Tag: habits

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.

The Room That Knew What I Knew

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I found an old Toastmasters competition video of myself the other night. Watching old video of myself is its own small torture — you’re looking at a former version, and you can see everything he doesn’t know yet. It’s like watching a younger sibling do the thing. But I’ll say it plainly: it was a good speech. I was proud of it then and I’m proud of it now.

The speech was about my time writing for the college paper. I’d been assigned to cover a speaker one night, and I had the audacity to bring a date and cut out early, before the man even took the stage. The next day I told my professor there wasn’t a story there. She looked at me like I was an idiot — which I was — because the man I hadn’t stayed to hear was a rescue worker from the Oklahoma City bombing. So I went and found him. I learned his story. And somewhere in there I realized he was telling a very good story with his life, and I wasn’t telling much of one at all.

I knew that speech was special because I could feel the room respond when I gave it. And still I ran it, over and over, in front of people who knew the material as well as I did.

That’s the part that seems strange from the outside. I wasn’t in that room to learn what makes a speech work. I could have recited the criteria — vocal variety, gesture, stage use, the scoring rubric, all of it. Everyone in that room could have. And that’s exactly why it worked. There’s a wide gap between knowing the academics of a thing and putting them into practice while you’re standing up there, and nobody can see across that gap from the inside.

Because here’s what a blind spot actually is. It isn’t ignorance. It’s what happens when you’ve rehearsed something so many times it’s dropped into muscle memory — and the very repetition that makes it effortless is what makes the flaw invisible. You’ve done it a hundred times. It feels right. It has to be right. Then somebody who’s watched a thousand speeches tells you you’re repeating a word, or your gesture is overplayed and pulling attention off the line it’s supposed to carry, and you realize you’ve been doing it every single run and you never once saw it. The room wasn’t teaching me anything I didn’t know. The room was seeing me.

I made the district finals with that speech. I don’t believe I get there without those people — not without the corrections, not without the energy they gave me, not without being sanded down enough times to be genuinely polished instead of merely talented. I’ve competed since. I’ve never gotten that far again, and I know exactly why: I’ve never worked that hard again.

But the room isn’t magic, and I want to be honest about that, because I’ve been on the other end of it too. A different competition, a loss I didn’t think I deserved, and a man I’d never met walked up as I came off the stage and asked if he could give me feedback. I wanted to punch him. Not because he was wrong — I don’t even remember if he was wrong. Because he cared more about the method than about me. He wanted to stand on his knowledge for a second. That’s not sharpening. That’s the difference between a supportive community and a religion, and the feedback is identical in both. What changes is whether the person is for you.

And there’s one more thing, which I only saw watching that old video back.

The speech made it about me. I was so busy connecting his story to my own that I never finished it through his eyes — and it’s less powerful for it. It’s a smaller speech than it should have been, and the man deserved better than to be the setup for my lesson.

Nobody in that room ever told me. They couldn’t. Not because they weren’t good enough, but because I gave them a speech I’d already decided was mine, and they helped me deliver the speech I brought them. The room can only sharpen the blade you hand it.

The Room I Can’t Read

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 1

I recorded four minutes of thoughts on my walk this morning and never stumbled once. Then I sat down to film a thirty-second video saying the same thing, and my brain locked up.

That gap has bothered me for a while, because on paper it makes no sense. I’m a Toastmaster. I did theater. I’ve stood in front of full rooms and ad-libbed my way through, and I was fine — better than fine. Put a phone in front of me in an empty room and I freeze.

For a long time I told myself it was the camera. Being watched. But that’s not it. I record my thoughts out loud every single day on my walks and it’s effortless. Same guy, same microphone. The only thing that changes is where the audio is going. One version is just me, organizing what I think. The other is going out to people.

Here’s what I finally landed on: when I’m in a live room, I can read it. I can see which points are landing, who’s leaning in, where to push and where to let go. I ad-lib because the room is talking back to me the whole time. Online, there’s none of that. You send it out into nothing. You have no idea if anyone’s watching, if it’s hitting, if it matters at all. You’re basically talking to yourself and hoping. And without the room to read, I lose the thing I’ve always leaned on.

So I overcorrect. If I can’t read the room, I’ll make the words perfect instead. I’ll get it exactly right the first time so I don’t have to record it over and over. That’s the Toastmaster in me — I want a well-framed talk, not a ramble. Except the demand for perfect is what freezes me before I ever start.

Then I noticed where I don’t do this. Work.

I sit in meetings and I’ll start talking before I actually know what I’m saying, and somewhere in the middle I realize I do know — I just needed to hear myself get there. I give myself that grace at work without thinking about it. And I know why. Twenty years in, I trust that if I open my mouth, what comes out is worth a little credence, even half-formed. So I let myself think out loud.

On camera, for the things I actually care about — the writing, the ideas outside my day job — I haven’t earned that yet. Not in my own head. So I won’t let myself be half-formed. I make myself audition for the right to speak before every take.

That’s the real thing under the freeze. It was never the camera. It’s that the perfect-first-take I demand of myself is a stand-in for an authority I haven’t built yet. And the uncomfortable part is knowing you can’t build it in private. Nobody hands you credence for the videos you didn’t post.