This morning I opened a work document I hadnāt touched in about three weeks.
The doc was well organized. Clear headings. Clean structure. On paper, nothing was wrong. And yet I sat there staring at it, trying to remember what problem I was solving when I last worked on it. Why certain decisions had been made. What Iād already ruled out. The document assumed Iād remember the context. I didnāt. What surprised me wasnāt that I felt stuck. It was how quickly I felt reluctant to touch it at all. Not because the work was hard, but because re-entering felt expensive. I could tell it would take more energy to reconstruct my thinking than to start something else entirely. So instead of pushing forward, I added one small thing at the top of the doc. A short note to myself explaining where Iād left off, what mattered at the time, and what I didnāt need to reconsider. It took a few minutes. No restructuring. No cleanup. That small orientation changed the feeling of the whole document. It didnāt make me productive. It made the work reachable again. This is the kind of thing Iām interested in here. Not perfect systems. Not better discipline. Small, human adjustments that make it easier to come back after interruption. If this resonates, thatās the work weāll keep circling. If it doesnāt, thatās useful information too.