Tag: habits

Summer Moon

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I took today off work. Nothing on the other end of it. No appointment, no trip, no reason I could have written down if somebody asked me for one.

Up at eight. At Summer Moon by nine. It’s my favorite coffee shop— the drip is good enough that you don’t do anything to it.

I sat for an hour. Phone and iPad on the table. Put music on, did my Bible study, got the picture posted. That was the entire agenda and it was done in twenty minutes.

The other forty I just sat there.

I didn’t notice I was relaxed. I noticed what I wasn’t doing.

On a normal morning I check my phone the way you check a mirror walking past one — not for anything in particular, just to see. Notifications. Something might have come in. Something might need me in the next four minutes. It doesn’t register as stress while it’s happening. It’s the shape of the day, and you don’t feel the shape of a day any more than you feel your own posture.

This morning the phone sat face up on the table and I left it there.

I did open email twice. Both times there was nothing. Nothing was the right answer, and I put it back down.

What I missed wasn’t rest exactly. I sleep fine. It was the stillness — music in a room where nobody knows me, and no requirement to think hard about any of it.

It’s been a few months. I don’t need it often. Every so often is plenty, which is probably why it takes me this long to remember it’s available.

My wife knew where I was. Nobody else did.

Empty or Clear?

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve written something here every day since January 1st.

The plan was operational. Capture the year while I was inside it — what I did, what worked, what the numbers said. A log. I’m a data guy; logging is a reflex.

Somewhere around spring it stopped being a log. The entries got longer and quieter and started arriving at things I hadn’t meant to say out loud. I’d sit down to record a day and end up wrestling something that had been sitting in me for years, unexamined, waiting for somebody to give it two hundred words and a deadline.

That turned out to be the actual value of the thing. Not the record. The wrestling.

Two hundred days in, here’s the question I’ve been circling.

I’m not out of things to say. I want to be clear about that, because “I’ve run out” is the easy story and it isn’t true. What I’m wondering is whether they need to be said every day.

Those are different problems with very different solutions.

If I’m out of material, the answer is to quit. If the daily cadence has finished the job it was hired for, the answer is something else entirely — and I don’t know what that is yet.

What it feels like tonight is that my head might finally be clear.

There was a lot in there on January 1st. Twenty years of half-thoughts, arguments I never finished having, ideas I’d carried around so long they’d stopped being ideas and turned into furniture. Writing every day emptied a lot of that out. Some of it turned into essays. Most of it just needed saying once so it would quit taking up space.

And now I’m looking at the back half of the year wondering if the job has changed. Whether the work isn’t emptying anymore but filling — read more, sit with things longer, let something develop before it gets a headline stapled to it and shipped by 9pm.

You can’t pour out of an empty pitcher. You also can’t tell the difference between an empty pitcher and a clean one without looking.

I do know a few things.

This has been the most stimulating year of my life. I got more done than I have in any twelve months I can remember, and more than that, I engaged with more — turned over more ideas, chased more of them down, argued with more of them.

I’m also a better writer than I was in January, and I can point at exactly why. Two hundred repetitions. I can cut into a topic faster now. I can find the middle of it and say it plainly instead of circling for three paragraphs hoping to land. That didn’t come from insight. It came from sitting down again.

And the growth was always the point. I’d love a thousand people to read this. That would be great. But the reason I’m here at 10:40 at night trying to bring something worth reading to a page is that the trying does something to me. It doesn’t work every day. It works enough.

I never expected to be 47 and still asking what I want to do when I grow up.

Except that’s not the question anymore, and I think that’s the actual news. At 25 the question is what will I become. At 47, with a career and a family and a garage full of projects and more capability than time, the question is smaller and harder:

What do I keep doing, and what do I stop?

I don’t have that answer. But I notice it’s the first year I’ve been in a position to have to ask it — which means all the accumulating finally added up to something with weight, and weight is what forces a choice.

Two hundred days of writing didn’t hand me the answer.

It got the room quiet enough to hear the question.

The Margins On The Page

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Years ago I sat down with someone I love who was burning out and couldn’t hear it from anyone.

I pulled out a sheet of notebook paper. The standard kind — blue lines, red margin rule down the left, another one across the top. Everybody who went through American school knows that page.

I started writing her life into it. Work. The commitments. The people she was carrying. The things she’d said yes to because saying no felt unkind. We filled the lined part of the page and she kept going, so I kept writing — out past the red rule, into the margin, up into the header space, around the edges until there was no white left anywhere on the sheet.

Then I turned it around so she could look at it.

I didn’t have to explain it. You can’t read a page like that. Your eye has nowhere to land. It isn’t that burnout was coming for her — it was that burnout was already there and had been for a while, and the page was just the first place she’d seen it from outside her own head.

That was one of the more useful things I’ve ever done for another person.

I have never once drawn my own page.

Here’s the thing I’ve gotten wrong for most of my life, and I only recently found language for it.

I thought the opposite of busy was rest. So when I got tired, I stopped working. I’d sit down, put something on, scroll a while, watch a game. And I’d get up an hour later feeling exactly as full as when I sat down.

Because I hadn’t been quiet. I’d only been still on the outside.

Whatever’s on that screen is competing for the same resources the work was using. It’s a different tenant in the same room. Doing nothing and going quiet aren’t synonyms — they’re closer to opposites, and I spent twenty years using one and wondering why I never got the effects of the other.

There’s a real physical thing underneath it. When you stop deliberately doing something, a network in your brain takes over — the default mode network — and it runs self-referential chatter, mind-wandering, replays of the past and rehearsals of the future. That’s your idle state. That’s what “relaxing” actually gets you. Quiet is a different activity, and it takes work: you’re actively damping that chatter, and the regulatory part of your brain has to engage to do it.

Which means stillness isn’t the absence of effort. It’s a thing you have to go do.

I’m not good at going to do it.

Every time I consider being quiet, there is an open item on a list somewhere, and my brain produces it immediately and with excellent timing. That’s still sitting there. And the feeling that follows is a strange hybrid — part responsibility, like a grown man ought to handle his business, and part failure, like someone’s counting on me and I’m choosing not to.

For a long time I assumed the fix was to finish the list. Get to the bottom of it and then rest would be permitted.

I know better now, because I’ve gotten to the bottom of it. Twice, maybe. And what happens when you get there is that your brain, with no drama at all, hands you the next thing.

The list is infinite. It has always been infinite. So if the condition for rest is completion, then rest never legally arrives, and I’ve built a life where the permission slip can’t be issued.

Sabbath is the oldest answer to this and I’ve been reading past it my whole life.

It’s not scheduled after the work is finished. That’s the entire point. It arrives on the calendar whether or not you got through your week, and it arrives with a command attached, which tells you God knew exactly how we’d handle it if it were optional.

And it isn’t only weekly. Jesus withdrew to quiet places while there were still sick people in the crowd — which is to say there was an open item on the list, a big one, an unambiguously good one, and He went anyway.

That’s the part that undoes me. I could probably defend leaving the yard unmowed. I don’t know how to defend that.

So the small ones count too. Ten minutes in a chair with a timer, breathing, and when the mind wanders — and it will, that’s not failure, that’s the actual exercise — you notice and come back. Micro-Sabbath. The rhythm at a scale that fits inside a Tuesday.

Here’s what I haven’t figured out.

The 7-40 Challenge is seven habits, tracked daily, and every one of them is something I do. The whole system runs on accomplishment. It’s been good for me in ways I can measure.

But I built a machine for producing completed items and then went looking for the reason I can’t stop. I have some suspicions about where to look.

I don’t know yet whether stillness belongs inside that system as an eighth thing to check off, or whether checking it off would kill the only part of it that matters.

Either way I know what the page looks like. I drew one for somebody else and never turned the pen around.

Aim for the Top of the Room

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Around our house, we love a good puzzle. It’s part of the furniture — brain-teasers at the table, riddles in the car, a general suspicion that anything can be turned into a game if you look at it right. So when my son’s eighteenth birthday came around and he told me what he wanted, it wasn’t just a party. He wanted a murder mystery — a night where he and his friends could sit down together and solve something.

That’s a brief. A real one. A specific thing, for a specific group, on a specific night. And a brief like that is the best gift a person can hand you if you like to make things, because it tells you exactly what you’re solving for.

So I built the night. Nine puzzles in all — seven scattered around the house for the teams to move through and work out together, then two more that funneled everyone down into the final whodunit. Dinner first, then about an hour of teasers, then the Clue-style reveal at the end. And here’s the thing I had to keep reminding myself the whole time I was designing it: it did not matter one bit what I found fun.

I’m older than eighteen. I like a hard puzzle, the kind you chew on for a day. If I’d built the night I’d want, I’d have built it for me, and it would have died on the table in front of a room of teenagers. So I set that version of me aside and built for them — for what my son loves, the history and the Professor Layton brain-teasers and the wordplay he’s been doing for years, and for his friends, who are cut from the same cloth. The question was never “can I solve this?” It was “can they?”

And that turned out to be a harder question than I expected, because I got the answer wrong in the most interesting way.

I wrote a cipher — a letter-shift, where you slide each letter back three spaces to read the hidden word. I thought it would be a good challenge. My son cracked it in about five seconds. Then I wrote what I thought was a gentle riddle, a little play on making a toast, the kind of thing I figured they’d get instantly. It stopped them cold. Clue after clue, and they still had to fight for it.

I’ve thought about that flip a lot since. It wasn’t random. These are kids who grew up pattern-matching at speed — puzzles, games, screens, systems with rules to crack. The mechanical cipher was their native language; they saw the pattern before I finished explaining it. But the slow, lateral riddle — the one where you have to read every single word and sit with what it actually means — that’s a different muscle, and it’s the one they flex the least. Without meaning to, I’d run a little experiment on how this generation thinks, and it inverted everything I assumed.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say, because there’s a trap on both sides of designing for other people.

I could have handed them something easy. They’d asked for a fun night, and it would have been simple to give them puzzles a child could solve and call it a crowd-pleaser. But that’s not respect — that’s pandering, and pandering gives people less than they’re capable of. The other trap is the opposite one, and it’s the one people like me fall into: build it high and hard and clever, the way I’d want it, and let them feel the reach of my own cleverness. That gives them less too. It just dresses the withholding up as sophistication.

The whole job was to aim at neither. To build for the top of what they could actually rise to — hard enough to be worth solving, fair enough that solving it felt earned. Respecting people’s capacity means calibrating to it, not performing above it and not stooping below it.

I didn’t get every puzzle right. But I built in enough variety that when my calibration was off, there was still something on the other side that landed. By the end of the night they’d worked their way down to the killer, and it had taken them the full hour, and it was satisfying in the way only a thing you had to work for is satisfying.

A couple of the kids told me I needed to throw another one soon. That made me smile — you make something, and it lands, and that feels good.

But that wasn’t the best part. The best part was my son, at the end of his party, having had a genuinely good night with his friends in our home. That was the whole brief. Everything else was just me trying to be worthy of it.

Hold the Thread

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

If my past self walked in and watched me work now, he’d think I’d lost my mind.

On a normal afternoon I’ve got three or four conversations with AI running at once, each one chewing on a different problem. While they work, I’m answering email, checking back with people I owe an answer, reviewing something else entirely. Then a result comes back on the first window, so I dig into that, set it running again, and swing over to the third. By the end of the day I’ve moved a ridiculous amount of work forward, and at no point did I sit still and do one thing.

The old me would have called that scattered — undisciplined, context-switching myself into a fog. Because my whole picture of focus used to be singular: one task, everything else closed, head down until it was done. If I had a real problem to think through, I had to clear the desk to think at all. Anything that looked like today would have read as chaos to me — and honestly, back then it probably would have been chaos, because I didn’t yet know how to be anything but scattered.

Here’s what actually changed, and it isn’t the switching. I still bounce between things all day. What changed is that I can now hold the problem statement of every open thread at once. I know exactly what each window is trying to solve. I can set one running, work another, and pick the first back up without losing my place, because the place never left my head. That’s the whole difference between pipelining and flailing — not whether you’re jumping around, but whether you still know what each thing is for when you come back to it.

Same behavior. Opposite states. The line between them was never visible from the outside, and I couldn’t see it from the inside either, until I’d lived on both sides of it.

I want to be honest about the trap in this, though, because it’s a real one. “Productive fragmentation” is also exactly what avoidance looks like. Staying busy across six windows is a fantastic way to feel like you’re working while you dodge the one hard thing. So how do I know I’m not just fooling myself with a nicer word for scattered? One test: things are actually finishing. The board is clearing. Tasks are getting closed, not only juggled. If the pudding’s got no proof in it, I’m not pipelining — I’m hiding.

And there’s a harder honesty under that. This way of working isn’t an upgrade you can hand to anyone. It only works if you already know what you’re doing. If you’re organized underneath, the tool lets you run four threads instead of one. If you’re lost underneath, it just lets you be lost in four places at once.

So I’ve stopped believing “focused” and “scattered” describe how a desk looks. They describe whether the person sitting at it knows what they’re trying to do. Some people genuinely need one thing at a time to keep that clear, and there’s not one ounce of shame in it — that was me for most of my life. The only thing that changed is that I finally learned to hold more than one thread without dropping any of them.