a note№ 055
Cut the list to three items this morning and finished all three by noon, which has never once happened with a list of nine. The nine were never a plan. They were a way of feeling busy about deciding.
#work
Nothing new here, and that is the recommendation. Formats that survive are formats that anybody can open with a tool they already have, and plain text has now outlived several generations of better ideas.
an essay№ 044
Against the clean slate
Every few months I want to begin again from nothing: new notes, new system, new folder with a confident name. The urge always arrives dressed as clarity, and it is almost always avoidance.
The honest version of the impulse is that the old material has become hard to face. Not disorganised — faced. There are half-finished arguments in there, and opinions I have quietly outgrown, and evidence that I was wrong in writing. A clean slate makes all of that disappear without the work of disagreeing with myself.
What I do instead now is smaller and slower. I keep the old leaves and add a line beneath the ones I no longer believe. The record stops being a monument and becomes a conversation, which is harder to be proud of and much more useful to read.
A slate that is never wiped accumulates something a fresh one cannot: proof that I have changed. That is the only kind of progress I have learned to trust.
a note№ 032
Fourth rewrite of the same small function tonight. The behaviour has not changed once. What changed is that I can now read it without holding my breath, which I have decided counts as progress.
an essay№ 028
On tools that teach
A good tool does two jobs. It finishes the work in front of you, and it changes what you believe the work is. The first job is the one we shop for. The second is the one that shapes us.
A hand plane teaches grain. A debugger teaches that a program is a sequence of states rather than a paragraph of intentions. Neither lesson appears in the manual, and both survive long after the particular task is forgotten.
So I have grown suspicious of tools that finish the work without teaching anything. They are not evil; they are simply expensive in a currency that does not show up on the invoice. When the tool leaves, the understanding leaves with it, and I am exactly as capable as I was before I began.
The test I apply now is small: after using this thing for a month, will I know something I could explain to another person? If the answer is no, I try to keep the tool at arm’s length, and do at least one pass by hand.
a note№ 026
The hour before the house wakes is the only hour nobody has asked me for. I have stopped calling it productive. It is simply mine, and I spend it slowly on purpose.
a note№ 023
Spent the evening sharpening rather than cutting. Nothing was produced and tomorrow will be twice as fast, which is a trade I am still learning to make without feeling guilty about it.
a seed№ 022
Measure twice, cut once — but read the drawing three times before you measure.
a note№ 020
The morning does not owe me clarity. I owe the morning attendance. On the days I remember which direction the debt runs, the work goes considerably better.
a seed№ 019
Nothing worth keeping has ever been finished on the first attempt, and nothing at all has been finished on the tenth.
Unfashionable and correct. Every layer you add between the text and the reader is a layer that has to survive twenty years of nobody maintaining it.
a seed№ 014
Arguments about tools are forgotten in a year. The files made with them are still here in ten. Optimise for the files.
a seed№ 012
A name is a promise about what a thing will keep doing. Most bad architecture begins as a broken promise about a name.
a note№ 011
Deleted forty items from the backlog this afternoon. None of them were done. All of them had been quietly declined months ago; the list was simply the last place still pretending otherwise.
a seed№ 008
The first draft is a question. The second is an answer. The third is an apology for how long the answer took.
a seed№ 002
A tidy desk is not a sign of a tidy mind. It is a sign that the mind wanted somewhere quiet to sit.
an essay№ 001
A year of plain mornings
I kept one rule last year and nothing else: the first hour belonged to whatever I would regret not doing. No list, no system, no reward. Only the hour, and the honesty to admit afterwards how I had spent it.
The result is not a transformation. It is an accumulation. Twelve months of small, unglamorous mornings have produced more finished work than any of the elaborate schemes I once built to make myself productive, and the schemes were far more interesting to design.
What I did not expect is the effect on the rest of the day. When the hour has gone well, the afternoon can be ordinary without feeling wasted. The morning already paid the rent, so the rest of the day is allowed simply to be a day.