Sample Post Category: Essays

For a year I have been putting my phone in a drawer in another room for two hours at a time, twice a day. First block is right after breakfast. Second block is right after lunch. Four hours of unavailability, in the middle of my working day, on purpose.

The mechanics: I tell the two or three people who need to reach me for genuine emergencies that they can call my partner’s number if it is truly urgent (nothing has ever been). I set an out-of-office style Slack status. I put the phone in a specific drawer in a specific room and I do not check it. When two hours are up I check it and process anything relevant.

What I did not expect: my sense of time slowed down. Two focused hours feels like four unfocused ones. What I also did not expect: nobody minds. In a year of doing this, I have missed zero things that mattered. I have missed hundreds of things that did not. And when I come back to the phone at 11 or at 3, whatever is there is small and easily handled. Nothing has been so time-sensitive that a two-hour lag broke it. That is a lesson worth learning at 34, before you have burned another decade at the speed of push notifications.

My rule when I get bad news — a project got cancelled, a friend got sick, a plan fell through — is that I do not act on it for 48 hours. I can talk about it. I can process it. I can vent to my partner. But I do not make any decision that would have been different 48 hours earlier. Nothing gets emailed, nothing gets bought, nothing gets sold.

The rule came out of watching myself make three bad decisions in a row in my twenties. All three were the day I got bad news. All three involved doing something dramatic and irreversible while still in the state of “I have to do something”. The dramatic thing did not fix the bad news. It added a second problem on top of the first.

Two things happen in those 48 hours. First, the initial shock recalibrates — the news is often less bad, or more bad, than the first reading. Second, the correct next step often becomes obvious in a way that it was not while I was actively upset. The correct next step is almost never the dramatic one. It is almost always a small conversation with a specific person. But you cannot see that on day zero. On day two, you can.

About twice a month I sit down and write a letter addressed to my mother, which she will never read, in which I tell her something. Sometimes it is a small update on my week. Sometimes it is a large thing I have been avoiding thinking about. I write it as a letter — “dear mom” at the top, sign my name at the bottom, seal it in an envelope, put it in a drawer.

The framing is doing all the work. When I journal without an addressee, my writing collapses into fragments — observations, half-formed thoughts, complaints. When I write to a specific person who I know will not read it, my writing gets structured. Sentences become paragraphs. Vague feelings become specific stories. My mother has 40 years of context on me, so I do not have to explain the whole backstory of anything — I can go straight to what changed this week and why it matters.

My mother knows the letters exist. She has offered to read them; I have gently declined. The point is not the reader. The point is the specific mental posture of writing to someone who loves you and knows you and will not judge you. If you have never tried it and you find journalling flat, try one letter to one person. Sign it. Put it away. See what changed on the page.

“What do you do?” is a small-talk question and it is also, sneakily, a status question. Whoever asks is looking for a way to place you on the map of familiar occupations so they can decide how to talk to you. If your job is easy to name, no problem. If your job is not, the question becomes weirdly stressful.

What I have learned to do is answer the question underneath the question. When someone at a party asks what I do, they are usually not asking for a job title. They are asking “how do you spend your days?” or “what do you care about right now?” or “how do we relate to each other for the next four minutes?” If you answer with the literal job title, you have accepted a small, shallow version of the conversation. If you answer with something specific about the actual texture of your week, you have offered a real conversation.

My answer now is usually “I build things on the internet, most of them boring but a couple I am proud of.” That opens a door to specificity. About half the time, the person asks a follow up. About half the time, they nod politely and move on. That is fine. The half that follows up are the conversations worth having, and my old answer — “I’m a software engineer” — used to give people permission to disengage before they got there.

Around 34 I started noticing that Slack was making me stupid. Not because of the platform — because of what I had trained myself to do with it. I would check between meetings, between paragraphs, between bites of lunch. Each check was a millisecond of decision-making about whether anything required my attention. Nothing usually did. But my brain was doing that low-grade compression work all day.

The experiment: I turned off every notification, badge and sound. I opened Slack only three times a day — morning, right after lunch, and 20 minutes before I logged off. I did not tell anyone I was doing this.

Nobody noticed. Not a single person raised the alarm that I had gone silent. Two people said in DMs later that they had appreciated a specific detailed answer I sent, and now I realise those detailed answers only existed because I was reading my Slack in a focused hour rather than in 40 five-second glances. Turns out the quality of my responses had been directly proportional to how much time I spent on them, which was directly proportional to how present I was when I opened the app.

Two years later this is still my default. Nothing has broken. The one lesson: nothing on a company Slack requires your attention within 30 minutes. Anything urgent enough to require faster response is not on Slack.

For eighteen months I worked from home five days a week and slowly forgot what I sounded like. Cabin fever is real. Then I tried the opposite — a co-working membership 40 minutes away by metro. That was worse: the commute ate the energy the space was supposed to give me.

What actually works, for me, is a room five minutes from my apartment. I rent it from a friend. It has no distinct amenities. It has a chair, a desk, a window, and no one who lives there. The five-minute walk is important — it is a shift, not a commute. My work brain turns on somewhere around minute three. My work brain turns off during the walk back, and I usually stop for coffee, which is the third stage of decompression.

The pattern is old. Writers have called it the “third place” for a hundred years. Ray Oldenburg wrote a whole book about it in 1989. What is new is that I did not need to figure this out from scratch — the internet was full of people saying “get out of your house” — but the internet forgot to mention that the geographic distance from your home to your work matters more than the amenities of the work space. Five minutes, walkable, no key ceremony. Perfect.

Advice from people at the very top of a field is almost always survivor bias, but that is not the interesting problem. The interesting problem is that the shape of advice from the top is fundamentally different from the shape of advice you can act on. Elite advice tends to be: “work harder than anyone,” “take asymmetric bets,” “trust your instincts.” That is not advice; it is a description of what worked once.

The person one or two rungs below the top gives different advice, because they are still figuring things out consciously. Their advice is often specific, testable, and includes the failure modes. When a mid-career engineer tells me to review code before I comment on it in a PR, I can do that on Monday morning. When a legendary engineer tells me to “think in systems,” I have no idea what to do differently.

So I stopped reading books by billionaires. I started reading books by people who wrote about the middle of their careers. The advice fits in my hands. It is boring and specific and I can try it on Monday. The compound effect over a decade is larger than any biography of a legend I have ever read.

It happened at a meetup for developers who were mostly in their twenties. Someone was showing an old file icon, the little square with the metal slider, and asked out loud “why does the save icon look like that?” The room laughed for a second and then got quiet, because a genuine answer was needed and I was the only one who knew.

I explained floppy disks. I saw one person open their notes app. It was funny, briefly, and then it kept being interesting for weeks. Because a small shift in status had happened in that room, and I had to notice it. I was no longer the person receiving advice; I was, at least sometimes, the person people were quoting later. That is a responsibility I was not ready for.

Two changes came out of it. First, I got better at explaining things. Not simpler — better. The stakes went up because the room was actually listening. Second, I got quieter in conversations where I did not know as much as I felt I should. Because the older person in the room has a different obligation: not to fill the silence, but to make room for the next person coming up. Both changes are still holding, three years later.

Around 2021 I put a lot of my adult identity into a side project that I believed would be my second career. I built it after work for four years. I launched. It got covered in a couple of small newsletters. Two hundred people signed up in the first week. Six months later I was struggling to justify continuing. Twelve months after that I quietly took it offline.

Here is what I did not expect: almost nobody noticed. The failure was public in the sense that the launch had been public, but the death was silent. No headlines. No debriefs. Everyone had already moved on. It was like watching a firework die in the wrong direction — over quickly, no aftermath, the crowd already looking at the next one.

The useful thing I learned is that the audience you imagine watching your failure is much smaller than you think. Almost everyone is worrying about their own thing. The story you write about your failure to yourself matters. The story other people tell about your failure to their friends… does not really exist. That is a huge relief and it changed how I approach shipping. If nobody is watching this closely except you, then the only performance that matters is the internal one.

The rule was simple: for one calendar year, I would finish every book I started. No exceptions. If I hated it at page 50 I would push to page 100, then 200, then the end. I expected to hate the year. Instead, the year quietly changed how I choose books, and by extension how I choose most things.

What I did not expect: starting a book became harder. The decision cost went up. I could not just crack a book open on a whim, because a whim now had 300 pages of consequence. I started reading Goodreads reviews. I started asking friends what they abandoned and why. I started being ruthless about the first 15 pages — if I did not feel the writer’s voice by then, I would just not buy it. The books I bought that year were, on average, much better than the year before.

The lesson generalised. When you cannot quit, you get more careful about starting. When you can always quit, you start too often and finish nothing. There is probably a bigger essay in here about career choices and relationships. I am still working out the extent to which the model applies. For now I am back to abandoning books occasionally, but the year gave me permission to only start ones I already suspect are worth finishing.