Cognitive Bias
The Risk You Fear Most Is the One You Saw Most Recently
Availability is why a plane crash in the news outweighs a car ride's real odds. The bias isn't that you fear rare things — it's that vividness stands in for probability.
Archive
Everything we've published, newest first.
September 2026
Note Systems
Backlinks Were Supposed to Resurface Your Notes. They Do Not, and Here Is What Does
Backlinks promised to resurface old notes and mostly don't — they only link what you already remember. A good title and search box are what work.
Subscription Creep
Your $12 Subscription Is Really $6 Every Time You Open It
A subscription feels like a flat fee until you divide it by real use, and that one calculation is what turns 'I should probably cancel this' into 'I'm cancelling this today'.
Apps & Tools
The Day You Outgrow a Project Tool's Free Tier
Six project tools, one spreadsheet: I checked each free plan's actual limit and what the smallest paid tier costs per seat, per year. The surprises are in the climbing costs.
Online Relationships
Read Receipts and the Typing Bubble: What Presence Signals Do to a Text Friendship
Read receipts, last seen and the typing bubble turned a reply delay into a tiny rejection, and changed how a text friendship reads silence.
Apps & Tools
Scheduling Links Compared: What "Free" Actually Lets You Book, and What a Year Really Costs
Compared the free plans and yearly cost of Calendly, Cal.com, SavvyCal and TidyCal. One caps you at one event type, one is free forever, one has none.
Note Systems
Your Note System Dies the Day Someone Else Touches It
A note system built for one brain breaks the moment a second person writes into it. Here is where shared notes fall apart, and the small structure that keeps them alive.
Online Relationships
The Friend You Only Knew Online Is Gone, and There's No Funeral to Attend
When a friendship lived entirely in text, losing it doesn't come with a service or a phone tree. The grief arrives in small, ordinary places instead — read receipts, a group chat going quiet, a suggested contact.
Cognitive Bias
The Halo Effect: You Trust the Polished Person Before They Have Said Anything
The halo effect is one good trait, like confidence or polish, colouring every other judgement you make about a person. Here's what actually blunts it.
Subscription Creep
The Pause Button Is a Trap: Most Subscriptions Cannot Actually Be Paused
I looked for a pause option on every subscription I pay for. Most don't have one — a 'pause' often keeps charging a smaller fee, or still renews.
Online Culture
The Quote-Post Dunk: How a Commentary Feature Became the Internet's Enforcement Tool
Quote-posting was meant for commentary. It became a platform's enforcement tool, outsourcing punishment to the crowd and changing who's safe to argue with.
Online Culture
The Report Button Is a Weapon, Not a Shield
The report function pretends to be a safety tool. In practice it's the fastest status move in any community — a lever for silencing rivals and settling fights that moderation was never meant to referee.
Online Relationships
A Friendship Across Twelve Time Zones
Your evening is their morning, and somebody always has to give up a good hour. The quiet logistics of an online friendship with a twelve-hour offset, and what happens when the compromise stops being shared.
Note Systems
A Note Has a Shape: The Six-Line Template That Makes It Findable a Year Later
The reason your notes never resurface isn't the app, it's that you file them with no structure to search against. Here is the six-line template I settled on, and where it breaks.
Apps & Tools
Newsletter Platforms: What "Free" Actually Gets You Before You Pay
I checked the free tiers on Mailchimp, Kit, Buttondown, MailerLite and Beehiiv. One caps you at 100 subscribers, another at 10,000, and "free" hides four different kinds of limits.
Cognitive Bias
Sunk Cost Is the Reason You Finish the Book You Hate
You keep going because you've already paid, and the money you spent is the one thing your future choices can't get back. What the sunk-cost effect is, when it's strongest, and the questions that reliably break it.
Online Culture
The /s Tag and the War Over Sarcasm
Sarcasm dies in text, so someone invented /s — and then people started fighting about it. How a three-character tone marker became a culture war over who gets to decide what a joke means.
Subscription Creep
The Same Subscription Is Two Different Cancellations: App Store vs. the Vendor
Cancelling on a vendor's website doesn't stop an App Store charge, and cancelling in the app often does nothing at all. Why a subscription you bought through Apple or Google is a separate billing relationship you have to close in a different place.
Online Culture
Every Platform Has a Score, Even the Ones That Swear They Don't
Take away the follower count and people invent a new one: reply speed, blue check, who got screenshot first. How invisible leaderboards shape what everyone posts.
Note Systems
Your Notes Never Resurface Because You Built Them to Be Filed, Not Found
Four retrieval methods — search, folders, tags and backlinks — and the exact point where each one breaks down under a real workload. Naming notes for the future you, not the present one.
Apps & Tools
Password Managers: What the Free Tier Actually Gives You, and What the First Paid Tier Costs
I opened the pricing pages for Bitwarden, 1Password, Dashlane and NordPass so you don't have to. Here is what each free plan really includes, where it stops, and what going paid costs a year.
Subscription Creep
I Keep Picking Annual Plans for the Same Reason I Regret Them
The annual discount works by making the full year feel cheaper, then making you too committed to quit at month four. Why I fall for it, and the question that stops me.
Cognitive Bias
The Decision You Didn't Make: How the Default Option Already Chose for You
Most of what you do this week was never a decision — it was a default someone else set, and you only notice it when it costs you. The default effect, and the one question that undoes it.
Online Relationships
The Friendship Ends the Day You Both Stop Being the One Who Texts First
Most friendships don't end in a fight; they end in a standoff, when both people quietly decide it's the other's turn to reach out. The logistics of who starts, and how to stop keeping score.
Online Relationships
The Online Friendship That Only Existed Because You Had Something to Do Together
A lot of text friendships are held up by a single shared activity — a game, a show, a job. When that ends, there's suddenly nothing to say. Here's what actually happens, and which ones survive.
Online Culture
The Joke That Kills Inside Your Server Dies the Second It Travels
In-group humour is not actually humour — it's a membership test, and it only works when the audience already knows the lore. Why inside jokes don't travel, and what that says about how communities form.
Subscription Creep
The Subscription I Keep 'Just in Case' Is the One Costing Me the Most
Not every recurring charge is for something you use. The hardest ones to cancel are the ones you keep for a version of yourself who never shows up. Here is how I finally priced them per use.
Note Systems
Voice Notes Are the Fastest Capture and the Hardest Retrieval
Speaking a thought takes seconds and filing it back takes minutes, which is why voice notes pile up uncategorised. Where audio capture actually breaks, and what to do about it.
Cognitive Bias
You Don't Evaluate Evidence, You Defend the Conclusion You Already Reached
Motivated reasoning means the facts arrive last, as ammunition for a verdict you reached first. What it looks like in a real week, and the question that breaks it.
Note Systems
The Capture Inbox Is Where Every Note System Dies
Every note system breaks at the same step: filing what you just captured. Why the inbox fills up, and a capture routine that needs no filing decision.
Apps & Tools
How Much Cloud Storage Is Actually Free, and What the Next Dollar Buys
Seven cloud services, compared: what the free tier really gives you, what the first paid tier costs a year, and why a 5 GB default is an upsell.
Online Culture
Context Collapse: One Post, Five Audiences
One post now reaches your boss, your mom and strangers at once, and each reads something different. Why context collapse breaks, and what to do.
Subscription Creep
Why the Small Subscription Is Harder to Cancel Than the Big One
Small recurring charges get rounded to zero and never audited, so a $5 subscription outlives a $50 one. The reframe that finally makes you cancel.
Cognitive Bias
The Advice You Read Is Mostly From the Survivors
The advice you read comes from people it worked for, while everyone who failed stays silent. That's survivorship bias — and how to ask for the denominator.
Online Relationships
The Friendship That Lives Inside One App
Some friendships never leave the app they were born in — no number, just a handle. What happens when the platform decays, and how to move it first.
Online Relationships
A Friendship Measured in Reply Times
A friendship that migrated entirely to text and voice notes, and the unspoken contract about how long you can go silent before it means something.
Spending Habits
I Logged Everything I Bought Under $15 for a Month. It Was $412.
Small purchases feel free, which is exactly why they are not. One month of writing down every sub-$15 spend, and what the total actually turned out to be.
Note Systems
One Plain Text File a Day Replaced My Whole Note System
PARA and Zettelkasten worked until the notes piled up and retrieval broke. Then I tried one append-only text file per day — here is what survived a real quarter.
Online Culture
The 90-9-1 Rule: Why Almost Everyone in Your Community Is Silent
In every online place, roughly 90 percent read and never post, 9 percent occasionally speak, and 1 percent make most of it. Why lurkers are not the problem you think.
Cognitive Bias
I Estimated Five Tasks and Timed Them. The Planning Fallacy Measured.
I know the planning fallacy by name, and I still fell for it on five out of five tasks. Here are the numbers, and the one fix that actually helped.
Gadget Reviews
The Trackball I Bought for a Sore Wrist, Six Months In
A six-month review of switching from a mouse to a trackball to fix afternoon wrist pain — what the spec sheet does not mention about the first two weeks, and whether it actually worked.
Memes
The Meme Is Not Funny Anymore Because You Are Not in the Room
Humour that depends on context stops working when the context leaves, and almost all internet humour depends on context. A defence of things that have aged badly.
Creators
Most People Do Not Stop Making Things. They Just Stop, and Nobody Knows.
The unannounced disappearance is the standard ending, and it costs the person more than it costs the audience. A case for ending things out loud.
AI in Practice
The AI Notetaker I Rolled Out to Nine People Earned Its Keep in Month Three, Not Week One
A three-month walkthrough of an AI meeting notetaker across a nine-person team, including what the pricing page leaves out about retention, export and cancellation, and whether switching was worth the migration.
Decision Making
I Made the Decision Two Weeks Before I Had to, and It Finally Stuck
The version of me who decides in advance and the version who decides in the moment are not the same person, and only one of them is reliable. What pre-committing actually does, and the one place it backfired.
Focus & Deep Work
I Stopped Defending My Focus and Started Rebuilding It. The Rebuild Is the Skill.
Focus blocks get broken. What happens in the twelve minutes after the interruption decides whether any of them amount to anything. A re-entry protocol, with honest numbers.
Communities
The Community That Died Quietly the Day Its One Moderator Left
Nobody notices a bus factor until the bus arrives. What a single volunteer moderator was actually holding up, why nobody stepped in, and the one community that survived by never letting it get to one person.
Money Psychology
A $290 Jacket Made the $47 Shirt Feel Cheap. The Number That Anchored Me Was Never in My Budget.
The first price I saw set the whole decision, and I only caught it because the expensive option was so absurd it made the cheap one feel like a bargain. How I started choosing which number to look at first.
Friendship
Every 'We Should Catch Up Sometime' Died. The Friendship That Lasted Ran on a Standing Date.
Sometime is where friendships go to die, because the coordination cost gets paid fresh every single time. What a recurring slot actually does, in honest numbers, and the one friendship where it backfired.
Platforms
A Feed Is an Edited Publication and It Has an Editor Who Is Not You
Following a set of accounts and reading a feed are different activities, and conflating them explains a lot about how people talk about what they saw online.
Saving Experiments
Four Savings Goals Failed and the Fifth Worked. The Difference Was Specificity.
'Emergency fund' and 'savings' both stalled. A goal named after a specific thing, with a date, filled in eleven months. I do not think that is a coincidence.
Communities
I Held On for About a Year Too Long
The signs that a community no longer needs the person who started it, and what happens if that person does not notice. I did not notice.
Subscription Creep
I Cancelled Nine Subscriptions and Timed Every One
The fastest took eleven seconds. The slowest took nine days and a phone call. How hard a service makes it to leave turned out to predict something about the service itself.
Online Relationships
I Moderated a Forum for Six Years and Half the Members Thought They Knew Me
What it is like to be on the receiving end of a one-sided relationship at small scale, and what it taught me about my own feelings toward people I follow.
Online Culture
Half the Time the Website Did Not Get Worse. You Got Older.
A specific and slightly uncomfortable look at what happens when a place you loved stops working for you, and how to tell which of the two things changed.
Money Psychology
I Kept a List of Purchases I Regretted, and Then Noticed I Was Still Defending Them
Writing down the regret was easy. What the list revealed over two years is how much work I do to make a bad purchase retrospectively reasonable, and what that costs beyond the money.
Emotions
I Wrote Down Who I Envied for Three Months, and It Was a Better Career Assessment Than Any I Have Done
The feeling is unpleasant and socially unmentionable, which is why it goes unexamined. It is also unusually specific about what you actually want.
Apps & Tools
The Annual Discount Is a Loan You Make to Your Vendor
Twenty percent off for paying yearly sounds like free money. Priced as what it actually is — an interest-free loan with a cancellation penalty — it is a much narrower deal.
Family
My Brother and I Have Almost Nothing in Common. We Speak Every Week.
For a decade I assumed the relationship was thin because the overlap was small. What changed was giving up on finding common ground and finding a common activity instead.
Boundaries
I Said Yes to Everything for a Decade and It Was Not Generosity
What I found when I looked honestly at why I could not refuse, and the small change that worked better than resolving to be firmer.
Habits
The Only Exercise Habit I Ever Kept Is the One I Deliberately Made Less Good
Four attempts at a proper routine, all abandoned inside two months. The fifth was worse in every measurable way and has run for three years.
Budget Systems
I Cut My Budget From Thirty-One Categories to Four and Lost Nothing I Was Using
Fine-grained categories feel rigorous and produce a report nobody reads. Here is what happened when I checked which of my thirty-one had ever changed a decision.
Focus & Deep Work
I Spent a Month Treating Shallow Work as Real Work, and My Deep Work Improved
The framing that admin is a lesser category made me do it badly, at bad times, resentfully. Scheduling it as work rather than as leftovers changed both halves of the day.
Tech for the Rest of Us
Two-Factor Authentication, Explained Without the Lecture
What the codes actually are, why SMS is the weak version, and — the part that goes wrong — what happens when you lose the phone.
Apps & Tools
Cloudflare Pages vs Netlify for a Small Marketing Site, Including the Bill at Month Six
Both deploy a static site in ten minutes. The differences show up in build minutes, redirect handling, and one caching behaviour that cost me two hours to understand.
Cognitive Bias
Some of My Biases Are Doing a Job, and Removing Them Made Things Worse
I tried to correct my optimism about new projects. It worked, and I started fewer things, and the ones I started were not better.
Friendship
Letting a Friendship End Without a Reason Is Allowed
I spent two years trying to repair something that was not broken, only over. What I eventually understood about friendships that simply finish.
Decision Making
When Both Options Are Good, You Are Not Choosing Between Them
The hardest decisions are the close ones, and I think that is backwards. A close decision is by definition low-stakes; what makes it hard is something else entirely.
Apps & Tools
We Tried to Cut Every Tool for a Month and Learned Which Four We Actually Cannot
An audit tells you what you pay for. Turning each one off for a week tells you what you need. The results did not match my predictions in six cases out of fourteen.
Work Relationships
Coordinating People Who Have Been Doing It Longer Than You Have
I ran an association where most members had been there decades before me. What actually establishes authority when seniority obviously does not.
Small Automations
The Least Impressive Automation I Have Is the One I Would Miss Most
No scripts, no integrations, no scheduler. Forty text snippets, built over three years, that have quietly removed more friction than everything clever I have made.
Apps & Tools
We Left a Tool We Still Liked, Because Liking It Was Not the Question
The hardest software decisions are not about bad products. Here is the framework we used to leave something that worked fine, and why "it works fine" is not a reason to stay.
August 2026
Weekly Reviews
My Weekly Review Went From 70 Minutes to 20 by Removing Four Things
The review had accumulated steps for six years, each one added for a reason. Cutting four of them made it shorter and, as far as I can measure, no less useful.
Creators
I Could See the Numbers, and Within a Year They Were Choosing My Subjects
Not deliberately. The feedback was fast enough and specific enough that my sense of what was interesting quietly reorganised around it.
Time Blocking
I Reduced My Whole System to Two Blocks a Day and Got More Done
After four years of increasingly elaborate calendars, the version that finally stuck has two protected blocks and nothing else. Here is what the elaborate versions were actually costing.
AI in Practice
The Two-Minute Check I Run Before Acting on a Machine's Answer
I sent a client a wrong number that a tool gave me confidently. Here is the check I built afterwards, and the category of question it will not save you from.
Gadget Reviews
Noise Cancelling Is Not the Feature I Actually Use
Three pairs of headphones judged over a full working day rather than a demo. The thing that decided it was comfort at hour six, which nobody can test in a shop.
Security & Privacy
A Password Manager Is the One Tool Nobody Argues About — So We Tested Whether It Deserves That
1Password at three seats for four months, including the migration nobody warns you about and the one feature that turned out to matter more than the vault.
Note Systems
I Ran a Zettelkasten for Eight Months and Kept Two of Its Rules
The method comes with a philosophy that I do not think survives contact with a job. Two of its mechanics, though, are the best thing that has happened to my notes.
Motivation
I Did the Same Task Well in March and Badly in June. The Difference Was Not Me.
Looking back at when I have worked well, the pattern had nothing to do with discipline and almost everything to do with two conditions I had never tracked.
Communities
A Community Becomes a Different Community Without Anyone Deciding
The same name, the same rules, largely the same people, and after three years it is about something else. The mechanism is small and continuous.
Subscription Creep
A Free Trial I Forgot About Cost Me £238 Over Fourteen Months
The trial did what trials do. What made it expensive was three specific design choices that are standard across the industry, and one habit of mine that made them work.
Saving Experiments
I Rounded Up Every Transaction for Six Months and Saved £286 Without Noticing
The automatic round-up is the most recommended painless saving trick there is. It worked, and the reason it worked is not the one usually given.
Memes
How a Joke Becomes a Rule, in Four Steps I Watched Happen Nine Times
Communities generate their own norms out of humour, and the process is consistent enough to predict. It is also how a welcoming place becomes a closed one.
Family
The Visit Goes Better When It Has a Shape
Years of visits that dissolved into television and mild tension, and the small structural changes that fixed most of it without anyone having to discuss anything.
Money Psychology
By the Time I Was Holding It, the Decision Was Already Made
I spent a month recording where each purchase was actually decided. Almost none of them were decided at the point of sale, which is the only place I had ever tried to exert control.
Note Systems
I Counted How Many of My Notes I Had Ever Reopened. It Was Nine Percent.
Four years of diligent note-taking, 1,340 notes, and a query against the access log that made me change what I capture rather than how I organise it.
Security & Privacy
Every Small Team Has Shadow Software, and Ours Was Eleven Tools Deep
Nobody signed off on any of it and every single one was a reasonable decision at the time. What we found when we went looking, and the policy that replaced the ban I nearly wrote.
Spending Habits
I Paid for Everything in Cash for Two Weeks and It Was Not the Lesson I Expected
The classic advice is that cash makes you spend less because handing it over hurts. It did make me spend less, for a completely different reason, and the reason is reproducible without the cash.
Friendship
The Friendships I Kept Longest All Had a Container
Not shared interests — a recurring thing that happens whether or not anyone is in the mood. Six years of running a choir made the pattern impossible to miss.
Platforms
The Platform Changed the Deal Four Times and Each Time People Were Surprised
Reach, monetisation and API access are not features. They are terms, and terms get revised. What that means for anyone building on someone else's land.
AI in Practice
Four Tools Added AI Features This Year. I Turned Three of Them Off.
What happens when software you rely on grows a feature it wants you to use, and how to tell an improvement from a shareholder announcement.
Tech for the Rest of Us
The Backup Setup I Would Give a Friend Who Has None
Not the ideal one. The one that takes forty minutes, costs about £3 a month, and covers the failure that actually happens to people.
Decision Making
Most of My Big Decisions Were Made by Deferring Them
I went back through six years of major choices and found that in most of them I never chose. The deadline chose, or the option expired, and I experienced it as a decision.
Security & Privacy
Fastmail vs Proton Mail for a Business Inbox, After Moving Twice
We migrated to one, disliked something specific, migrated to the other, and found a different specific problem. Here is the honest split for a small business address.
Motivation
The Only Reliable Motivation I Have Found Is Another Person Waiting
I tested five ways of getting myself to do things I did not feel like doing. Four are variations on self-discipline and none of them worked twice.
Boundaries
What to Do When You Cannot Leave and Cannot Change Them
Most boundary advice assumes an exit. For a family member, a neighbour or a long colleague there is often no exit, and the useful moves are different.
Apps & Tools
We Replaced Four Tools With Notion and Got Two of Them Back
Consolidating onto Notion saved us $91 a month and cost us something harder to price. A year later, here is exactly which parts stuck and which we quietly reversed.
Habits
I Started Tracking a Habit and It Immediately Got Worse
The streak worked for eleven weeks and then became the point. What happened next made me change how I measure anything I want to keep doing.
Budget Systems
Zero-Based Budgeting Lasted Five Weeks and Taught Me One Permanent Thing
Assigning every pound a job before the month starts is a good idea that I could not sustain. What I kept was a single category that fixed the reason it collapsed.
Online Relationships
The Group Chat Is Doing More Work Than Anyone Admits
Six years of watching group chats form, sustain and die, including my own. What keeps one alive is not what people think.
Emotions
I Stopped Treating Boredom as a Failure of Attention
Every time I was bored at work for six weeks, I wrote down what I was doing. The pattern was not what I expected and it changed what I delegate.
Online Culture
Every Growing Community Faces the Same Problem and Almost All of Them Handle It Badly
Growth changes what a place is, and the people who were there first experience the change as decline. Both sides are right, which is why it never resolves.
Time Blocking
The Difference Between a To-Do List and a Calendar Is an Estimate
Moving tasks onto a calendar forces you to say how long each one takes, and that forced estimate is the whole benefit. It is also why most people quit in the first week.
Apps & Tools
The Real Cost of Moving a Team Off a Tool Is Not the Migration
We budgeted two weeks for the data and got it done in three days. Then spent five weeks on the part nobody schedules — every integration, habit, and link that pointed at the old thing.
Cognitive Bias
I Wrote Down My Predictions for a Year. I Had Remembered Being Right.
Forty-one predictions, sealed and dated. The gap between what I predicted and what I remembered predicting is the most uncomfortable thing I have measured about myself.
Work Relationships
The Conversation I Avoided for Seven Months, and the Four Sentences That Ended It
A recurring problem with someone I liked, and every escalating indirect strategy I tried before the obvious one. It took under two minutes.
Creators
The Audience Is Not Yours and Knowing That Changes What You Make
Six years of writing for a group of people who could stop reading at any moment, and the two things that turned out to keep them.
Gadget Reviews
I Spent Two Years Upgrading the Wrong Half of My Desk
Four monitors, three chairs, and the £90 accessory that did more for my working day than any of them. A note on where the returns actually are.
Small Automations
Half the Things I Wanted to Automate Should Have Been a Checklist
A checklist has no dependencies, never breaks silently, and takes four minutes to write. I spent two years learning when to reach for one instead of a script.
Focus & Deep Work
I Tracked My Actual Focused Hours for Six Weeks. The Number Was Two and a Half a Day.
Not two and a half hours of work — two and a half hours of the concentrated kind. Once I had a real number, most of my productivity habits stopped making sense.
Memes
Every Meme Format Dies the Same Way, and You Can See It Coming
Six years of watching formats arrive and burn out in one community. The stages are consistent, and the third one is where it stops being funny.
Weekly Reviews
My 15-Minute Friday Review (the Habit That Killed My Sunday Dread)
The exact three-block, fifteen-minute weekly close-out I use every Friday, and why shrinking your weekly review is what finally makes it stick.
Saving Experiments
Thirty Days Buying Nothing New: The Two Weeks That Mattered Were Three and Four
A no-buy month is a common experiment and the first fortnight is mostly novelty. What I learned came from the part where it stopped being interesting.
Spending Habits
What 30 Days of Logging Every Purchase Did to My Spending
One boring month of writing down every purchase in a notebook turned out to change more than any budget I'd ever tried. Here's what I actually found.
Apps & Tools
The SaaS Pricing Audit I Run Before Any Trial (It Caught a $4,200 Surprise)
A 20-minute checklist for finding the real cost of a SaaS tool before you start a trial — seats, add-ons, overage, and the traps pricing pages hide.
Communities
Ninety Percent of Moderation Is Boring and the Arguments Are All About the Other Ten
Six years of the actual queue: what is in it, how long decisions take, and why every public debate about moderation is about the rarest cases.
Money Psychology
I Worked Out What an Hour of My Time Is Worth and It Changed What I Buy, Not How Much
The number itself was uncomfortable. What it actually did was resolve a category of small decisions I had been making badly for years.
Subscription Creep
I Listed Every Recurring Charge on One Page. It Came to £2,904 a Year.
Not one of them felt like a significant decision when I made it. Seeing them together, on a single page with annual figures, is a different experience from seeing them monthly.
Security & Privacy
I Exported My Data From Nine Tools Before I Needed It, and Only Three Gave Me Something Usable
Every SaaS product has an export button. Testing them while you are still a happy customer is the only way to find out what it actually produces.
Platforms
You Can Predict What a Platform Will Become From What It Counts
Not from its policies or its stated values. From the single number it puts next to a post, which determines everything downstream.
Online Relationships
Three of My Closest Friends Are People I Have Never Been in a Room With
A decade of friendships conducted entirely in text, what they are good at, and the specific thing they cannot do.
Apps & Tools
Figma vs Penpot, Run in Parallel on the Same Client Project for Five Weeks
We rebuilt the same twenty-screen deliverable twice, once in each tool, and timed it. The gap is real but it is not where the comparison articles put it.
Work Relationships
You Did Not Choose Your Colleagues, and That Changes What You Owe Them
Advice about work relationships is mostly borrowed from friendship, and the borrowing causes specific problems. A different starting point.
Family
What I Learned About My Family From Running Their Group Chat for Four Years
Someone has to be the switchboard, and in most families it is the same person. Four years of being that person, and what changed when I stopped.
Spending Habits
The Category I Had to Invent Was "I Don't Know Why I Bought This"
Six months of categorising my own spending produced one bucket I did not plan for, and it turned out to hold more money than my grocery bill.
Emotions
My Anger Is Almost Always About Something That Happened Earlier
I kept a log of every time I was disproportionately annoyed. In four cases out of five the actual cause was hours old and had nothing to do with the trigger.
Apps & Tools
The Quarterly Stack Audit That Takes Ninety Minutes and Has Never Not Paid For Itself
A repeatable process for going through every piece of software a small team pays for, in one sitting, with a decision at the end of each line.
Motivation
I Was Never Unmotivated. The Task Was Underspecified.
Every time I could not get started on something for a year, I wrote down what the next action actually was. In most cases there wasn't one yet, which is a different problem.
Apps & Tools
Per-Seat Pricing Has a Number Nobody Quotes You, and It's the One That Grows
The list price per seat is the least interesting figure on a pricing page. Here is the arithmetic that actually predicts what a tool costs a growing team in year two.
Small Automations
I Built Fourteen Automations and Deleted Nine of Them
The five that survived have one thing in common that I did not notice until I looked at the nine that did not. It is not how much time they save.
Cognitive Bias
I Can Name Twenty Cognitive Biases and It Has Never Once Stopped Me
Knowing a bias has a name is knowledge about a category, and the bias operates on the instance. Here is what did work, on one of them.
Weekly Reviews
The Five-Minute Version of the Weekly Review, For the Weeks You Have Skipped Three
Every weekly review system fails the same way — you miss one, then the backlog makes the next one worse. Here is the recovery version that is designed to be done badly.
AI in Practice
I Logged Every Time I Used an AI Tool for a Month. Two Uses Were Worth It.
Forty-one logged uses, honestly timed against doing it myself. The wins were narrow, real, and not the ones I expected.
Boundaries
Saying No Is Easy. Saying It Again Four Days Later Is the Skill.
Most advice on boundaries covers the first refusal. What actually decides the outcome is what happens when the same request returns slightly rephrased.
Tech for the Rest of Us
Nobody Explained What I Was Actually Buying When I Bought a Domain
A plain account of what a domain name is, what the renewal is for, and the four upsells that are not necessary — written for people who were handed this decision without being told anything.
Note Systems
A Year Into PARA, and the Archive Is the Only Part I Still Use
PARA organises notes into four buckets. After twelve months and about 900 notes, three of those buckets had collapsed into each other and the fourth had become the whole system.
Friendship
Every Friendship That Survived Had One Person Who Was Willing to Organise
Eleven years running a neighbourhood association taught me that the warmth is not what keeps people together. Somebody sending the message is.
Gadget Reviews
The Keyboard I Stopped Noticing, and the Three I Sent Back First
Four mechanical keyboards over eighteen months, judged on the only criterion that survived — whether I still thought about it in month six.
Budget Systems
Every Budget System Assumes a Salary. Here Is What I Do Instead.
Twelve years of freelance income means some months are triple others. The method that finally worked treats the good months as a reservoir rather than as income.
Decision Making
Nine Hundred Interviews Later, I Stopped Believing the Reason People Give
Not because anyone lies. Because the account arrives after the choice, and it is built to be tellable rather than to be accurate.
Apps & Tools
Six Months on Linear, Including the Two Weeks We Nearly Went Back
Linear is fast in a way that changes how a team files work. It is also opinionated in ways that cost us a fortnight — here is what held up after half a year of real use.
Online Culture
The Rules That Actually Govern a Forum Are Never in the Rules
I wrote the rules for a community of two hundred thousand people. They governed almost nothing. Here is what did.
Habits
Habits Do Not Die in Week One. They Die in Week Three, and For a Different Reason.
The failure everyone plans for is motivation running out. The one that actually happens is the first disruption, and almost no advice addresses it.
Focus & Deep Work
There Is No Deep Work on a Ward, So I Stopped Trying to Build a Fortress
The standard advice is to protect long uninterrupted stretches. When that is not available, the useful question changes from how to avoid interruption to how to cost it less.
Time Blocking
Time Blocking for People Whose Day Gets Taken Away From Them
Standard time blocking assumes your calendar is yours. Eleven years of shift work taught me a version that assumes the opposite, and it is the only one that has ever survived my week.