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Most Urgency Is Borrowed
On June 18th, I had two tests planned for the morning. By noon, neither had started. By end of day, neither had run. The day wasn’t unusual. I work 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. in Bangkok, shifted late to overlap with Europe and still get a few hours with the US. The morning is supposed…
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The Website Started in the Vault
Claude didn’t start my website redesign by asking what color I liked. It started from the vault. That matters because most AI-assisted design work begins in the wrong place. You give the model a vague brief, and it gives you something that looks like every other portfolio site: gradient background, soft cards, oversized hero claim,…
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When to Stop Building the System
Earlier this month I spent forty minutes tweaking the CSS that hides my AI_OS folder in Obsidian. The folder was already hidden. I was adjusting the color of the overlay when the panel collapsed. Nobody sees it but me, and I already didn’t see it. That’s the moment. Not dramatic. Forty minutes, zero output. I’ve…
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A Hobby Should Stay Unproductive
I brought the camera with me to Marble, then didn’t use it. The chair was comfortable, the light was bright but warm, the coffee was good, and I had Stillness Is the Key open in front of me. I got lost in the book instead of looking for a frame. No photos. No notes. No…
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Maps as Thinking Tools
I linked my GTD note to my Obsidian vault note without knowing what I expected to find. Probably nothing. The two had always lived in separate mental compartments and that separation felt so obvious I’d never questioned it. The link broke it, which I didn’t expect. What I found was this: GTD’s actual core insight…
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The PKM Trap: Capturing More Than You Connect
I saved the same article twice. A week apart. Different folders. No memory of the first save. The article was Tiago Forte’s guide to building a second brain. That’s when I knew the system wasn’t working. Not because I was careless, but because the system had no way to show me what it already knew.…
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I Didn’t Have a Self-Control Problem. I Had a Friction Problem.
For a while I thought I just lacked discipline. I had 80-something apps on my phone and used maybe a dozen regularly. I had 18 habits tracked in my system and was hitting roughly 10 of them. And I was buying things I didn’t need, cheap or on offer, because clicking “buy” was easy. The…
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The Demo Worked. Mine Didn’t.
The first agent that broke wasn’t Vera. It was Giulia. I’d sent her into the background to file some vault notes while I worked on something else. She reported back fine. Searched the right folders, identified the right structure, confirmed the file paths. Then nothing. No new files appeared. I ran the session again. Same…
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Reading Without Retention
One year I ran the 52-book challenge. Logged on Goodreads, tracked in a spreadsheet. I finished 58. 18 of those were fillers, books read to keep the count moving, not because they had anything to offer. I cannot tell you the title of most of them. That is not a failure of memory. It is…
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What Bangkok Taught Me About Seeing
I wasn’t trying to take photos. I was walking through Chinatown at night with no particular direction, camera over my shoulder, not thinking about light or composition or anything useful. Then a cat sitting on a pile of books in a small bookshop looked up at me. I raised the camera and clicked once. That’s…