Over the last four years, I’ve published over 130 pieces, invented dozens of concepts and frameworks, and built an entire productivity philosophy from scratch. It’s getting harder to find your footing on here. This post is your map.

If you haven’t already done so, also check out my ABOUT page for more background on who I am, plus the Atlas to browse posts by category and the Lexicon to browse by index.

The Foundation: Fractal Productivity

I started this Substack based on a simple idea: that personal productivity is fractal. I only much later wrote a piece that actually explained what fractals are:

But from the beginning, fractals were always part of my writing. Fractal Productivity was the initial name of this Substack and the name of the very first piece on here:

In this first series, I identified one of my most important concepts: the personal program — the work unit that sits above the personal project.

I’ve since thought and written a lot about the personal program, and to bring everything together, I eventually wrote:

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If you read one thing from this section, make it this one.

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Magnitude Tuning

After that, I explored a practice I had never seen before elsewhere. I called it magnitude tuning, and I wrote 4 pieces about how I used it to improve my goal-setting, weekly reviews, and other parts of my productivity system.

The PARA Years

Back then, I was deep into PKM — Personal Knowledge Management — and was still using the PARA method, so I wrote extensively about it.

If you don’t know what PARA is, read this quick intro:

I experimented a lot with PARA over the years, having been part of many of the creator’s online cohorts, and even moderated one. Over time, I identified many ways to improve the method without breaking its core invariants:

Building a Smart Task Management System

I then ported an email newsletter series I had written many years earlier and turned it into a long series on building a smart task management system. If you want a ground-up approach to how tasks, lists, and inventories fit together, this is it. The series included, among others, my idea of a digital inventory.

I actually quite recently wrote an update on my personal inventory:

The series covered many other topics — contexts, energy management, recurring tasks, and more:

Second Brains and PKM

After that, I shifted my focus back toward PKM and “second brains.” If you don’t know what these topics are about, these two short intros cover the basics:

I also wrote several shorter knowledge pieces in this field:

And I reported in detail on my painful migration from Evernote to Obsidian — useful if you’re considering the same move or just want to understand what switching a PKM system actually costs:

±PEAKER: My Organization Method

Several years later — now — I no longer use PARA or ACE because I built my own organization method called ±PEAKER. If you struggle with digital organization in any form, this is where to start:

This is one of the pieces I’m most proud of. It lays out my overall philosophy and how I actually organize everything. Read it.

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If you are still stuck with PARA or ACE but it just won’t fully work, read this first:

And once you’re convinced, go here:

Goal-Setting

Another big arc in my writing is goal-setting. I wrote quite a bit about it over the years — from the mechanics of how to set better goals to the deeper question of what goal-setting is actually for:

Snowflakes

And then there were standalone, non-canon pieces that I call “snowflakes” — one-off ideas that didn’t belong to any series but were worth writing:

The Book: Scale-Smart Productivity

All of this prepared me to shift gears away from just “fractal productivity” to something bigger. I realized that the personal productivity “industry” is broken. And I tried to wrestle with how to save it. That work led to my book, which after several title changes arrived at its final name: Scale-Smart Productivity: A Philosophy of Productive Life — How To Think, Plan, And Act From The Right Level.

If you want a sense of what the book is about before buying, these essays cover the core ideas:

And complement those with what I consider my most important series:

Scale-Smart Moves (2026)

My first post appeared on April 27th, 2022 — almost four years ago. My latest series from March 2026 is called Scale-Smart Moves, and it feeds ideas from the book back into the blog. If you want to see the framework applied as practical, single-concept essays, start here:

That’s the territory. Four years, 130+ pieces, one system built in public.

If you actually read this far, your perspective matters immensely to me. So if you ever got anything out of my writing, please do vote here:

My son is obsessed with axolotls. He’s three, and our recent visit to the zoo convinced him that this is the animal. The best animal. The only animal that matters.1 So, as it goes, he now owns a book, a plaything for the bathtub, a cuddly toy he can take to bed and, above all, a quiet certainty about it all. I don’t blame him. He’s right. There’s something fascinating about these creatures — an amusing oddness, a cartoonishness even, and the longer you look, the stranger they become.

At this point, I’ve probably learned more about them than any adult without a biology degree ever should. In a nutshell, axolotls are Mexican salamanders that never grow up. To fully appreciate what that means, you need to understand metamorphosis — the biological process by which an animal transforms from a juvenile form into its adult one. Caterpillars go land-to-air: they cocoon themselves and get wings. Salamanders go water-to-land: they lose their gills, develop lungs, and leave the water behind.

Water-to-land is what should happen to the axolotl. But it doesn’t. The animal reaches maturity, reproduces, and can live for years, all while staying in what biologists call its larval form. That’s like a caterpillar that never becomes a butterfly (these exist, too). In the case of the axolotl, that means they keep their gills, soft bodies, and that faint, permanent half-smile for all of their life.

Force an axolotl to grow up, and it breaks

The academic term for what happens with the axolotl is neoteny: reaching sexual maturity without undergoing metamorphosis and retaining juvenile traits. It sounds like a flaw, or at least an unfinished state. But the axolotl isn't broken. It isn't waiting to complete a missing step. By every functional measure, it is fully formed. It just doesn't match our idea of what a finished animal is supposed to look like.

In fact, the axolotl is not just not broken. It has a superpower that’s hard to ignore once you see it: it can regenerate and regrow almost all kinds of tissue. If it loses a limb, a tail, even parts of its heart or brain — it regrows these cleanly, from scratch. Most animals can do small repairs: close wounds, form scar tissue, and adapt around damage. The axolotl, due to its “juvenilization” and always maintaining its larval form, regrows tissues from scratch, leaving no visible traces of the injury and no accumulation of errors.

These two traits — the refusal to mature and the ability to rebuild — are not a coincidence. Researchers at Northeastern University tested it directly. They took a group of axolotls and forced half of them to undergo metamorphosis using thyroid hormones that axolotls naturally lack. The axolotls that “grew up” regenerated at half the rate of their larval siblings, and their regrown limbs came back wrong with missing digits, malformed carpals, and other structural defects.2 So growing up didn’t just cost the axolotl its flexibility. It cost them the one thing that made them remarkable.

Towards Neotenic Systems

I didn’t dig that deep into axolotls because I care about salamander endocrinology. Nor because my son keeps bringing up axolotls. I was fascinated by the whole animal because it reminded me of a pattern I’d seen elsewhere, namely, in how people treat their houses, their bodies, their relationships, and their minds. We want things to be finished. We want to train and eat until we reach a healthy body, and then keep it until we die. We want to practice meditation to reach enlightenment and then stay calm for the rest of our lives. We want to fall in love and marry so that we can then sustain a perfect relationship till death do us part. Above all, maybe, we want to reach happiness and stay happy until we die. The idea that these things have a final form that can be reached and “locked in” is so deeply embedded that questioning it feels almost ungrateful.

In personal productivity culture this takes a very specific shape. Companies are selling all-in-one apps, and individuals offer sophisticated templates and pre-packaged AI workflows. And some of these products may indeed help some people some of the time, though I suspect only a very small percentage of those who actually pay for them ever gain anything in return. The real problem I have with these offerings is the idea that people sell together with their products. An “all done-for-you” Notion template that helps you manage your entire life brings with it the framing that such a fully formed and “finished” productivity setup is even possible. That systems and workflows can be perfected and then pay dividends for life.

In biology-speak, the message is that your system should undergo metamorphosis. It should lose its juvenile gills. It should emancipate itself. And learn to walk on land. Your system should morph into the finished salamander, the butterfly with wings. And people buy into this willingly, because they want to solve productivity once and for all, so that they can move on to other problems. In turn, however, they lose the ability to regenerate. They harden and overfit their systems to current circumstances, cement their workflows, and thicken their habits around a certain setup that seems to work in any given moment.

Eventually, however, things break. They always break. Sometimes, because of a big life change that wrecks a system so completely, there’s nothing left to regrow from. But more often it starts small: a single lost habit, a bug in a tool, some friction in a workflow. Tiny wounds can heal, but over time, paper cuts cut deeper and deeper. That’s why most people’s systems are scarred all over. That’s why they have spikes where there should be limbs. They are a ticking time bomb waiting to detonate. All because their system was designed to be done. And done systems, when they break, produce spikes instead of limbs. The only way out: declare bankruptcy and start over in a shiny new app. That might feel like neoteny, but it's actually more like euthanasia. You're not regrowing the limb. You're putting the whole animal down to buy a new one.

The axolotl’s biology suggests a different design principle. Our systems should be evergreen, perpetual work-in-progresses. Our systems should be considered fully functional without ever being finished or finalizing their form. They should be neotenic.

The Problematic Hormone

Most productivity systems out there are not neotenic in this sense. Because people want the finished salamander, gurus can sell them metamorphosis-in-a-bottle. The ultimate setup. The best of the best. The last system you’ll ever need. A neotenic system, in contrast, and by definition, is never finished. Something you work on for the rest of your life. This idea is not sexy, and it’s almost impossible to market.

This, by the way, is anything but an excuse to stay a beginner forever. The axolotl isn’t immature. If anything, it’s amature3. It hunts. It reproduces. It lives for two decades. It does everything a finished salamander does — without hardening into a form that can’t change back. It remains plastic. The productivity equivalent of immaturity is the person on their fourteenth app migration who hasn’t shipped anything. The person who builds tracking dashboards for work that never starts. The person who optimizes their goal-setting process instead of setting goals. That’s not neoteny. That's not staying larval. That's never even leaving the egg.

The axolotl doesn’t try to grow up. It doesn’t keep switching lakes. It lives in one lake, remaining fully functional in larval form throughout its life. But the axolotl doesn’t choose to stay larval, either. It doesn’t resist metamorphosis through discipline or mindset. It’s simply missing the hormone that triggers the metamorphic cascade. Neoteny isn’t something the axolotl actively does. It’s the absence of a trigger. So productive neoteny isn’t about learning how to stay flexible. The real question is: what trigger do we need to remove to become axolotls?

That trigger is your belief that your productivity system will be finished at some point. That's your thyroid-stimulating hormone. Once it floods the system, the cascade is hard to stop.

If you believe there is a final or ultimate form of your system, you will, many times over, decide that your system is now “done” and stop working to improve it. This belief is also what makes off-the-shelf systems so seductive — an all-in-one app, a guru’s template, a pre-built workflow. If a finished system is possible, why not buy one that’s already there? Of course, in the end, things don’t hold. And the routine you spent months building is suddenly gone. But instead of regrowing it, you tell yourself you already did that. You did the work, and it didn’t work. So why bother doing it all over again? The finished-system myth blocks you from seeing that a system that doesn’t work is simply a system with a lost limb. A limb that can be regrown, if the system was never designed to be done. But yours was. The system you built was done. And it didn’t work. So you don’t bother to repair — you abandon. You stop iterating because the system was supposed to be done. You throw away past work and start over, rather than reshaping what's there. Your productivity gills have hardened into lungs. And lungs can't turn back into gills.

Remove that one belief — that your system can ever be finished, that it will finally grow up and be perfect — and you don’t need to learn flexibility. You just stop calcifying.

Scale-Smart Systems are Neotenic

Most productivity systems hand you a fixed form. A next-actions list. A weekly template. A project board with prescribed columns. These are metamorphosed containers — they work as long as your circumstances match the author’s assumptions. David Allen’s next-actions list, for example, is a great idea if you are a disciplined person who juggles hundreds of small moving pieces. But the moment your main work shifts to a single deep project — writing a book, say — an ever-growing list of tiny actions no longer helps you. It distracts. The container was built for one context and hardened into that shape.

A scale-smart system, as I propose it, works very differently. Instead of thinking in fixed containers, you think of all your work in flexible scopes — boundaries that expand, contract, split, and merge in response to actual demands. In my book, I call this Effort Scoping: treating your work as a set of flexible sets of intentions you can reshape without tearing down the whole structure. You can grow sophisticated systems when life demands it, but otherwise stay as simple and lean as possible. Your effort scopes are never finished. They leave and regrow based on your needs.

Effort Scoping and many other ideas I’ve written about4 help you move towards an axolotl’s soft body instead of the salamander’s hardened skeleton. That’s nimble modularity instead of knitted castles. The underlying principle is the same across all of them: your system should never reach a final form. It should do everything a finished system does, but without hardening into one that can't change back.

The cost of growing up

You’ve seen it. Everything automated. Templated. Linked. Metamorphosed. But when life changes a tad too much, the templates assume workflows that no longer exist. The databases reference dead projects. Bullshit notes accumulate. Pseudo-tasks proliferate. Regrowing limbs would mean tearing everything down, so you don’t. Or you do, by starting over in a shiny new app.

My son doesn’t know about thyroid hormones, neoteny, or regenerative capacity. He doesn’t know about productivity or even what it means to grow up. He just sees an animal that smiles and never has to become something else. He’ll grow up. He’ll “metamorphose” through puberty— that part’s not optional. But his systems don’t have to. The best ones never do.

Dive Deeper

Every year, I sit down at least once and update what I call my digital inventory.

A digital inventory—as per my definition—lists all the apps, tools, and services a person uses to accomplish things in the digital realm. Sometimes I share it online, as I did here in 2024.

The idea behind this practice is to fractal out (to zoom out to a higher level), take a bird's-eye view of your entire digital landscape, and see if there are any obvious improvements you can make or subtle shifts that could make your digital life healthier. So, the overall goal is to raise your awareness of your productivity setup and identify areas for improvement. And that’s not just about cataloging what you have but also about visually presenting it in a way that encourages consolidation and simplifies your digital workflow.

This year, it was interesting to see how many consolidations have happened over the last couple of months (fewer but better tools!) and what new AI-based tools I have added to my stack. It is, however, also grounding to see that my tooling setup is still 95% based on tools that are not AI-based or even AI-enhanced. This goes to show that, against the current hype, they are still just the very tip of the iceberg.

Please don’t take this post as an opportunity to fall for shiny-object syndrome. If you find an interesting tool you would like to try out, I suggest putting it on a monitoring list instead of acting immediately. See my own such list at the very bottom of this post.

My Digital Inventory (early 2026)

Emojy Legend

• 🗡️ — used rarely for task artifact management

• 🗡️🗡️ — used now and then for task artifact management

• 🗡️🗡️🗡️ — used heavily for task artifact management

• 📜 — rarely used for personal knowledge mangement

• 📜📜 — used now and then for personal knowledge mangement

• 📜📜📜 — used heavily for personal knowledge mangement

Important Note: I have not listed all apps install on my computer or phone, only the one’s I use regularly.

Calendar  📅

• Fantastical 🗡️🗡️🗡️📜📜

  • meetings, events, webinars, online calls

  • time- and day-bound information like holidays, vacations, retreats, birthdays, when my mom takes care of our son, etc.

  • selective timeboxes for workouts, progressive efforts, and rituals like my morning & evening rituals

• Microsoft Outlook 🗡️🗡️

  • work-related events & meetings

Project, Task & Action Management 🚀

• Todoist 🗡️🗡️🗡️

  • actionable task artifacts

  • pending task artifacts

  • recurring routine task artifacts (standards, habitual patterns)

  • backlogged task artifacts

  • incubating task artifacts

• Obsidian 🗡️🗡️🗡️

  • today's high-priority tasks from Todoist (bi-directional sync)

  • actions

  • daily intentions

  • someday-maybe / incubation task artifacts

• Scrivener 🗡️ 📜📜

  • The app I am using to write my 1000-page book Scale-Smart Productivity
    

Personal Knowledge Companion 🧠

• Obsidian 📜📜📜

  • Any notes & project support material

  • Personal Project Management

  • Personal Program Management

  • Inspirational Material & Incubating Artefacts

  • Knowledge Building Blocks (“Intermediate Packets”)

  • Life management

  • Store insights, lessons learned, ...

  • Connect ideas

  • Increase understanding

  • Coding-related "personal wiki" for references

  • Work-related tasks, artifacts, and actions
    ALL OF THE ABOVE ORGANIZED IN MY ORGANIZING METHOD:
    

• Craft 📜

  • Currently in use only to share my ARCs of Aspiration to the web

Quick Capture 📥

• Todoist 🗡️🗡️

  • task artifacts

  • actionable and timely stuff like links and ideas (on mobile)

• Raycast Obsidian Integration

  • log to Obsidian daily note journal with global keyboard shortcut (on desktop)

E-Mail ✉️

• Spark Mail (legacy version) 🗡️🗡️🗡️📜

  • Personal & side-business mails

  • Pending emails

  • Reference emails for tax returns

• Microsoft Outlook 🗡️📜

  • Work emails

Incubation 💡

• Readwise.io 📜

  • Main peripheral incubation space of my ±PEAKER org method

• Readwise Reader 🗡📜

  • Read Later Queue for Blog Posts

• Goodreads

  • books "to read” lists

  • lists of read books

  • book reviews

• IMDB

  • movies to watch list and tracking

• trakt.tv

  • movies to watch list and tracking

Tracking 📏

• Timing 📜📜📜

  • Manual and automatic time tracking in one tool

  • I wrote an in-depth article on why and how I switched from my previous Toggle+RescueTime combo to this amazing new tool

• YNAB 🗡📜📜

  • Tracking expenses and setting budgets

  • The following budgets can be considered “tasks” in some sense

Other Helpers 💻

• 1Password 📜📜📜

  • storing passwords

  • storing secrets & sensitive info like medical/banking data or software licenses

  • subscription details

  • Watchtower (see compromised website with leaks and duplicate passwords)

• Raycast 📜📜📜

  • Quick Launcher

  • Hyperkey

  • Clipboard manager (referencing recently copied stuff)

  • Window Manager

  • Text Expander (storing text snippets)

  • Obsidian Extension (see section Quick Capture)

• Arc Browser 🗡️🗡️📜📜📜

  • Permanent Bookmarks

  • Program bookmarks

  • Bookmarks for work (separate browser profile)

  • FYI: Considering switching to Dia, the browser company’s latest product, as they seem to slowly bring back the best features of Arc Browser

• macOS FileSystem 📜📜

  • to-read folded for PDFs

  • large files and documents

  • backups

  • confidential files

• CleanShot X (macOS)

  • My favorite screen capture tool

• Cotypist (macOS)

  • LLM-enhanced auto-complete across apps

  • FYI: Free beta software (0.20) from the creators of Timing

• Caffeine (macOS)

  • keeps my MacBook awake even if I am afk

• DeskRest (macOS)

  • a tool that helps you take smart breaks—see all about that here:
    

• CaffeineApp (iOS) 📜

  • logs of my caffeine intake

• PDFExpert 📜

  • PDF highlighting

  • Highlight export

• Apple Maps 📜

  • stored locations like home, work, …

• Google Maps 📜

  • saved and favorited locations

• Safari & Chrome

  • Fallback web browsers

• Focus@Will & BrainFM

  • Focus music for flow

• TextSniper

  • OCR clipped selection of the desktop screen

• CamelCamelCamel

  • Price tracker for Amazon

• Apple Shortcuts

  • To copy my Timing activities into my daily note at the end of every day

Tools I Use Professionally 🧑‍💻

• Jira 🗡️🗡️

• Confluence 📜

• GitHub Enterprise 🗡️🗡️

• Xcode 🗡️🗡️📜

• draw.io 📜

• GoogleDocs 📜

• Microsoft Outlook (macOS & iOS) 🗡️

• MS Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

• Warp

• Git Tower

• xcodes

• Kaleidoscope

• Android Studio

• Charles

• Eraser

• Zed

Social Media & Communication 📡

• Slack 🗡️🗡️ 📜📜

  • unread messages & threads

  • saved (bookmarked) messages for later reference

  • search whole chat history for reference

• Substack 🗡️ 📜

  • drafted and scheduled Substack Notes

• YouTube 📜

  • for later watch list

  • saved playlists

• iMessage 🗡️

  • unread messages

• Whatsapp 🗡️

  • unread messages

• Instagram 📜

  • saved collections

  • created drafts for posts

  • messages

• LinkedIn

  • saved posts, messages

• FaceTime

• Zoom

Dedicated Side-Business Tools

• Substack 📜📜

  • Drafts for new posts

  • Scheduled posts

• Claude.ai Pro & ChatGPT Go

  • For revising and improving my essays

• Leonardo.ai 📜

  • AI-generated images for my essays here on FP

• Grammarly

  • Grammar improvement before publishing texts

• Hemmingway

  • Grammar improvement before publishing texts

Honorable Mentions

• Docko (macOS)

  • Probably the only atelic app in here — just looking cute

• One Thing (macOS)

  • menu bar app to place a single task artifact to focus on

Monitoring 🔎🕵️

Do you use any of these and if so, can you recommend them?

Artifical Intelligence

• Vercel - open agent skills ecosystem

• ElevenLabs - Free AI Voice Generator & Voice Agents Platform

• AudioPen / Wispr Flow - Effortless Voice Dictation

• Elephas - Personal AI Writing Assistant for Mac

• Runway - Magical AI tools, real-time collaboration, precision editing, and more.

• Soundraw.io - AI music creation

• Aki by Akiflow - Your Executive Assistant beyond human limits

• Reclaim – AI Calendar for Work & Life

Task Artifact Managers

• TickTick: Looks a lot like Todoist. A free tier is available, premium, more powerful, and slightly cheaper (I would love the statistics, Pomodoro timer, Eisenhower matrix, and only one layer of indentation! action). Available on all platforms. Has Todoist import (but I would need to drag all projects into PARA...),

• Amazing Marvin: Highly customizable with calendar integration, todoist import and, time estimates, procrastination counter

• sunsuma: daily planner with calendar, todoist, and JIRA integration -> pick tasks, estimate durations, and get them timeboxed in your calendar

• Things 3: one-time payment, no subscription, German company

• Locu - focus timer, to-do-ist and notes in one

AI Scheduling (Calendar+TAM)

• motion: AI scheduled days (“To-do lists and calendars are dead”)

Internet Browsers & Bookmarks

• Dia

• ChatGPT Atlas

• Zen Browser - Firefox-based (no account needed, still very small)

• Raindrop.io - Browser Bookmark decouple from browsers

Knowledge companions

• NotebookLM: Personalized AI - AI notes app by Google (US only so far)

• DEVONthink: Sits on top of file system, powerful search

• Supernotes: A child of Notion + Roam

• Nimbus: Marketed as "The way Evernote should have evolved"

• Pandoc: Convert files between markup formats (may need after Obsidian)

Writing

• Ulysses: distraction-free interface, project management, proofreader, and more.

• Spear: an all-in-one solution for writing, note-taking, and PKM.

• Elephas: Personal AI Writing Assistant for Mac.

Research

• Booksends: reference manager for students and professionals.

• Otter.ai: powerful Speech-To-Text Software

Collaboration

• PliimPRO: Safely share your screen with one click

• Codeshot: 6€ to make nice code shots

Reading/Books

• The StoryGraph: at some point, this may replace Goodreads

That’s all!

Let me know if you have any other tool recommendations!

I’m always happy to add them to my list :)

Go Deeper

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

I

Mark Forster, a British time-management writer who was less famous than he should have been, built much of his productivity thinking around a single insight: most to-do lists fail because they stay open. You keep adding to them because there is always room for one more thing, and so their natural tendency is to grow into something both demotivating and impossible to clear. There is no real bottom to an open list, Forster argued, no finish line, no moment when the list is truly closed. In that sense, an open to-do list is not really a plan at all. It is an endless sink that defies real commitment.

Forster’s solution was to “close” the list by drawing a line at the end of each day. Everything above that line becomes tomorrow’s fixed work scope. Nothing may be added. Everything below it is postponed. Unlike an open list, a closed one has a natural tendency to shrink. Once the line is drawn, decision-making stops. You no longer respond to whatever shows up. You only work the scope you already committed to. Anything that arrives afterward is deferred by default.

David Allen made a similar move, though on a smaller scale. His popular two-minute rule says: if something takes less than two minutes, do it now. Otherwise, defer it. In Getting Things Done, he calls this an efficiency cutoff, the point at which tracking an item costs more than simply dealing with it. The exact number, he admits, is arbitrary. Five minutes might work. Ten probably would too. The point was never the number itself, but the existence of a threshold. The two-minute rule is a heuristic for deciding when to engage with incoming work and when to defer it.

II

In The Upside Down of Doing, I argued that there are basically two tightly interwoven modes of work: engagement and execution. Execution is the actual work, the doing itself, the realization of an intention. Engagement is all the spade work that surrounds execution: deciding, checking, scoping, gathering context, and reorienting yourself. Engagement work is often invisible and underestimated. Whenever we are engaging, instead of executing, we are prone to getting lost in The Forest of Distraction or sucked into The Attentional Vortex. Engagement has no natural stopping point. You can always rethink, re-check, or reconsider things. Left open, engagement tends to expand and spills into execution time. Then progress stalls, or the whole day disappears into deciding what to do instead of actually doing it.

The challenge here, I have argued, is that engagement and execution are not sequential but two sides of the same coin, and we have to transition back and forth between them. Engagement, therefore, accounts for much more of our daily work than we realize. And so the problem Forster and Allen were trying to solve with their rules and lists was to contain engagement so that execution has room to happen. While their methods differ in scale, they are the same in principle. Allen’s two-minute rule creates a threshold at the level of the single action item. Forster’s closed list creates one at the level of the day. Both help you contain engagement.

Work comes at you fast, much like the fire-breathing dragon in the title image above. But you don’t have to fight every dragon that appears. Most dragons you can just shield off and dodge, and deal with later. Moves like those of Allen and Forster can be part of your armor.

III

If we abstract the overall idea here, of creating an “engagement armor,” we land at something I call engagement cutoffs: predetermined thresholds that, without deliberation in the heat of the moment, determine whether to engage with something or not.

We can distinguish three types of these cutoffs, each solving a different problem. The first two — the filter and the lock-in — are both entry conditions. They decide whether new things get engaged with at all.

The two-minute rule is a filter: it fires per item, on arrival, based on a single number. Small-enough things are always engaged with immediately; bigger things are never engaged with immediately and always deferred. Deep work sessions are similar to a black-or-white filter. During deep work, the only thing that matters is the session's goal, and everything else is deferred until at least after the session.

The closed list is a lock-in: it fires once a day, freezing the whole field of play in advance. Setting goals works similarly — you lock in your commitments once, then stop reconsidering them whenever doubt arises. The progressive effort we talked about earlier in this series is also a form of lock-in. For the first hour of the day, you lock yourself into the engagement (and execution) of only one important effort, and everything else gets deferred. Using a doline instead of a deadline is also a form of a lock-in. When I wrote my book, I decided to engage with one chapter for one week, then strictly move on to the next.

Next to filters and lock-ins, there is a third kind of armor: the continuation cutoff. It fires not on arrival but at intervals, and answers a different question entirely: should I keep engaging? Sunk cost is a powerful drug, and it sometimes wears the costume of stubborn persistence. If we realize the dragon we are fighting already has one, we can decide to retreat. A continuation cutoff is hereby more of a scheduled moment of honesty. It could read: after 5 sessions with no meaningful progress, I stop, or after 3 months of working honestly towards a goal without meaningful progress, I pivot. What matters is that you pick a number before frustration or enthusiasm chooses for you.

IV

Psychologists have long had a term for this type of approach: implementation intentions. In one field study1, women who intended to perform a breast self-examination during the next month were asked to write down where and when they would do it. Of those with strong intentions who also made a specific when-and-where plan, every single one followed through. Among those who held the strong intention but made no such plan, only 53% did.

A later study2 pushed further. Oettingen, Hönig, and Gollwitzer (2000) asked whether simply adding a time to a goal was enough — or whether something about the structure of the plan was doing the work. Participants were given concentration tasks to complete each Wednesday morning over four weeks. One group wrote: “I will perform as many arithmetic tasks as possible each Wednesday at [chosen time before noon].” The other wrote: “If it is Wednesday at [chosen time before noon], then I will perform as many arithmetic tasks as possible.” Both groups reported nearly identical motivation. But the second group started the tasks in much closer temporal proximity to their intended times — the first group’s average deviation was more than five times as large. It was not having thought about when to act that mattered. It was the linking of a situation to a behavior, so that one automatically triggers the other. Gollwitzer called this an if-then plan: if situation X, then I will do Y.

Engagement cutoffs are a specific variant of an implementation intention, built for a digital VUCA world where you can’t predict what’s coming. You could restate the two-minute rule as: “If I encounter a task that takes less than two minutes, I engage.” You could similarly restate the closed list: “If I encounter something after 6 pm when my list is closed, I disengage.” As you can see, they share the if-then logic but encode a more generic situation rather than a specific one, and then couple that with a concrete number: 2 minutes, 6 pm. So, the power of the engagement cutoff is that you don’t need to recognize a specific situation— you only need a general kind of situation coupled with a concrete measure. This way, it works equally on Tuesday’s mail and Wednesday’s email inbox, on the project you expected and the one you didn’t.

V

A battle rule for small stuff that pops up in the heat of the moment. An engagement line drawn the night before, by a calmer version of yourself. What both Allen and Forster were describing with their engagement cutoffs is a form of temporal self-governance. Present you is always confronted with dragons — be it the filling inbox, the colleague with an urgent request, the idea that suddenly seems more alive than the thing you’d planned to do. Past you, however, is unhurried, clear-headed. If the past self has set the terms, the self standing in the war zone has an actual chance of honoring them.

This is not how we usually think about discipline. We tend to imagine it as a confrontation — you versus the distraction, willpower versus desire, the better self wrestling the worse self into submission. Heroic, exhausting, and unreliable. What an engagement cutoff offers instead is something more like delegation. You don’t fight the dragons. You make a decision before they even appear, and then you follow it when they do. The act of willpower doesn’t really disappear. But it moves upstream. You lay the track in the quiet, before the train is even moving. What’s left is just following the rails.

The engagement layer, left open indefinitely, is a breeding ground for dragons. The preparatory hovering that mistakes itself for progress, the meta-work that expands to fill all available time. You can be extremely busy with this layer and accomplish almost nothing. Many people are. A cutoff closes the aperture. Allen drew his at two minutes. Forster drew his at the end of each day. You’ll draw yours somewhere different — one or many. What matters is that you let a past version of you have a say. And that clarity, more than intensity, is what, in the long run, keeps energy aligned with what actually matters.

Dig Deeper

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

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TL;DR: We talk about goal-setting as though it happens in a single sitting. We ask, “When did you set your goals?” and expect an answer like, “December 31st, around 9 a.m.” But this language is misleading. Goals begin as embryonic ideas—shapeless, unnamed— and mature slowly, through iteration, into full-term commitments. The real question is not when a goal was conceived, but for how long it has been developing. And the answer might be five days, seven days, or even two weeks. A good goal isn’t born. It’s carried.

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I

Unless a goal has been forming quietly in the back of my mind for a couple of weeks, I can’t just sit down and pull it out of thin air. If I try, I’m usually left with incomplete thinking, a strange kind of overconfidence, and oddly distorted timelines. So much so that, just a few days later, in a different mood and under a different mental frame, the same goal can suddenly feel off. The problem is that by then, I’d already be locked onto the wrong track. So I either had to abandon the goal as stillborn. Or I had to change it midway, which has always been a slippery slope into self-deception.

The lesson, at least for me, is this: goal-setting isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a punctiliar event. There is no clean border I can cross from old goals into new ones. There is, rather, some kind of borderland between seasons of directed pursuit—a whole country of opportunity, a long liminal stretch where the old can fully close, the new can begin to take shape, and rough drafts of intention can slowly crystallize into real goals.

There is still a moment when you first sit down to draft a new set of goals. For me, that moment usually comes during a quarterly retreat, when I try to leave familiar places behind and move into settings that feel novel, calm, and mind-opening. But the retreat itself is not the borderland. It is only where the crossing begins.

The real journey of goal-setting takes place after I return to ordinary life and see those drafted goals sketched against reality. This is when I start to iterate. When I let the first draft be wrong, then return for a second pass, then a third. When I look at the same goals from different angles, in different moods, on different days. When I sleep on my goals, again and again. When I give my goals time to settle into their final form over days or even weeks.

If I want goals that are truly scale-smart, goals that make sense both up close and from afar, I need this kind of back and forth. I need this room for play. The borderland gives me that space. So I’ve learned to remain there for a while.

II

The borderland between goal-setting periods comes with several perks. One of them is logistical. In my quarterly goal-setting rhythm, it is rarely possible to move cleanly from one quarter to the next with a completely new set of goals. A new quarter often starts in the middle of the week, and except in Q4, I usually have no days off. So I am forced to push my goal-setting session to the weekend before or after, which either cuts the old quarter short or drags it out past its natural end. The borderland gives me a better option: a clear crossing into the land of drafting, but an open stretch in which the goals can continue to take shape.

Taking this a step further, I like to treat the borderland as a kind of grace period, a stretch where I can keep closing the old while already sketching the new. For example, I once set myself the goal of going to the gym 30 times in a quarter, but by the last day of the quarter, I had only reached 22. So, during the grace period, I kept going and pushed the number up to 26. Some might call that cheating. I call it progress. The main focus of the grace period is still goal-setting. But as I’ve said, that takes time, and it cannot always be forced. So the grace period gives me a useful bit of slack: a way to tease out a little more progress without deadline pressure, while allowing the old to close gradually and the new to keep taking shape.

Which brings me to a second perk of the borderland: not only can my goals breathe, but so can I. I have never liked deadlines. If I treat calendar dates as hard crossings between one goal-setting period and the next, I let the calendar dictate the pace. I become tempted to “finish” my goals because the date demands it, not because real clarity has arrived. The borderland works much better for me. It fits my preference for dolines over deadlines. After all, no one says I must be “on goals” all the time. Sometimes it is perfectly fine to be goalless for a while. The borderland gives me that freedom.

III

Beyond all of this, the borderland is also a chance for small improvements, loose ends, and neglected tasks that would otherwise get swallowed by goal-induced tunnel vision. It is also a great time to dip my toes into new things, subscribe to a new YouTube channel or Substack newsletter, and just let my soul breathe a little. More generally, the borderland feels like a kind of deload from telic striving. It unlocks an atelic mode, where I stop obsessing over outcomes and give myself more room to wander, reflect, and follow what quietly draws me in.

So much of life has become goal-oriented that I can slip into telic mode without even noticing. I’m always chasing. Always optimizing. Always looking over the next ridge. In that posture, it becomes hard to reflect on what has happened, and even harder to appreciate what is already here. Atelic mode softens that grip. It lets me follow my intuition and whatever quietly draws me in. It lets me unwind. It lets my mind wander. It helps me stop trying to squeeze meaning out of everything. I start noticing the texture of the day again.

The borderland is unusually good at inviting all of this because my emotional weather is often just right. I’m proud of what I’ve done over the past three months, and quietly excited about what comes next. That mix of closure and possibility creates a rare kind of safety. It loosens my grip just enough.

My visits to the borderland are intuitive and opportunistic. I let myself wander a little in The Forest. I digest. I integrate. I even sometimes allow myself to get pulled into The Vortex for a bit. I return to each draft of a goal a few times. But I don’t try to force anything. I just try to let things crystallize. I take at least one small step toward each goal, just to tease out what may still be missing. And I ask myself, again and again, questions like: Is this scoped properly? And: Does this really fit the overall quarter I’m about to enter?

I suspect most people are still where I once was. They don’t visit borderland. They pass straight through it, dissatisfied with their old goals and quick to replace them with a new set of bad ones, only to repeat the same losing game forever. I wish they weren’t like my past self. Stay there a little longer.

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

There is a small productivity hack I occasionally use when I find myself endlessly postponing the same task. Often, when I push something to a future date, I do so intentionally because it no longer fits my current schedule. But sometimes I actually have the chance to complete it and still decide not to. If this happens once, I just ignore it. If it happens twice, I get curious. If it happens thrice, I treat it as a red flag.

Work avoidance has many faces and just as many solutions. The best remedy I know of and the one I propose in my book is to rescope—early and often. By modifying, rephrasing, and clarifying a task artifact, you can usually get a foot in the door. And that can be enough to get you going. However, if you tried that and it doesn’t work or the real problem wasn’t procrastination in the first place, but something else (like flawed priorities), then here’s a small hack you can use, which I call deliberate priority inflation:

Every time you postpone a task, increase the priority of the task artifact by 1.

In practice, in my Todoist, this could mean bumping it up from p2 (orange) to p1 (red) before rescheduling it to another day. With this, I allow myself to rescope my work without hard feelings, knowing that the next time it shows up, it will have a higher priority tag. I will defer it for now, but knowing it will come back stronger.

Note that this hack only operates on the artifact you have mapped out into a list or app, but it works even if, in your mind, the priority remains the same. Because, after all, you can’t will yourself into caring more about something.

So far, so good. But what if you have already reached the highest priority level?

Well, you have never reached the highest priority level. You can always further escalate somehow. In Todoist, p1 (red) is the highest priority you can set. But once I reach that, I can further put emphasis on any given artifact by appending exclamation marks (!, !!, !!!) to the description or by adding other visual aids (hello emojis).

All priorities are essentially effort scopes. And there is no harm in creating new scopes ad hoc whenever needed. In fact, that is the whole idea of scoping. We just want to break out of our mental quicksand habits and routines, and we want the artifact to jump out at us the next time we see it.

NOTE: Of all the moves I presented in this series, this is the most low-level solution, meaning it can backfire or not work at all for you, even though it works perfectly for me. I included it to show that a scale system can accommodate hacks and quick-and-dirty tactics to some extent. Using hacks and tactics is not a failure. It’s just that these should make up only a tiny portion of the overall system.

Go Deeper

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

Over the last few decades, folders quietly lost their charm. First, file names stopped being constrained. Then search improved dramatically. Now AI is going commonplace. The promise — don’t organize, just search — grows stronger by the year. Heck—kids growing up on tablets often don’t learn folders at all. Nowadays, everything is swiped, scrolled, typed, and retrieved. The mental act of “putting something somewhere” dissolves into “I’ll find it later,” and slowly, but surely, the file system turns invisible.

Maybe that’s efficient. Maybe even rational in a world of infinite indexing. But something important gets lost when you never decide where something belongs.

Searching is a plain act of retrieval from the 1st age of digital archiving. It’s primarily about access. Organizing, in contrast, is an act of interpretation. It’s about meaning. When you place a file into a folder, you’re making a small claim about reality. You’re saying: this belongs with that. This is that kind of thing. This connects to that domain of my life. Search can find your past. But only organizing with folders shapes how you understand it. And perhaps that’s why they feel outdated. They require commitment. And that has lost its charm as well.

But when placement becomes optional, orientation goes with it. Stop placing things, and you stop building a mental model of where things belong. Your folder structure, taken as a whole, is a map of your intellectual life. It reflects how your mind works. What you value. How your life has unfolded. Placement is not a neutral decision. It’s autobiographical. And in outsourcing it, you don’t just outsource labor — you outsource the quiet skill of knowing where you are.

Folders show a type of hardness. They act like digital stigmergy, leaving traces of coordination among your different versions. Your past self leaves a structure; your future self follows it. No traces, no paths. Just a growing pile and a search box.

But folders are not just about placement. They also involve maintenance. And maintenance has a cost. Moving a file down a deep hierarchy can take a few seconds. Do that fifty times in a row on an overloaded inbox, and you’ll feel the resistance in your body. That friction is real.

What usually breaks the system isn’t a big idea against folders. It’s the small resistances that build up over time. Eventually, the structure quietly collapses, and search fills the gap.

I won’t solve your entire organizing problem in this article — that’s what ±PEAKER is for. But I can zoom in on one small move I use constantly, one that makes relocating files noticeably easier. No, I am not talking about AI. Nor about automatic file-mover plugins. Those have their place,1 but if you outsource the physical act of placement, you lose some of the mental value we just talked about. I’m actually talking about moving files manually — and making that just a little bit faster.

Let’s assume you already have a decent folder structure. Not perfect. But coherent. Few collisions in meaning. Most of the time, you can tell where something belongs. Now imagine yourself triaging an inbox on a busy day. Or walking through your root folder and spotting a stray file sitting there like a lost sock.

What do you do?

You just noticed a misplaced file. It would make sense to sort it, but it could take a few seconds — and you were on your way somewhere else. For cases like this, I use what I call waterfall organization. The idea is simple: if you don’t know the exact destination folder of a file or don’t want / can’t spend time on it right now, don’t force it. Do something smaller. Move the file one step closer. One drag-and-drop, one move command. That’s it. Think of it as the scouting rule of digital organization: leave every folder a little bit cleaner than you found it.

When I process an inbox and don’t immediately know the precise folder three layers down, I don’t stall. I don’t overthink. I move the file one step further into the correct org space (root-level folder). Later, when I’m already in that area, I move it one step further. Files trickle downward over time, like water flowing down a cascade. Each touch moves them closer to their natural resting place.

The key insight is this: organization doesn’t have to happen in one move. waterfall.org turns sorting into something incremental — a gradual process. No cleanup weekend. No grand restructuring. Just small corrections whenever you bump into something. Over weeks and months, entropy decreases. Not because you fought it once. But because you biased the flow.

Folders stop being a burden. They become channels. They stop feeling like a decision you have to get right. They become part of the flow of working. You adjust as you go.

If in 2026 you haven’t given up on folders, you can count yourself among the clergy of directories. That doesn’t mean doing grunt work for its own sake. Use AI where it makes sense. But when it comes to the main structure of your digital life, remember: where you put things is not a trivial decision. It carries weight. It carries value. It carries meaning.

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

Four million. That’s how many books are published every single year. A tiny number compared to the countless manuscripts that stall and starve along the way. When I first attempted to write a book, at twenty-one, I made it exactly to page three. That was 15 years ago, so I don’t recall why I gave up back then. But in writing my new book, I rediscovered one potential reason: writing a book can feel like carrying a heavy piece of furniture up a staircase that keeps adding floors as you go. That’s why many drafts fail — not for lack of talent, but because keeping a long project alive is a skill most people were never taught.

In traditional publishing, this challenge is somewhat mitigated by a contract between the publisher and the author. It includes a firm delivery date — a “deadline” — and authors are legally bound to meet it. And this works. External accountability under time pressure is a potent forcing function that gets many writers to finish on time.

And yet — nobody likes a deadline as it leads to anxiety. A deadline sits in the future and asks, again and again, like a child in the backseat of your car: Is it finished? Is it finished? It pulls your attention forward. It invites negotiation. It feeds the very same monsters it was supposed to defeat (e.g., procrastination). The word also carries historical baggage: in the American Civil War, a “dead line” was a literal boundary that prisoners could be shot for crossing. And a deadline does nothing to help you survive the long middle — the weeks between page one and the final manuscript, where most drafts actually starve.

That wasn’t how I wanted to write my book. But I’d failed at page three before. This time, I needed a forcing function — but not deadlines. So I resolved: every Monday, I’d move on and begin drafting the next chapter. No hard feelings. No looking back. No looking forward. Even if the previous chapter wasn’t done. Even if the next one felt seductive. Even if everything still felt rough. Monday simply meant: let go and move on. If something was missing by Sunday night, I let it rest — satisficing, not coming back.

I called those Mondays my dolines. Where a deadline would have asked »Did you finish?« my doline asked,»Did you move on?« With deadlines, anxiety is the mechanism — that’s how it gets its weight. A deadline always looms ahead of you. My dolines did the opposite. They anchored me in the present chapter. They moved my attention away from what’s finished, as well as what’s coming and towards what’s right in front of me. And that’s how they guaranteed my progress.

The rhythm of dolines carried me to a full draft in twelve weeks. Within one quarter, the book took shape with the majority of its content outlined. Some chapters moved forward roughly this way. Most had gaps I had to patch later. But that was the point. I wanted to get to the end of the first draft without getting lost in The Forest. After I had passed that first challenge of completing a whole draft, I could switch to a more quality-focused approach of refinement.

Dolines won’t work for all types of efforts. They only work for efforts where you can see at least a very rough high-level structure of the whole work; the whole staircase up front. My Mondays held because I could see all the other Mondays on the calendar. Twenty chapters, twenty weeks, one draft. That picture was visible before I declared the first doline. Each Monday drew its weight not from the individual chapter — which was always rough — but from the fact that all those Mondays together would get me somewhere worth going. Without that view, a doline collapses back into a date. Your brain won’t buy the closure if it can’t see what the closure is for.

That’s why you can’t just “set” dolines. You can set a deadline. You choose a fixed date by which you must be finished. Dolines, in contrast, must be “declared.” A deadline pulls you toward the future — is it finished yet? And sometimes into the past — peeking back, reminiscing. The doline does neither. There’s no cognitive drag forward into anxiety. And no cognitive drag backward into revision. The doors are shut — not because the other parts were perfectly done, but because you declared it as such. A doline is not a date on a calendar. It’s a commitment to the shape of the whole thing. Every doline is a point in time that restructures what’s possible. A threshold that, once crossed, changes what it means to go back. Chapter 1 is still there. You’re just no longer inside it.

So the sequence matters when declaring dolines: first zoom out until you can see the whole shape of the effort. Then declare the individual dolines that will get you there. This way, a doline completely alters the character of the respective calendar date. It’s no longer a threat — something bad happens if you miss it. It’s a fact in light of a bigger vision. Chapter 3 closes on Monday because that’s what the structure requires, and you trust the structure. That trust is the mechanism. Not willpower. Not urgency borrowed from consequences. Trust in the process you’ve already mapped. Trust is also why the end sprint doesn’t happen. There’s nothing to sprint towards. Monday isn’t a finish line — it’s a threshold. You cross it, and you’re in a different place. You’ve burned the bridge behind you, at least for this iteration, at least for this draft. You can return to chapter 3 in a later pass. But only from higher ground.

A deadline asks: Did you finish?
A doline asks: Did you move on?

One pulls you forward into anxiety. The other holds you in the present chapter — fully, without negotiation — until it’s time to close that door as well. The gaps you may leave behind in older chapters are honest. And these are the only kinds you can fix.

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

Two years ago, in a piece called Free To Collect + Allowed To Keep It, I argued that, while hoarding atoms can have dire consequences, the same idea does not apply to the world of bits. Digital gluttony, just-in-case-storage, or the collector’s fallacy are straw men pushed hardest by the minimalist productivity crowd. These ideas are utterly silly.

In digital space, there’s no hoarding. There’s only bad organization.

Yes, people can suffer from too much consumption and too little production. Yes, they certainly can suffer from too much imitation and too little critical thinking. But telling someone to save fewer links is like telling an insomniac to buy a better pillow. It sounds good in theory, but it won’t help much in practice. It certainly won’t change what actually matters.

People who feel overwhelmed by their digital possessions don’t have a capture problem. They lack basic digital literacy. They’re trying to run before they’ve learned to walk.

At a bare minimum, before you can start collecting to your heart’s desire, you should master two core skills:

1. Separating stuff by action potential — task artifacts, for instance, can go in a dedicated task manager, while all other, less timely notes, reside in a notes app.1

2. Pushing low-priority material to the periphery of the system, where it costs the least.2

Once that foundation is in place, “death by a thousand captures” stops being a problem. That’s why, two years ago, I proclaimed: Go ahead. Feed your SME (pronounced “smeh” — short for Someday/Maybe Empire).

Today, I’m going one step further. Not only are you free to collect, you should collect.

There are four reasons for this.

1️⃣ A SME saves energy.

In digital space, where things weigh nothing, the willpower math is simple: you can either capture now and sort later (energy cost: close to zero) or resist and lose forever (energy cost: low but perceptible and accumulating quickly). If I encounter an interesting quote, an intriguing reference, a link, or an enticing post, I simply keep it. I have capture mechanics in place to do so within 2 seconds. Then I’m ready to move on. If, instead, I were to stop to consider whether I really should keep something, that would take some resistance. I could also easily go off into the weeds, because to properly answer whether something is worth keeping, I would need more context; so I’d peek inside and then— maybe—I’d skim the whole thing. And so, either I lose 10+ minutes, or I end up capturing it anyway. Defaulting to always capture wins on both ends.3

2️⃣ Some parts of your SME will be useful.

The Japanese have a word for the habit of accumulating unread books: tsundoku. Umberto Eco called his vast personal library of unread books his antilibrary. With a SME, you apply the same logic to many other places. For instance, I keep Goodreads lists, IMDB watchlists, YouTube queues, and—for over a decade now—articles saved to Readwise Reader. My read-later list currently sits at 3,568 items. Many people see that as failure and want to "clean up" or start over. But why? As long as it sits at the periphery of your system and doesn't drown out things with higher action potential, it costs you nothing. Quite the contrary. When I recently decided to read more articles, I had a perfect place to start—especially now that my feeds are hijacked by AI discourse and I simply don’t want to read about AI all the time. My SME saved the day.

3️⃣ Your saves are votes.

Every time you save something, you’re casting a vote about what matters to you — often before you know why. Over time, those votes stack up into patterns you never planned for. My iPhone photo library is a good example: I’ve been photographing my life for over a decade, and the daily flashbacks Apple surfaces are pure resonance — a signal from your past self about what was worth keeping. Apple’s resurfaced photos sparked the title images for this very series. The SME returns things on its own schedule, not mine — and that schedule is often better.

4️⃣ Never start from zero.

A SME is a long-term memory prosthetic that lets different versions of you collaborate across time. Without a SME, every effort begins with partial amnesia. With one, curiosity compounds across decades — what once seemed like a dead end reveals itself as a foundation. With a SME, you rarely start from scratch; you have sediment to draw from. For example, I recently rediscovered the first draft of a science fiction novel called Savant, which I wrote at 21 and abandoned at exactly page three. Back then, the idea outpaced the skill. Reading it now, I can see the potential I couldn’t see then — as though past-me had left something on the doorstep for present-me to find.

You are already feeding a SME, at least in some ways. You just tend to forget what you already have. And that means you are not using it to its full potential.

Here are a few practices to tap into it more often:

1. Before starting any new effort, search your SME for relevant keywords. Maybe you kept something in the past, that is helpful.

2. Open one random item from your SME every day and see what it sparks. Treat it like a conversation with a previous version of yourself.

3. Think of your SME as a cross-cutting tool. It includes your read-later app, your Goodreads list, your YouTube queue. The empire is bigger than any single app.

4. When you’re stuck or blocked, open your SME instead of opening social media. One is a feed designed to distract; the other is a feed you designed yourself.

5. When something resurfaces unexpectedly — a flashback, a search result, an old note — don't just consume it. Ask: why did past-me keep this? That question is often more useful than the item itself.

6. If you have five minutes, go spelunking.

When we tell the story of our lives, we draw a straight line. School. Job. Move to another city. Marriage. First child. We prune the detours and keep only the “important” milestones. But lived life doesn’t feel linear. It feels like a tree. There’s a trunk, yes — but also branches in every direction. Detours. Obsessions. Almost-careers. Experiments that never matured. A SME honors that true shape. It’s where the branches can rest until they’re ready to matter.

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

If there is one thing I got right early in life, it’s deep work.

Almost everyone around me struggles with focus. I don’t. Never have. But I only recently understood why. It’s not discipline. Not willpower. Not even “good habits,” at least not in the usual sense.

It’s simpler: I almost never start a work session without a fixture.

In programming, a test fixture describes the setup that must exist before an automated test can run. A work fixture is the same idea applied to focus. It’s your ready state.

Deep work rarely fails because of weak character. It fails because of small misalignments: slight discomfort, vague scope, background noise, unfinished loose ends, and digital residue. A work fixture reduces friction and prunes zeigarniks before they start pulling on your attention. It helps you set up an environment that is favorable to “running” deep work.

Most people try to achieve that with a pre-session ritual. Fetch coffee, put on headphones, block the internet, close the door, then finally begin. That’s a good start. But here’s the twist that turns such a ritual into an actual fixture: Stop describing steps. Start describing the state. A ritual is choreography—always the exact same sequence of actions. A fixture is a more flexible checklist of conditions that lead to the overall optimal state.

So instead of:

1. Make coffee

2. Go to the bathroom

3. Close the door

You write down something like:

• Bladder empty

• Water nearby (200ml+)

• Coffee ready

• Door closed

The difference between a ritual and a work fixture lies not just in the wording. With a work fixture, you may meet the conditions in any order. Sometimes you will fetch coffee before hitting the restroom, sometimes the other way around. If you have a toddler, meetings, a weird day, whatever, a rigid sequence breaks easily. A state checklist is order-independent, so you can still “arrive” even if the path changes.

Now, what are some good conditions to include in a work fixture?

The most obvious condition is the scope of the work you are going to do:
What exactly will this session be about? What task are you going to tackle?

In my book, I call answering these questions assembling the Focus Scope (FOS). Setting one clear intention of what this work session will produce or progress. This doesn’t always involve writing something down — sometimes it’s a quiet resolution, sometimes it’s selecting the right artifact in your TAM, or writing a crisp line in your macOS menu bar. What matters is that you’ve decided on the intention before you enter The Forest.

Beyond scope, here’s what else to consider:

• Bladder empty

• Water nearby

• Coffee or tea ready

• Noise-canceling headphones on

• Focus music playing (e.g., Brain.fm).

• Calendar checked & clear for session duration

• Doors & Windows closed

• Lighting adjusted

• Desk tidy

• Body activated (e.g. few jumping jacks before sitting down)

• Breathing settled (A few slow breaths taken)

• Phone out of the room

• Notifications off / Do Not Disturb on

• Messaging apps muted

• Internet blocked

• Time tracker started

• Pomodoro session started

• Standing desk adjusted

• Walking pad ready

No individual condition can guarantee deep work on its own. But stacked together, they create something close: a reliable, ready state. The environment your best work runs on. A signal to your mind and body that this matters. That you’re entering focus now.

This is what makes work fixtures a scale-smart move.

1. A fixture is a smart default for your pre-session state — designed once, run implicitly every time. You don’t decide what conditions to meet before each session. The fixture already decided. You just show up and check the boxes.

2. A fixture contains fractalling cues: it makes you zoom out before the session — check the day, reduce surprise collisions — so you don’t keep negotiating with reality while you work. It makes you zoom in at the start — pin down the exact task — so the session has a spine. And it cocoons you from external noise during the session, so you stay locked at the right scale once you’re in.

3. A fixture scales across session types. Not every session needs the full fixture. Some days you don’t have the energy to go deep. Other days, the work doesn’t call for it. Apply a smaller fixture — same note, fewer conditions. Mark your non-negotiables: bold them, flag them with an emoji, whatever makes them visually distinct.

One setup. Multiple scales. That's the compounding advantage.

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Here’s a challenge: write down your current work fixture (whether you chose it consciously or settled into it over time). Not as a ritual. As a checklist of conditions. Start with five. Ask: What must be true for your best sessions to happen?

I’m curious what you come up with. Drop it in the comments. 👇

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This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

We all chase rabbits sometimes. The sirens await at every turn these days, and we can’t always keep ourselves tied to the mast. But if the Attentional Vortex wins often enough, you don’t lose a morning. You lose the day, the week, the year. That’s regret territory.

To resist the Vortex, writing out a plan is not enough. Sirens don’t care about your intentions. Turning off distractions isn’t enough either, because the nastiest ones live in your head. And frantically timeboxing every hour of your day just puts you in a straitjacket. Because we all know that by 9:02, when your toddler throws yogurt at the wall, what started as a promising day quickly dissolves into spaghetti.

As I’ve said elsewhere, daily notes can stabilize your focus. They afford you exactly what you need: a central place to return to throughout the day. A beacon you can swim back to when the Vortex pulls you under.

Yet most people never unlock what daily notes can do.

My guess is that most fail for a simple reason: they can’t make the daily note a habit. It’s hard to build places that you can always return to. Most people have one: their calendar. But if that’s all you have, you might turn into a Newport-style timeboxing fanatic. Some people have two—if they’ve adopted a dedicated task artifact manager. But even that isn’t enough.

To protect yourself from The Vortex, you need at least a third space. This should be a general-purpose anchor for the dynamics of your day. A daily note naturally fits this role. It starts fresh each morning and can be auto-generated. And if your tool of choice supports it, it’s easier to adopt than “yet another tool.” Adopting daily notes takes time, but if you start small, it will stick.1

However, next to behavioural difficulties, there’s a second failure mode. That’s when you do use daily notes, but not to silence the sirens. Because a daily note by itself can’t do that. It’s just an empty canvas. YAPTO—yet another place to organize. So, to fight The Vortex, the question isn’t whether you use a daily note or how much you plan. It’s whether you’ve designed a humane structure for your day that can survive contact with reality.

That’s what Structure Setting is about.

It’s the middle ground between building a color-coded productivity cathedral and wandering naked through the day—all vibes and good intentions, but no stability to counter the suck. Structure Setting is not about listing obligations or building schedules. It’s about creating your day through rites.

A rite is a simple practice focused on a repeatable activity. Meditation could be a rite. Journaling is a rite. A progressive effort can be a rite. So can listing your to-dos, or timeboxing a block. Many practices that fail in isolation work fine inside a structured setting.

In practice, Structure Setting lives within a daily note template. The template “freezes” your ideal day. Not the day you must execute, but the day you’d want to flow through if things went well. Every morning, your daily note is generated from that ideal world. But during the day, you follow the rites you actually need.

Here’s the twist: you will almost never do all of them. That’s the point, and it’s why I use “rites” instead of “rituals.” No rite is mandatory. Mandatory structure breeds stress the moment you miss a day. A gentle structure, one that forgives you when you skip it, still gets things done.

At the end of the day, you delete every rite you didn’t perform. This matters. You don’t want unfollowed rites cluttering up your past. What’s left is the path you actually took: a true record of your day.

As with any behavior change: start with only a few rites, then slowly add more. Once you reach a critical number, say seven or eight, you can group them into clusters.

Personally, I use over a dozen rites grouped into four sections. In Obsidian, I use headings for sections and callouts for each rite, so I can collapse both.

My clusters follow the acronym MEME:

Miracle Morning Rites

• Morning Greeting — a bootstrap rite: greeting + quick context on the day (calendar + weather).

• Journal du Jour — a short prompt to prime my thinking.

• Free Flow Journal — Three questions:
  What’s on your mind? What’s your focus today? What would make today a win?

• Engagement Flow — a short “start here” checklist: check calendar, prune inboxes, re-scope the day.

Effort Rites

• Progressive Effort — an anchor for the first hour. It pushes needle-moving work that doesn’t scream. (More on this in this entry).

• NOW ◉ — a section that pulls in top tasks for the day (synced from Todoist: due today, high priority, no routines).

• Efforts — a log of sessions completed (deep work, pairing, etc.) plus tasks completed (via sync).

Minute Map Rites

• This cluster contains one rite that occurs several times a day. It’s an in-situ, timestamped bullet journal. This journal captures thoughts, links, and ideas as they come up.

Emerald Night Rites

• Altered Notes — an automatic vault query: a glanceable summary of what I worked on, read, and changed.

• Time Tracking Entries — semi-automatic: I pull in data from my time-tracking tool to support the reflection rites.

• Lessons Learned — I scan the minute map and what I read, and extract lessons (TILs, new quotes, thoughts and ideas I had, new questions to ponder, …).

• Nightfall Reflections — a gratitude-style recap: achievements across my seven “life areas”.

• Outro — a final checklist for anything else (e.g. new events for my Personal Change Log).

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Your rites will look different from mine. They should. The point isn’t to copy MEME. It’s about discovering your rhythm and making it explicit in your daily note template.

Why can Structure Setting work for you when other things don’t?

Because rites, as defined here, are forgiving. A skipped rite isn’t a failure. It’s a rite that wasn’t needed today. Tomorrow, the structure resets. Most systems punish inconsistency, but Structure Setting tries to own it. That’s what allows it to scale across time.

Rites are also composable. You can add, remove, or rearrange them without breaking anything. Rough week? Strip down to Morning Greeting and Free Flow Journal. Feeling ambitious? Expand into the full MEME (or whatever you build). The structure flexes with your energy, not against it. That’s how it allows you to scale up and down.

And, as stated before, rites leave a digital pheromone trail: a record of where you actually went. When you delete unperformed rites at day’s end, what remains isn’t just a cleaned-up note. It’s an effortless log of how you spent your days. No extra habit tracker. No separate system. Just the truth, one day at a time.

Structure Setting won’t save every day. The Vortex will still get you sometimes. That’s expected. But with rites instead of obligations, you gain what most systems don’t: a visible structure that helps you find your way back whenever you notice you’re lost.

What does the backbone of your ideal day look like? Let me know in the comments.
And if you want more detail on any of the rites above, ask.

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

About a decade ago, a friend lent me a self-help book titled The Miracle Morning. The main premise: get up earlier, and take charge of your day before it takes charge of you. The author, Hal Elrod, knows a thing or two about rebuilding. In December 1999, at 20 years old, he had a near-fatal car accident that left him in a coma with permanent brain damage predicted. A morning routine, he argues, put his life back together.

The general idea of early rising is sound — “early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” as Franklin supposedly said. That’s why I’ve had some version of a morning routine ever since I read the book at 24. But Elrod’s specific approach is too ambitious for most. He wants you to meditate, affirm, visualize, exercise, read, journal, and somehow become a new person — all before breakfast. My own routine has included all of these at various points, but rarely all at once. And I don’t think you should even try.

In this post, I want to suggest almost the opposite: use that morning window for one thing and one thing only.

Discretionary time is becoming ever rarer. An uninterrupted morning window is ideal for reclaiming the little time we have. It fosters all the necessary conditions to progress on something that matters, but doesn’t scream.™️ If you chip away at the same thing every morning, uninterrupted, progress becomes boringly reliable. Almost inevitable.

I call this a progressive effort: a personal project (or program) you touch every morning for 60 minutes, no matter how full your life is. During that hour, you exile news, inboxes, and all other interruptions and practice direct contact with the thing you say you care about.

The best part of this is how non-invasive it is. Progressive efforts fit alongside your work week, family, exercise, and social life. You can even practice on days with all-day commitments—the morning window exists before those begin.

One hour of focused work right in the morning doesn’t steal your day. You fire and forget: do the session, close the loop, then start your day as if nothing happened. Except it did. Progress happened. And it will keep happening, day after day.

While your exact mileage may differ, here are the exact constraints that make it work for me:

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The Format:

• Reserve the first 60 minutes of your day. Mark it in your calendar.1

• Practice this 5 to 6 days per week. Give yourself at least one day off.

• During that hour, focus only on your effort—no news, no inbox, no interruptions.

• Keep it to one progressive effort at a time. Do not splinter yourself.

What to Work On:

• Choose Quadrant 2 work: important but not urgent. Something that will still matter in 5 years, even when everything else is chaos.

• Choose something deep: writing, reading, coding—anything that rewards repeated contact and has low ramp-up once it becomes habit.

• Pick something substantial that will take months, not weeksyou’ll want time for the slow-burn creativity boosts that follow (more on that below).

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Progressive efforts are behind most of what I've built. During university, I used them to study the hardest material right after waking up — often working through demanding online courses for an hour at a time. I graduated at the top of my class. Later, as a software engineer, I used the same window to dig deeper into code than others did and to read essential books in my field. Stay consistent, and you can finish long, demanding books within a month or two. Within a few years, I became a well-rounded senior engineer.

My book Scale-Smart — a 1,000-page compendium on productivity and life design — happened the same way. It took well over a year, but what could have been a scheduling nightmare turned into a simple game of patience. I showed up, wrote a little, and left. Most of what you read on this Substack was composed the same way.

Progressive efforts are the only operation I’ve found that reliably produces serious results over time without requiring heroic motivation. Beyond the practical benefits, there’s something deeper happening when you work on the same thing for one hour every morning: the slow burn. Over time, your brain starts to process your effort between sessions. Ideas keep simmering in the background. Creative problems begin to solve themselves as your subconscious works through them, all because you kept the relationship with the effort alive.

Many people try a Miracle Morning, but without a single progressive effort to anchor it, it’s easy to scatter—reacting, optimizing, reorganizing—but never actually advancing anything that matters. And after months of early rising with nothing to show for it, no wonder they drift back to their old ways. With a progressive effort, things can be different. Try it for a few months. Once you feel that steady, inevitable momentum, you won’t want to stop.

So, right now, pick one thing. Not five. Not three. Just one project that matters to you and will pay long-term dividends. Then, tomorrow morning, claim the day before the day claims you. Give it an hour. Not more. Not less. The day after tomorrow: repeat.

Progressive efforts are simple, non-invasive, inevitable.

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

Modern life is full of text. And text has two major problems: it’s slow, and it’s flat.

It’s slow because before you can use written information, you must decode it sequentially—word by word, sentence by sentence—so that you can reconstruct meaning as you go. And it’s flat because we’re fundamentally built to navigate 3D space, but 2D text lacks helpful spatial cues, making it harder to orient yourself or remember where things are.

Text on screens is even worse. When I picked up Harry Potter as a kid, I at least got tangible pages. The heft told me how many pages remained, and the texture gave me tactile feedback. But nowadays on my eReader? I can't riffle through pages, can't feel how much remains, can't thumb-mark important spots. What little spatial context the analog text provided vanished entirely.

We have definitely been trying to escape textual flatland. We structure written information with headings, paragraphs, bullets, and nested lists. We create indices, summarize key points, highlight them in color, and format important points in bold and italics. We even started building wikis—whole “networks” of text with bidirectional links.1

But how much have we really gained? In all of these annotations, we're essentially marking up text with more text. And while they are helpful when applied carefully, all of them are hard to search for, impossible to reuse across tools, and destined to become clutter. They are imperfect patches for the navigational traces we actually need.

Enter the emoji.

Unlike letters, which only represent sounds, emojis are more like logograms. Logograms are compact visual symbols that carry meaning independent of language. The emoji 🔥 means “fire” whether you read English, Mandarin, or Arabic. But what’s more, emojis can enrich text with emotions. Wikipedia writes:

The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation.

An emoji not only gives you more meaning per pixel, but it also adds emotional context that you can leverage. And not only that. Logograms also operate at a different perceptual level than text. Your visual system processes them quasi-instantly, without the need for sequential (word-by-word) decoding like text.2 You surely spotted the fire emoji above long before reading a single word surrounding it. And your eye may keep returning to it even now, that you have long passed it. This pre-attentive recognition of emoji becomes increasingly powerful as the text you’re navigating grows longer or denser—exactly when you need visual navigation most.

The most important advantage of logograms over traditional structuring, such as bold or highlights, is that emojis are universally available, searchable, and portable. Nowadays, emojis work identically across platforms and digital tools;3 they are increasingly becoming a universal abstraction, something we can use everywhere and anywhere in cyberspace.

Put another way, emojis survive digital context switches across your entire digital life. You can use the same emoji in a text message, a calendar entry, a file name, an entry in your mobile task manager, or a bullet point in your notes—and it works the same way everywhere. This is powerful because it enables conceptual integration across tools.

Many people, in an attempt to bridge multiple digital tools, use all kinds of technical or manual approaches to deal with fragmented information. This often involves API keys, finicky workflows, manual copy & paste, and lots of cross-app links that are begging to break. With the emoji, you can, in certain cases, skip all of this and instead rely on protocols to conceptually (mentally) integrate tools. When the visual marker 🔥 in your calendar means the same thing as a 🔥 in your task list, you can create a connection between the two across tools and platforms without any technical overhead. This is useful in both accidentally fragmented and deliberately modular productivity systems, as it simplifies and speeds up text-heavy workflows.

Hashtags, you might argue, were designed to do something similar. You can standardize them and— theoretically—use them everywhere, since they are just text. But that’s exactly their problem: they are just text—they require the same sequential decoding that slows everything down. More importantly, tag support varies wildly across platforms. Try using #tags in file names, calendar entries, or most note-taking apps. What’s more, many tagging approaches suffer from the death of inflation as they are too versatile.4

Unlike hashtags, emojis just work everywhere and don’t suffer from inflation because they are limited to a fixed set. Currently, there are roughly 1,400 base emojis available (4,000 with variants like skin tones). And there is no way for you to add new emojis to the mix. As standardized logograms, emojis aren’t as versatile as letters—you can’t write whole passages with them. And what if the concept you want to express doesn’t have an emoji?5

The point here isn't to replace text with emojis. Text is here to stay (for a very, very long time). The point is to sometimes augment text with visual markers that your eye instantly catches, rather than relying on traditional synthesis, structuring, and markup. And emojis let you do that. They let you add highly personal navigational signals to text. In my system, for instance, the fire emoji maps to “Work in Progress.” Wherever I want to explicitly contrast something as WIP from the surrounding context, I add 🔥 to it. This gives me instant visual filtering—I can spot active work at a glance, and it works across every tool I use.

The key leap here is that in your personal system, emoji meanings aren’t fixed. The popular meaning6 of an emoji—as it appears in the wild—doesn’t constrain you in your personal setup. You can domesticate emoji and interpret them however you want. For you, 🔥 can mean heat, urgency, passion, or something completely personal like chimney at my holiday home. And that’s exactly where the scale-smart power lies…

Once you explicitly define what an emoji means to you, it stops being decoration and becomes a reusable unit of meaning—a visual anchor with consistent navigational power. Define enough of these, and you've built yourself an emoji legend.

I deal with an awful lot of text every day, and I’ve been using my emoji legend for several years now to speed up navigation and reduce the need for technical integration. If I’m tracking a personal program or a long-running project across multiple tools—notes in Obsidian, task artifacts in Todoist, files on my desktop—I often pick an emoji that represents that effort and use it everywhere I need a visual anchor. In my core house renovation program, for instance, I used 🏡. When exploring a new topic, I choose an emoji to connect all related work. I mark all LLM-generated output with a 🤖, and all things I wrote in my own words are marked with 💬 to distinguish certain parts in larger texts. Progress indicators are another big use case for me. I already mentioned 🔥, but I also use 💤 for pending items and ✅ for done. I’m sure you can find many more use cases.

Here are some tips to get started on your own legend:

1. Start minimal. You’ll be tempted to use emojis everywhere at first—it’ll get noisy. That’s normal. Gradually, you’ll find the right density. Err on the side of fewer symbols with clearer meanings.

2. Keep your legend accessible. Store it somewhere you can quickly reference, especially early on. In my ±PEAKER org method, it belongs to Protocols.

3. Map what already exists in your head. If 🐱 already means “work in progress” to you intuitively, start there. Don’t impose arbitrary meanings—document the associations that already feel natural.

4. Avoid ambiguity. If you keep confusing two emojis, find better ones. A symbol that needs constant explanation isn’t working.

5. Speed up insertion. Learn your OS emoji picker (⌃⌘␠ on macOS). Create text expansion snippets for frequent ones (I type !wip → 🔥). Consider tools like Rocket or Raycast for faster access.

Emojis are one of the few truly universal elements in digital systems—they work identically everywhere without any setup. Creating an emoji legend helps you build a personal vocabulary that serves as a lightweight visual anchor map, traveling with you across every tool you use. It's a small intervention, a simple scale-smart move, with outsized navigational returns if used consistently and long-term.7

So go. Build your legend. And see those navigational gains compound over time.

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If you enjoyed this essay, be sure to feed that info back to me by hitting the like button!

Also, if you want to dive into a whole catalogue of scale-smart tactics, operations, and strategies, check out my book Scale-Smart.

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This is the index post of my series on scale-smart tactics & operations. Here’s what’s inside:

1. Build Your Legend 🦸‍♂️
   Turning The Emoji Into A Visual Anchor for Your Digital Life

2. Progressive Efforts
   One Hour, One Project, Every Morning

3. Your Daily Note isn’t Working. Here’s Why.
   A Rite-Based System for Beating the Attentional Vortex

4. Work Fixtures
   Engineering Your Way Into Deep Work

5. Stop Cleaning Up Your Read-Later List
   In Defense of “Digital Hoarding”

6. Dolines Instead of Deadlines
   How I drafted a book in twelve weeks without any pressure whatsoever

7. waterfall.org
   A Small Trick for Staying Organized With Folders

8. Deliberate Priority Inflation
   A Quick&Dirty Hack To Get Out of Mental Quicksand

9. A Good Goal Isn’t Born. It’s Carried.
   Why goal-setting is slow work, and real goals take time to form, test, and settle

10. Engagement Cutoffs
    A Simple Way to Decide What Gets Your Energy

Intro to the Series

I did it! I’ve just released Part 7 of 7 of my book Scale-Smart. At roughly 950 pages, it’s truly become a compendium of Productiveness. If you’ve been following me for a while, this is the “whole package”: it contains the nuggets from 100+ essays, stitched into one practical philosophy, with the missing connective tissue added, and then expanded into an overall praxeology for accomplishment.

Writing Scale-Smart really lived up to my definition of a personal program: it was a grand personal campaign with a central transformative outcome. I started in early 2024, and according to my time-tracking tool, I spent nearly 700 hours on it, most of it in deep writing mode. So I really like to believe I’ve leveled up as an author, a thinker, and someone who sees big, long, and hairy efforts through.

This is especially so, since it wasn’t a classic book project where one mostly does research and then repackages existing ideas into a new form. It was quite the opposite: a knowledge-building effort. Now, on the one hand, that is very bad for marketing (so far, I’ve sold fewer than 50 copies). Few people will ever dare to start reading something substantial like Scale-Smart, and even fewer will finish. However, I believe there’s no more comprehensive, end-to-end view of accomplishments available anywhere online. I don’t want to claim it is “the best” in any area or in any absolute sense. But if you want the full picture of how someone like me actually manages life, from philosophies and principles all the way down to the nitty-gritty everyday moves, I don’t think you’ll find a more complete version anywhere else.

Writing my book shaped me so much that I am rebranding this Substack from Fractal Productivity to Scale-Smart. This has prompted me to release a new series on scale-smart tactics & operations.

“Scale-smart tactics & operations” — that’s a mouthful, so let’s unpack that.

Under my Iceberg Protocol, I define tactics as the small, repetitive productivity moves we use tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times a day. For example, a simple tactic is to set up hotkeys to quickly delete, duplicate, or move lines of text up or down in a tool like Obsidian. In contrast, I define operations as small to medium-sized, cohesive bundles of tactics. Think Pomodoro Technique, PARA Method, and the use of checklists. These are somewhat larger “moves” that shape the level of engagement with a personal accomplishment.

As I write in my Iceberg Protocol, standalone tactics & operations aim at efficiency and don’t guarantee effective action toward one’s goals. That’s why copying them from others often fails. It is only when you integrate them into an overall strategy that you unlock their full potential.

So, what makes tactics & operations “scale-smart”?

In my book, I coined new terminology, developed new concepts, and integrated them into a single, coherent whole philosophy I call scale-smartness.

A scale-smart person is someone who builds scale-smart setups & systems to accomplish their aspirations.

In building scale-smart setups, a scale-smart person neither misses the forest nor the trees. She unites the grand with the granular, the big aspiration with the tiny, messy actions of the day.

In building scale-smart systems, a scale-smart person can scale up or down on demand without breaking. His system works equally well whether he completes one task per day or one hundred; whether he has one meeting per month or every two hours.

A scale-smart system is built to last, not just for today or this year or the current job, but for one’s entire life.

My book teaches you how to build scale-smart setups & systems and how to reach a higher level of scale-smartness. And that is, I tell you, not a trivial endeavour. It’s taken me over a decade to get here, and even I am far from done. That’s why the book had to be so long.

What makes tactics & operations “scale-smart” is uniting them under a scale-smart strategy that consistently acknowledges your full context. This strategy must be embedded in a scale-smart setup and implemented within a scalable system that is scalable across life. That way, they become scalable themselves, support your Productiveness, and do so at the convenient micro level of everyday action. They become, in other words, concrete bottom-up moves of success.

Unfortunately, this means the content of this series may be of limited value to you if you can’t integrate the tactics & operations into a cohesive, scalable system. Each of the presented moves can help you get a bit faster/clearer/better in a certain area of your life. But if you want to truly unlock their power, you’ll need to go further. I leave it up to you if you dare to do that.

Changes To The Substack in 2026

As I’m rebranding this site to Scale-Smart, I’m also making a few other changes:

1. Going forward, all new articles I publish will be free (no premium-only posts), but they will now move behind the paywall faster, after 1 month rather than 3 (as it was before).

2. I raised the monthly subscription price but lowered the annual subscription price to the minimum allowed on Substack.

3. Lastly, I won’t follow a fixed release cadence anymore. For instance, I plan to publish one or two posts per week on random days, rather than posting one post every Tuesday, as I did in the past. Some weeks you get more than one; some weeks, no post at all.

I do all of this for two readers: first, to incentivize more committed readers, either those who read for free as soon as new posts appear or those who opt for an annual subscription. Second, to make this Substack more scale-smart itself. These changes will help me scale up or down more effectively based on my current life situation.

Thanks for reading!
Dennis

This is just a quick note about a change I’ve been thinking about for a while. Over the last 1,5 years, in writing my book, I’ve come to realize that I no longer want to use the term “productivity” to describe my work. In the past, I’ve defended the term here and proposed an alternative—Productiveness—and I will, of course, keep writing…

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This morning, as I was wrapping up my monthly review, I looked over my weight chart and noticed something odd: I had gained weight in January. That’s nothing out of the ordinary, unfortuna…

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That left little room for writing. I didn’t publish on FP this month, and I also missed pausing paid memberships. I’m sorry. To make it right: anyone…

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It’s impossible to say when it started, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve been a collector. As a kid, I kept coins, and stamps, and Pokémon cards, and rusty nails I found on construction sites.1 Anything rare or unusual, I wanted to pocket it, to keep it. I learned rather quickly, however, that collecting only works for things you can hold in your hands. Extraordinary experiences — trips, conversation, afternoons of play — resisted being bottled up. To keep those kinds of things, one first has to make them keepable. One has to make something from nothing. And that’s how I became a builder.

Whenever I’d gone deep enough into something, before moving on to the next thing, I felt compelled to make something from it — a keepsake, a small artifact to mark where I’d been and to bring with me. I loved music, so I learned to play the guitar and write my own songs. I loved movies, so I made amateur films; one trilogy we created was titled Cuddly Toys and had a total playtime of 2.5 hours. As a boy of the ‘90s, I also spent countless hours on my Game Boy. Unlike most ‘90s boys, however, I complemented that by designing my own paper RPGs for my cousins and brother.2

But—not everything went as planned. I loved reading, but all my attempts at writing a book were a disaster. I tried judo for a season, but found it just wasn’t for me right after my mom had paid a ton of money for a judo suit. I tried parkour for a while (no comments on this), and I played tennis for a couple of years, neither of which got me anywhere.3 However, I did not let these failings discourage me. After all, I wasn’t looking for permanent experience. I was following whatever spark felt alive and building artifacts to have something to show for it.4 And so my drive to experiment carried well into my twenties.

When I was around twenty-five years old, I became more elaborate in my ways. I went through a phase that felt like one long laboratory experiment: ninety days of cold showers, a pull-up challenge, running a marathon for fun, biohacking my energy, improving my sleep, and testing how many Pomodoros I could survive in a day (my record was 17). At the same time, I tried every learning method I could find to get through university — spaced repetition, speed reading, memory palaces. All of this blurred into a quantified‑self phase that awakened something more profound: a hunger to grow. I got the fittest I’ve ever been. I raised my self‑esteem in every measurable way. I meditated like a Tibetan monk. I traveled (or rather “vagabonded”) the shit out of the world.

And somewhere along the way—it’s hard to tell where exactly—I fell hard for the idea of “productivity”. Mostly, because it transformed my time at university from unmanageable stress into controlled calm. Getting Things Done (rest in peace!) rewired how I organized my work. Once I had mastered it, I sliced through tasks like a hot power saw through melted butter. And it led me into a never-ending rabbit hole of other self-help ideas. One of them was second-braining and treating everything I do as a “project”. Projects felt bigger, more meaningful than tasks and all the pseudo-scientific experiments I had done up to that point — and so quite soon I was obsessed with project-based work. After all, each project allows you to explore something new and concludes with a clear deliverable, an artifact, that proves your success; or so I thought. 5

Now, as life got more serious — a.k.a., I got older and started working — I found a new outlet for my drive. I’d become an Apple enthusiast when I got my first iPad in 2011, and over time, I had collected an iPhone, a MacBook, an iMac, and an Apple Watch. And when Apple brought out their new programming language (Swift) during my time at university, I thought Why not collect that as well? So I decided then and there to become an iOS developer. This wasn’t a light decision. Because, for the first time, I had to harness my builder energy and focus it on a single craft for years on end. That meant my life became, for a while, less about experiments and more about mastery. During that phase, I delved more deeply into goal-setting. Goals were challenging to get right, but once I understood them, they became a catalyst — a way to author my life with intention. I can hardly imagine living without them now.

Okay? Wait a second! Why am I telling you all this!?

Well… throughout all these phases, I—unknowingly—always carried a single, dominant model in my head for how work — or “effort” — should be structured and thought about. At different phases of my life, the main driver for all I was doing was either curiosity, or tasks, or projects, or experiments, or goals. And each frame worked for some of what I took on. Each gave me clarity, even breakthroughs. However, as illustrated, none of them worked for everything I did during that particular phase.

When I was deeply immersed in GTD, I would crush through tasks, but treating everything like a checklist made me lose sight of bigger arcs (GTD tends making you miss the forest for the trees). When I obsessed over projects and formal experiments, I often ended up over-engineering everything, building complex systems for things that didn’t need them. And when I followed raw curiosity, I was in a jack-of-all-trades kind of situation: I did a lot, but I drifted around a lotter, and, essentially, got nothing substantial done. Trust me, I’ve got many failed games, apps, and half-written novels to show for it. Even my goal-setting phase had a tough beginning and rough edges: sometimes I got stuck in tunnel vision and fixated on metrics, and at other times I ended up betraying myself and quietly massaging numbers to hide any failures. Read my series on magnitude tuning for a complete history of this.

It took me years to realize all this. To understand that there would likely never be a single effort model to rule them all. Projects are not the holy grail of getting stuff done. Experiments are no silver bullet either because they are exhausting. Goals can easily backfire. And no, habits and systems also have their weak points. All of these approaches and mental latticeworks that they bring with them have their place. But life is versatile, and the most successful approach is the one that integrates ALL of them. We need the whole bloody portfolio if we are to succeed at whatever we set our mind to. We need a way of seeing effort not as a single, all-encompassing approach, but as many different things that all require different approaches.

The alternative is to ignore all that and live a dull and utterly bland life, always doing things the same way, because we have always done them this way and because others do them the same way, and then be surprised, over and over again, why some efforts don’t seem to work out (wasn’t that, after all, the definition of insanity?).

So, how do we do this, I hear you say. How do we know what approach to take? Glad you asked! A first step is maybe to break free from the currently dominating model in your life by designing a scale and type-free map of efforts, a practical way to get a complete overview of your responsibilities and work by using effort notes. Realizing that neither tiny experiments nor GTD projects nor goals will save you. Because that jailbreak by itself is a pretty helpful way to avoid getting stuck in the wrong frame of mind. However, to get into the right frame of mind for what we are trying to do, we need more than that. We should not get rid of tasks, projects, programs, experiments, goals, habits, systems, routines—because ALL of them do indeed have merit. What we need to do instead is learning when to use which.

Enter effort archetypes…

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TRUTH is a deep and contentious topic. Philosophers have debated it for centuries without reaching a consensus. Some say truth reflects reality. Others argue it’s about coherence, usefulness, or social agreement. Some even doubt it means anything at all—just a label we stick on ideas we favor.1

Still, truth matters. A lot. We search for it in courtrooms,…

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