I’ve been avoiding a task list that technically still works. It’s well structured. Clear categories. Sensible priorities. If I looked at it fresh, I’d probably say it’s a good system. The problem is that I haven’t looked at it fresh. I’ve looked at it after missed days, dropped threads, and a few decisions that happened elsewhere. When I open it now, I don’t feel guided. I feel accused. Nothing on the list tells me what’s still relevant, what quietly resolved itself, or what I no longer need to care about. The system assumes I’m coming back with the same context I had when I last touched it. I’m not. Instead of fixing the whole thing, I’m trying something smaller. I added a temporary section at the top called “where I am right now.” No priorities. No dates. Just a few lines about what actually feels live and what can wait without consequences. It’s messy. It breaks all my old rules. But it lets me stand somewhere again. I’m not sure if this becomes part of the system or stays a workaround. For now, it’s enough to get me unstuck.

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 I’d already ruled out. The document assumed I’d remember the context. I didn’t. What surprised me wasn’t 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 I’d left off, what mattered at the time, and what I didn’t need to reconsider. It took a few minutes. No restructuring. No cleanup. That small orientation changed the feeling of the whole document. It didn’t make me productive. It made the work reachable again. This is the kind of thing I’m interested in here. Not perfect systems. Not better discipline. Small, human adjustments that make it easier to come back after interruption. If this resonates, that’s the work we’ll keep circling. If it doesn’t, that’s useful information too.