Personal notes on work (2026)

Suppose you have decided that 2026 is the year you do your best work. The year you “lock in”, as the kids say. How will you be progressing?

Here is how I plan to lock in:

Slow down

That’s how to lock in.

I find that I do my best work when I slow down and think for a while. The problem is that it’s hard for me to always know when I am slowing down and thinking, or when I’m just procrastinating. So I have decided that I am slowing down when I am resting, and procrastinating otherwise. Now, what is rest?

Rest

It took me until now to understand the point of rest. I suppose it’s because it’s often spoken about in terms of sleep. Sleep rests both the body and the mind, which is why it is king. I am however about to tease something different about rest—the way I mean it here: being at rest while conscious is something you should cultivate. That is, being awake while your mind is not preoccupied.

Consuming content, then, is not resting. Neither is any activity that engages the mind. At rest your mind is attentive, but not concentrating (that’s word to J. Krishnamurti).

Examples of things I have found so far that qualify as rest for my mind include: going on walks and taking a (non-hurried) warm bath.

The keen-eyed reader will realize that these are the same two activities that trigger moments of sudden insight. This is what a mind at rest does: it unspools and unwinds those knotty problems until they are simple.

I hope to find more examples of rest for my mind through experimentation.

Ample sleep is important. I should have known intuitively that my tendency to sleep twice a day (four hours at night, and two or so hours at noon) was a sign of exhaustion.

Work no more than five to six hours a day — and if you have an eight-hour work day, greedily find moments of rest in-between.

If your mind is troubled, write down what is troubling you, so that you can give your mind rest.

”No Prosthesis Day”

I love LLMs. I tried to use them sparingly due to fear of brain atrophy, but they are just too convenient. I’ve balked. I am not complaining.

Yet, I am finding that spending time without reflexively yeeting a query every now and then at the AI assistant is becoming rather difficult. I am one with the machine; it nurtures and aids me.

So, to make sure I am perfectly able to function in life if OpenAI’s servers are nuked from orbit (I kid. I am a Claude boy), I am working at least a day a week without using ‘em.

That day was today (Wednesday), and I kinda liked it. I wasn’t completely faithful to myself (I did ask Claude a few questions about a poorly-documented library I was exploring and asked it to formulate a few tickets I needed written), but that leads to my next point:

Failure of any kind is interesting

It is neither good nor bad. Just interesting. Matter of fact, let’s not even call it failure. Let’s call it perplexity.

When confused, regard reality

The world is a confusing place, and the playbooks for doing things that matter are either too specific, too broad, already outdated, wildly speculative, or too superstitious to be applicable. When unsure what to do, look at reality. That’s all I can say without falling prey to the accusations I made of world playbooks above.

Goodbye.