Last night I read the same paragraph four times. Not a difficult paragraph. A novel I actually like. Somewhere between the second and third attempt, my hand had already picked up my phone. I don’t remember deciding to. If you’ve searched “how to focus while reading,” you’ve probably already read the standard advice. Put your…
I once owned a whole set of colored highlighters, marked up every book I read, and remembered almost none of it. Half the time, the remembering problem starts earlier — I couldn’t even stay focused on the page long enough to have something worth keeping. The system was supposed to be foolproof. Highlight the good…
There are two books on my shelf with a bookmark stuck around the one-quarter mark, and they’ve been sitting like that for a long time. Atomic Habits. Deep Work. I didn’t abandon them because they were bad. That’s the part that took me a while to understand. Bad books are easy to quit — you…
Half a year has gone by and I haven’t finished a single book the way I’d hoped to. Not for lack of trying. There’s a stack on my nightstand — three started, none past the halfway mark. I pick one up, read a page, realize I’ve absorbed nothing, and put it back down. Some nights…
There’s a box in my closet marked “donate” in Sharpie, almost a year now. I know exactly what’s in it. I’ve moved it twice — once to vacuum under it, once because it was in the way of the vacuum itself. Both times I thought about actually taking it somewhere. Both times I put it…
So I cleared my desk. I wrote about that already — about how the hard part was never the tidying, it was making myself decide what to let go of. I got it down to a screen setup, a lamp, a glass of water, a pen holder, and one notebook. It looked great. I felt,…
For about a year, my desk had a routine that went like this. I’d look at it on a Monday morning — the second monitor I’d added so I could actually see things, a lamp, a glass of water gone slightly warm, a pen holder with little compartments for sorting pens by type that I…
I read slowly. Not “I wish I read more” slowly. I mean I can sit with a book for thirty minutes and realize I’ve read the same paragraph three times because my mind wandered off to something I forgot to reply to. I’ve been like this for more than two years. Long enough that I…
What I actually open every day — and the one I’m probably about to cut. Last week I pasted a news article about a company’s founder into Claude and asked it to break down the business. A few minutes later I had the whole thing laid out in front of me: the flagship product, how…