The cards were in a shoebox in the storage unit. I hadn’t touched them in twenty years. I wasn’t looking for a memory but rather a shoebox.

When I opened the lid, the smell hit first. That sharp, sweet vinyl. Faintly chemical. Unmistakably 1994. Before I could name a single player, before I could even register the faded blue of a Grant Hill rookie card, I was nine years old again. Sitting on the carpet in my childhood bedroom. Sorting by team. The light coming through the window at that specific afternoon angle.

The memory didn’t arrive as a list of facts. It arrived as a feeling. Full-body. Complete.

Like I’d been dropped through a door I didn’t know was still open.

I just stood there. Holding a shoebox. Thirty years gone in half a second.

(Which is a weird thing to say out loud, I realize. Thirty years. That’s a lot of years to get dropped through a door. But I don’t know how else to describe it. The thing knocked me sideways.)

The shortcut, explained

Why does a smell hit harder than a photograph?

You can look at a picture of your childhood kitchen and feel a gentle tug. But catch the scent of the soap your mom used, just once, unexpected, and you’re not remembering. You’re there. The difference is anatomical.

Your sense of smell is the only sense that takes a direct route to your brain’s memory and emotion centers. The olfactory bulb, the part that processes scent, sits wired directly into the hippocampus and the amygdala. No relay points. No filtering. Every other sense passes through a switchboard first.

Smell walks straight through the front door.

There’s a name for this: the Proust effect, after the passage in In Search of Lost Time where the taste of a madeleine cake dunked in tea triggers an entire childhood to come flooding back. Proust wasn’t being dramatic. He was describing neurology before neurology had the words for it.

Music does something similar. It encodes itself into the emotional context of the time you first heard it. That’s why a song from high school doesn’t just remind you of high school. It puts you back in the passenger seat. The specific humidity. Who you were driving with. The thing you were worried about that week that you can’t even remember now.

This is the mechanism. Close to magic, though.

The real reason it feels so good

The science explains how the door opens. It doesn’t explain why walking through it feels so good.

I think nostalgia is really about the contrast. I keep going back and forth on this, but I keep landing there.

The person you were when you collected those basketball cards didn’t carry a mortgage. Didn’t have a calendar that looked like a losing game of Tetris. Didn’t lie awake at 3 a.m. running through the mental list of everything that needs to happen this week. That version of you had boredom. Long afternoons. The kind of attention span that could spend forty minutes sorting cards by team, by position, by some arbitrary system that made sense only to you.

The sensory shortcut drops you into a self that wasn’t yet buried under adult complexity. And that feeling, the sudden lightness of being that person again, even for three seconds, is what nostalgia is delivering.

You.

Old Time Hawkey, the Northern Michigan influencer who’s built a whole brand around the feeling of a cedar swamp cabin, put it better than I can:

Neuroscience backs this up, probably. When nostalgia hits, the brain activates the same regions responsible for your sense of self over time. The anterior medial prefrontal cortex. The posterior cingulate cortex. These are the parts that stitch together who you were, who you are, and who you’re becoming.

I don’t fully understand the science. I understand enough to know this: when you miss the old you, some part of your brain is trying to keep that person connected to the current version. Like a bridge that got built without asking your permission.

What we get wrong about nostalgia

We do two things with nostalgia. Both miss the point.

We dismiss it. “You’re living in the past.” “Rose-colored glasses.” As if the ache for something that’s gone is a weakness. As if the people who feel it most deeply are somehow failing at the present.

And then we commodify it. Throwback playlists. 90s-themed trivia nights. Nostalgia packaged and sold back to you with the rough edges sanded off. The problem with a manufactured throwback is that it triggers the idea of nostalgia without the mechanism. It’s a photo of the kitchen, not the smell of the soap. It’s fine. It’s fun. But it doesn’t open the door.

One tells you to get over it. The other sells you a ticket to a cleaned-up version of it. Neither treats it as what it probably is: a built-in tool your brain is handing you for free.

How to build your own door

You don’t need a whole nostalgia practice. You don’t need to curate a 90s shrine or build a museum of your childhood. You need one thing. One sensory trigger you can reach on a Wednesday.

Here’s what I did, and honestly, it’s not complicated.

Find the thing. The thing that carries a smell, a texture, a sound. A CD. A baseball glove. A t-shirt from a summer camp you can’t believe your mom kept. The object that, when you touch it or smell it or hear it, does the work before you can think about it.

Put it somewhere you’ll walk past it. On a shelf. In your car. On your desk. Somewhere you’ll bump into it without planning to. The basement doesn’t work. A storage unit you’ll visit someday doesn’t either. (I don’t know why we keep saying someday about storage units. We both know we’re not going.)

And then just let it happen. Don’t schedule it. Don’t try to optimize the experience. Nostalgia doesn’t work on a calendar. The whole point is that it arrives uninvited.

I put the basketball cards on a shelf in my office. Not the whole shoebox. Just a few. The ones that mattered. They sit next to a stack of books and a coffee mug from a conference in 2019 I can’t bring myself to throw away. Every few days, I catch the vinyl smell when I’m reaching for something else. It lasts half a second.

It’s enough.

You need the one thing that, when you smell it or touch it or hear it, reminds you of who you were before the noise. Keep it close. Let it do its job.

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Keep one door open

The cards are back on the shelf now. The shoebox is in the recycling. The basement is still a basement.

But something shifted. Not because I spent an hour reminiscing. Because I stopped treating the things that take me back as clutter, or childishness, or a version of myself I was supposed to grow out of.

They’re doors.

Keep one open. See what happens when you walk through.

I don’t know if any of this makes complete sense. I think it does, though. The stuff you can’t explain is usually the stuff doing the real work.

If this piece took you somewhere, subscribe for free. One essay a week. No noise.

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Before you go, I know we’re all suffering from subscription fatigue, so if the above resonated with you in any way, and you might be feeling tipsy from the nostalgic value provided, I do have the option available below as well. Thank you for your continued support! (Shoutout to for the idea and inspiration!)

Take care of yourselves,

Matt

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P.S. I built my brand strategy using Eden. If you're working on yours, it's the tool I trust. That link gives you a head start.

P.P.S. If you don't have a thing yet, or if you're looking to rebuild a collection you lost somewhere along the way, I've been slowly putting mine back together on CollX. And if you want to hunt for your own, Whatnot gives you $25 to start. No pressure. No urgency. Just a door, if you want one.

It was a Wednesday night. Phone down, kids asleep, and the house had that specific quiet that’s somehow louder than noise. The fridge hummed its low, steady hymn.

I was bored.

Not stressed. Not behind. Just, you know…flat.

The kind of bored where you walk into the kitchen, open the fridge, see that it still has the same things in it that it did before, close it, walk to the couch, and then back to the fridge like it might have changed its mind (it didn’t).

You probably know the version of this story I’m telling.

The advice says to sit with it. Let your mind wander. Embrace the stillness that is boredom.

So I sat with it. And I felt worse, not better.

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Boredom Is a Side-Quest Deficit

Two camps dominate the boredom advice these days. Camp one says sit with it, let your mind wander, embrace the emptiness. Camp two says scroll until the feeling passes.

Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor, tells 15.5 million YouTube viewers that “boredom isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.” A Substack note with 45,000 likes says “go on walks without music. No stimulation. No distractions of any kind.” A viral tweet at 2.3 million views: “Boredom and silence are the real growth drivers.” The “Getting Your Attention Span Back” starter pack opens with “step 1: find boredom first. pure unadulterated boredom. no work, no phone, no stimulation.”

These are smart people. They mean well. And I tried it. Maybe you’ve even tried it.

I sat in the quiet. I let my mind wander. And I felt somehow worse.

The “sit with it” approach works when your brain has fuel. When you’ve had a rich, varied day and your mind just needs to decompress. Stillness as recovery makes sense in that context.

But most of us aren’t arriving at boredom from richness. We’re arriving from the same commute, the same desk, the same dinner rotation, the same screens. (Woof.)

Stillness doesn’t fix depletion from sameness. It amplifies it.

What Kierkegaard Actually Meant

Sounds like a moral indictment, doesn’t it?

Sit with the emptiness. Endure it. Become someone who doesn’t need novelty.

Boredom is a signal that you’ve stopped being the person who does things. You’re refusing to be yourself, and your brain is politely informing you, in the only language it has: a low hum of nothing that makes you open the fridge three times in twelve minutes.

Neuroscientists call it the novelty effect. Your brain encodes new experiences with more detail, making them feel more vivid and memorable than routine ones.

That’s why you can describe in detail a random restaurant you stumbled into on a trip five years ago, but not what you had for dinner last Thursday (was it Taco Thursday?)

When your week has zero novelty in it, your brain does exactly what a dashboard does when the gauge hits empty. You feel that hum of nothing-to-do and you call it boredom.

I think it’s more accurate to call it a signal.

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There Are No Uninteresting Things

That’s the permission. You’ve stopped being interested because nothing in your week surprises you anymore. The world didn’t get boring. You just stopped looking at it.

The fix is to give your brain one small, novel thing.

I call it a side quest. Here’s how it works.

The 25-Minute Side Quest

Three rules:

1. It takes 25 minutes or less.

2. It has a clear end. You finish something.

3. It’s something you haven’t done this exact way before.

No perfect mornings required. No deep work block. No 90-minute setup. Just a small thing that breaks the photocopy.

Seven you can run tonight:

1. Cook something you’ve never made from what’s already in your pantry. Improvise. Make it a challenge.

2. Walk a route you’ve never taken (safely). No podcast. No phone. Just your feet and whatever you notice.

3. Write a physical letter to someone you haven’t talked to in a year. Pen, paper, envelope. You don’t have to mail it. The writing is the quest. No hiding behind Facebook.

4. Learn one song on an instrument you don’t play or haven’t touched in years. Badly. The badly is part of it - even if it’s Hot Cross Buns.

5. Sketch what you see out your window. On paper. With whatever’s nearby. It will be terrible. That’s fine.

6. Call someone instead of texting (oh, the horror!). No agenda. No reason. Just “I was thinking about you and decided to call instead of text.”

7. Do something physical you haven’t done since you were a kid. Jump rope. Throw a ball against a wall. Climb something you’re allowed to climb. Or even better, just be a kid again.

Each one takes less than 25 minutes. Each one has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Each one is a small loop that closes.

That last part matters. Most of what makes a week feel flat is that nothing finishes. Every task opens into three more. Every project is a hallway with no doors, with “perpetual burnout” hiding behind every door.

A side quest closes. You did the thing. You can see it. Your brain gets the little hit of completion it’s been missing, filling a little bit of dopamine.

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The Box in Storage

I know the difference because I’ve been both people.

One version of me sits with the boredom. Opens the fridge. Closes it. Opens his phone. Closes it. Feels worse. Wonders how many ads I can be shown of the exact same thing. Goes to bed early, which feels responsible but changes nothing about Thursday.

The other version picks one small thing and does it.

This summer, I pulled a box of old sports cards from the storage unit. Hadn’t touched them since roughly the Bush administration, maybe even earlier than that. I wrote about letting go of sentimental clutter a while back, but these weren’t clutter. They were what I would call, dormant joy.

I downloaded CollX and started scanning. 3,399 cards later, I have a digital collection I can actually browse, price, and trade. Some were worth actual money. (WhatNot is where I sell the ones that have value. Here’s $25 to shop if you’ve got old cards in storage.) Some were worth nothing but a memory. I was 10 years old again, flipping through rookie cards on the living room floor, the smell of the vinyl card holder pages still the same (maybe slightly mustier). All of it beat opening the fridge a third time.

If a side quest doesn’t scratch the itch, that’s different information. Might not be boredom at all. Might be you’re pointed wrong.

Each side quest is a small act of curiosity.

Your brain doesn’t need a 90-minute deep work block.

It needs one thing to pay attention to, for 25 minutes, that it hasn’t seen before. And sometimes, curiosity leads somewhere unexpected.

A box of old cards becomes a collection. A collection becomes a side hustle. A side hustle becomes a reason to keep scanning.

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What To Do Tonight

Open a note on your phone. I use Eden for this now. It’s where I turn “I should write about this” into actual drafts instead of abandoned notes. When boredom turns into a creative itch, the difference between a spark and a finished piece is having somewhere to put it before it disappears.

Write down one side quest from the list above. Or invent your own.

Do it tonight. Not this weekend.

The house will still be quiet. The fridge will still be there. But when Thursday shows up, you’ll have done something instead of waited.

And that’s the difference between a week you survive and a week you remember.

Take care of yourselves.

Matt

P.S. If this landed, the heart and restack buttons are free and they’re one of the best ways to let Substack know this would land for other readers.

P.P.S. I went deeper on the novelty effect, such as being a tourist in your own town in a recent episode of The Mitten Dad Show. If you’re not subscribed yet, it’s free.

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I got up at 7:30 on a Saturday. Looked up. It was 11 am. My first cup of coffee was still sitting there, mostly full, completely cold.

I hadn’t been napping. I’d been doing Saturday things. Groceries. Laundry. A junk drawer I’d been meaning to fix since, I don’t know, March. A form for school. The mental tally of everything I’m the only one tracking.

By the time I sat down to actually write, I was already done.

You probably know the version of this story I’m telling. The Saturday that disappeared into maintenance. The Sunday that was supposed to be for you but got eaten by prep for the week ahead.

Most people think burnout is a work problem. Too many meetings. Too much Slack. A boss who doesn’t get it.

But here’s what I missed for years: the job was Round 1. The bell rang the moment I walked through the door.

Dinner. Laundry. The permission slip that’s been sitting on the counter since Wednesday. The vet appointment, the dance rehearsal, the mental tally of everything I’m the only one tracking. That’s Round 2.

Nobody’s counting it as labor. Nobody clocks you in or out. You…just do it.

The burnout most of us feel isn’t from the job: it’s from the second shift nobody calls work.

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You’ve been fighting the wrong fight

I did the burnout advice. Closed the laptop. Played with the kids. Went to bed early.

Then Monday walked in wearing the same heavy boots.

Why? Because I treated Round 1 like the whole fight. I rested from the job and then walked straight back into the invisible labor of keeping a life running, with no buffer in between.

Last Wednesday. Medical appointment at 3, dance rehearsal at 4:30, dinner still unplanned, and somewhere in between I’m supposed to be a person with creative ambitions. By 5:47, I was staring into the fridge making a dinner decision I’d been putting off all day, and the writing I’d promised myself that morning never happened.

That’s the impossible math. Work 9 to 5. Hit 10k steps. Cook every meal. Keep the house clean. Spend time with family. Sleep 8 hours. Have hobbies.

When @OrevaZSN posted this, it hit over 1.5 million views in days. The numbers don’t add up. They were never supposed to.

There’s a woman on TikTok whose whole account is proving the mess takes 90 seconds, the email takes 2 minutes. @tannerguzy wrote that it’s “the most wholesome and effective psyop I’ve ever been exposed to.” On paper, you have time. The clock says so. But your body says you’re running on fumes.

That gap between clock time and felt time. That’s where the second shift lives.

Round 1 has a clock. Round 2 doesn’t.

You’re good at managing your time. You’ve just been counting the wrong fight.

Round 1 is visible. It has a clock, a paycheck, a boss who notices when you’re late. Round 2 has none of that. No clock. No paycheck. No performance review. But it drains you just the same. Maybe more, because the drain is invisible even to you.

James Clear wrote that you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. But Round 2 doesn’t have a system. Round 2 is duct tape and memory and hoping you don’t forget the thing.

You’re maintaining a life you’re too tired to enjoy. Round 2 keeps everything running so there’s something to come home to. But by the time Round 2 is done, there’s nothing left for you. The maintenance that preserves the life also prevents you from living it.

This isn’t for the person who thinks burnout is a sleep hygiene issue. If you’ve already tried the gratitude journal and the morning routine and you’re still running on fumes, this is about what you haven’t been counting.

It’s an accounting problem. Nobody’s counting what you’re actually fighting.

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The Round 2 reframe: three steps

I’m not going to tell you to eliminate Round 2. You can’t. The permission slips, the vet appointments, the dinner decisions. They’re not going anywhere. But you can stop letting invisible labor feel like a personal failure.

1. Name the rounds you’re actually fighting

Open a note on your phone. Write down everything you did yesterday after you clocked out of work. Not the big stuff. The 90-second mess. The 2-minute email. The permission slip. The dinner decision you made at 5:47 because you couldn’t put it off any longer.

Don’t judge the list. Just name it.

The labor you can’t name is the labor that breaks you.

2. Audit what’s draining you vs. what you think is draining you

Look at the list. Two columns: “worth the energy” and “could be lighter.”

Some of those things are non-negotiable. Some of them are just habits, or guilt, or someone else’s job that landed on your plate and never left or your email inbox becoming someone else’s to-do list. The point isn’t to fix everything. It’s to see it clearly enough that you stop blaming yourself for being tired after fighting it.

3. Take 5 minutes between bells

I still forget this one. Especially when I’m in a flow state working on a project. The irony isn’t lost on me. The guy writing about the second shift gets caught in Round 1 and forgets to breathe between rounds.

So here’s the smallest version: when you feel the bell ring. When you close the laptop or walk through the door. Take 5 minutes. Sit down. Breathe in through your nose. Out through your mouth.

You’re not meditating. You’re not optimizing. You’re just noticing the transition between rounds instead of absorbing it.

The first step isn’t doing less

I’m 41, and I finally understand the gardening people. I wrote about this on Threads last week (which went surprisingly viral). For years I thought they’d traded ambition for tomatoes and a quiet porch. (Which sounded a little boring to someone still trying to build something.) Then I started taking night walks.

What looked like doing nothing was actually the thing that made everything else possible. The pause. The breath. The 5 minutes between bells.

Picture a Tuesday where you’ve named the rounds. The 5:47 fridge stare still happens, because dinner still needs deciding (“not leftovers again”). But the blame doesn’t come with it.

The permission slips are still on the counter, but they’re on a list now instead of looping in your head. And somewhere in there, between the bells, you wrote for 25 minutes and didn’t feel guilty about it.

Here’s a better question than “how do I get more done”: which round am I actually fighting right now, and does anyone, including me, know I’m in it?

Maybe the first step isn’t doing less. It’s naming what you’re already doing, so you can stop blaming yourself for being tired.

Take 5 minutes tonight. Between the bells. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.

That’s enough. For now, that’s enough.

Take care of yourselves,

Matt

P.S. If the Round 2 reframe hit something for you, hit reply and tell me what’s in your invisible second shift. I read every one of these, and honestly, reading what lands for people is the best part of my week, and make sure to hit the heart and restack buttons as it’s a huge help with discovery.

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P.P.S. Two tools I actually use for this: Step 3 — taking 5 minutes between bells — is what I built Interrupt Stack for. It’s a little Mac app that walks you through a 10-second ritual when you feel the bell ring. And Step 1 — naming the rounds — works best when you get the mental tally out of your head entirely. I dump all of it into Mem so it stops living in my brain rent-free. Use MITTENDAD for 20% off your first 3 months.

P.P.P.S. I use Eden by and his team to organize my ideas and Mem to externalize the mental load. If you’re building something in the margins the way I am, all my tools and discounts live on the Perks page. Consider becoming a paid subscriber today.

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You’re at dinner with someone you love. Or a friend you haven’t seen in months. Or just sitting on the couch next to your partner after a long week, scrolling away.

They’re telling you something. A story about their day. A thing that bothered them. Something funny that happened on the way home.

And part of you is somewhere else entirely. That part is writing.

This is a good one, the voice says. You’ll want to remember this.

You’re mentally drafting a caption.

The phone isn’t even out. But you’re already packaging the moment: the lighting, the way the story unfolded, the detail you’d lead with. Already curating a version of a real conversation for an audience of nobody.

The person you’re with might notice. Or they might not.

But you notice. Because there’s a tiny drop in your stomach when you realize you weren’t actually there for the thing you were already trying to save.

You probably know the version of this story I’m telling.

It shows up differently depending on who you are. If you’re a parent, it’s your kid mid-sentence (something about a stick they found, or who got sent to the office, or why the blue cup is unacceptable today) while you’re running a focus group on whether this moment is “good enough” to remember, record, or retell.

If you don’t have kids, it still shows up. On a date where you’re already planning how to summarize it. On a walk where half your attention is on drafting the post about how present you’re being (whoops). In a conversation with a friend, where you’re tasting the anecdote while they’re still talking, looking for the hook.

The auditor doesn’t care if you have kids. It cares if you’re the kind of person who treats experience as material.

The auditor sounds rational. Helpful, even. “You’ll want to remember this.” “Capture it before it’s gone.” “This is the stuff that matters.”

It’s a thief. And what it steals is bigger than one conversation.

It trades the messy, complete experience (the one where you can smell the carpet and hear the hum of the fridge and notice that the person across from you has a tiny expression you’d somehow never catalogued) for a sterile thumbnail. A two-sentence caption. A mental screenshot with the contrast turned up.

It convinces you that curating the moment is the same as being in it.

That’s a lie. And the bill comes due later than you think.

Naval Ravikant put it bluntly once: money is worth less than life. Life is worth less than attention.

Money you can make back. Time you can’t get back. But attention is the thing that turns time into something worth having. And the auditor is bleeding you out, one Thursday at a time, while the person in front of you is still talking.

How Social Media Trained Your Brain to Narrate Your Own Life

If you’ve caught yourself writing the post in your head while the moment was still happening, pondering “this would make a great IG Reel”, you know the drop in your stomach when you realize you weren’t actually there.

This isn’t for people who are fine with half-listening. It’s not for the person who thinks “uh-huh” counts as presence. It’s for the ones who felt something shift when they caught themselves doing it and couldn’t shake it for the rest of the day.

The thing is, nobody meant for this to happen.

Social media trained us to see every moment as potential content. The language we use in our lives is cute until it becomes a script. Until we’re the ones who can’t stop performing.

There’s a reason this feels so hard to turn off. You’ve been practicing. Every post, every story, every caption you’ve ever written has been training your brain to stand just outside your own life and narrate it.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: my kids don’t audit the moment.

They’re just…in it.

No part of them is wondering if this is content-worthy, or whether they should be somewhere more productive. I watch them and feel a little embarrassed. Because I used to be able to do that.

Before I started creating, I was just in rooms. Present, bored even, but present. The auditor showed up the same way it did for you: one caption at a time, until performing the moment felt normal.

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Why Presence Feels Harder After You Become a Creator

So I tried something.

The next time my daughter started telling me about her day (same time, same couch, a different Thursday), I felt the auditor kick on. This is a good one, it said, right on cue.

And instead of following the thought, I reached down and touched the carpet.

That was it. The whole intervention. My hand is on the floor of our living room, feeling the texture of a rug that needs to be vacuumed, or a foot, scraping the crumbs of half-eaten Cheerios.

It sounds too simple. But physical sensation does something that mental effort can’t. Your brain can’t be in two places when your hand is reporting back from one of them. The carpet was scratchy and warm and real, and suddenly the caption I was drafting 30 seconds ago didn’t seem important anymore.

The hum of the fridge came back. The way she was sitting (one leg tucked under, sock half-off). The whole room, which had been reduced to a backdrop for content, became an actual room again.

That’s the transformation. The room comes back. The person in front of you stops being material and becomes a person again.

I’ve been trying to turn this into something repeatable. Here’s what I reach for when the auditor starts narrating my living room.

Three Ways to Fire the Internal Auditor Tonight

Name the auditor

Touch something in the room

Ask one follow-up question

1. Name the auditor.

When you catch yourself curating (mid-conversation, mid-dinner, on a walk, in the middle of someone else’s story), just say it in your head. “That’s the auditor.”

You don’t have to fight it or shame yourself for it. Just name it. The naming loosens its grip. It turns the voice from an invisible director into something you can see, which means something you can step around.

2. Touch something in the room.

The carpet. The edge of the table. Your own knee. The arm of the chair. Grass, if you’re outside. Your partner’s hand.

What matters is that physical sensation anchors you to the experience instead of the curated version of it. Your brain can’t run a focus group while your hand is reporting that the seat cushion is warm from someone else sitting there.

One parent on Twitter put it even more directly: treat your phone like a landline. Hang it up in one place. When you need to check it, walk over, look, and walk away. The same principle works for the mental phone.

The point is the same: put something physical between you and the audition.

3. Ask one follow-up question.

Not “How was your day?” That’s a reflex.

Ask something specific. Something you don’t already know the answer to.

“What surprised you today?” “What made you feel something you weren’t expecting?” “What moment from this week do you think you’ll remember in 5 years?”

When I started asking better questions, the answers stopped being soundbites and became actual windows. A friend attempted a joke that didn’t land. My daughter is proud of someone for trying anyway. A small moment of vulnerability that someone trusted me enough to share.

That’s the thing I would have missed.

If I’d been writing the script in my head, I would have filed it under “nice conversation” and moved on. But the real thing was sweeter and more complicated than any caption I could have written.

That’s not a core memory.

That’s just a Thursday. That’s just someone on the couch, telling me about their day.

And I was there for all of it.

What to do tonight.

The next time someone starts telling you something (anything), and you feel the urge to curate it, touch something. The carpet, the table, your own knee. Doesn’t matter what.

Then ask them one question you don’t already know the answer to.

Tonight, when the auditor kicks on, touch the carpet before you touch your phone. Just once. Reply and tell me what you noticed that you would have missed.

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If this hit home for you, consider taking a moment to hit the heart and restack buttons, as it’s one of the best ways to let Substack know this matters and helps with the discovery of it for others.

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Take care of yourselves,

Matt

P.S. Earlier this week, I shipped a tiny Mac app called Interrupt Stack. It gives you a 10-second ritual when something (or someone) breaks your focus. I built it because I kept losing my train of thought between Slack pings and “Dad, can I have a snack?” If your attention gets yanked around all day and you want a small tool that helps you land instead of crashing, you can grab it here.

P.P.S. I use Mem as my external brain. When a random thought, task, or idea shows up while someone is talking, I don’t try to hold onto it. I dump it into Mem and get back to the carpet. Holding something in your head while pretending to listen is just the auditor in a different costume. Use code MITTENDAD for 20% off 3 months of Mem Pro.

P.P.P.S. I wrote parts of this essay using Eden. It helped me pull together the research, organize the argument, and find the structure underneath what started as a rambling note about carpet texture. Try it free here. And if you want to see how I used it for a full creative project, I wrote about that too.

Every interruption costs you 15 minutes. You never notice you lost them until you add up a morning.

It was a Thursday morning, and I was two sentences into a paragraph I actually liked. Then: “Dad, can I have a snack?” I said yes, got up, got the snack, sat back down. Stared at the cursor. The sentence was gone. Not the topic, not the general idea. The actual sentence, the one I’d already half-written in my head, evaporated the second I stood up.

Twenty minutes later it happened again. A Slack message this time. Then the dog needed out. Then a delivery at the door.

By lunch I’d been interrupted six times and made real progress on nothing. Not because the interruptions were long. Each one took thirty seconds. But getting back to where I’d been took ten times that, every single time.

For years I assumed this was a discipline problem. Get better at holding the thread. Concentrate harder. Write faster before the next interruption lands.

I think you know where this is going. That instinct is backwards. You can’t out-focus a four-year-old, and you shouldn’t want to.

Park it.

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Park it

I tried the notebook. I tried sticky notes on the monitor. I tried voice memos to myself, which mostly captured me sounding confused, or stammering. All of it failed for the same reason: too much friction in the exact moment I had none to spare.

You cannot open an app, find the right note, and write a clear paragraph in the three seconds between “Dad?” and actually turning around.

Whatever the system was, it needed to survive being used one-handed, mid-sentence, with a four-year-old already three words into her next request.

Researcher Gloria Mark, who’s spent years studying attention at UC Irvine, has tracked this for over a decade: once you’re pulled off a task, it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully re-engage with it. Not because the task got harder. Because your brain has to rebuild the entire mental scaffolding it was standing on.

You can’t stop a four-year-old from needing a snack. But you can stop that snack from costing you half an hour of writing.

So I built a system around a single constraint: it has to be faster than the interruption itself. I called it the Park-and-Return Method, and eventually I built it into an actual app because I couldn’t find one that did just this.

Here’s how it works. The moment you’re interrupted, you hit one key combination. A tiny panel appears, already waiting for your cursor. You type three things:

1. What you were doing

2. The very next step, in plain language

3. Anything else your brain is holding (optional)

Hit Return. Walk away. The whole thing takes under ten seconds, because that’s the actual design constraint: it has to be faster than the interruption itself.

If you get interrupted again before you’re back, you park again. The cards stack, newest on top, so you always resume in the right order.

Back to that Thursday. If I’d had this running, the snack interruption looks like: hit the hotkey, type “writing the MDM draft” / “finish the sentence about interruption cost, next line is about the discipline myth” / nothing else, hit Return, get the snack.

When I sit back down, I click the little tray icon in my menu bar. There’s the card, with the next step in the biggest text on the screen, because that’s the part that actually gets you moving again. I don’t reconstruct anything. I just read it and keep typing.

How to park a thought in under 10 seconds

You’ve tried capturing thoughts before. A note on your phone. A scratch file on your desktop. And every time it felt like more work than just hoping you’d remember. Then you didn’t remember.

The problem was friction.

Here’s how to make it stick. 5 steps, each one building on the last.

1. Set your hotkey

Pick one key combination. The moment you’re interrupted, you hit it. A tiny panel appears, already waiting for your cursor. No navigation. No app switching. No “where was that note again” while a four-year-old repeats herself louder.

The hotkey is the whole interface. If it takes more than a second to trigger, it’s already too slow.

2. Park 3 lines

Three things, every time: what you were doing, the very next step in plain language, and anything else your brain is holding (that third line is optional). That’s the whole capture.

The next step is the part that matters most. “Finish the sentence about interruption cost” gets you moving. “Keep writing” doesn’t. Be specific enough that future-you doesn’t have to guess.

3. Walk away

Give the kid the snack. Answer the Slack. Let the dog out. The cards stack automatically, newest on top, so if you get interrupted again before you’re back, you just park again and keep going.

You don’t have to organize anything. You don’t have to remember anything. The stack remembers the order for you.

4. Resume from the menu bar

When you sit back down, click the tray icon. Your most recent card is waiting, with the next step in the biggest text on the screen.

That’s intentional. The next step is what gets you moving again, so it gets the visual priority. You don’t reconstruct anything. You don’t re-read context and hope the thread comes back. You just read one sentence and keep typing.

5. Everything stays on your machine

No account. No cloud. No sign-in. No analytics. No network connection of any kind. It notices which app you were in when you parked, so your card has context, but it never touches your screen, your documents, or anything you typed anywhere else.

When you delete the app, the data is gone. It only ever lived in one folder on your machine.

That’s the whole system. One hotkey. Three lines. Under ten seconds.

Tonight, not this weekend, download it, set your hotkey, and park one real thought the next time someone says your name mid-sentence. That’s the whole test.

It’s called Interrupt Stack. It’s $14.99 this week as part of the launch (regularly $19.99), one-time, no subscription, and it’s live on the Mac App Store now.

Go download it, set your hotkey, and the next time someone says your name mid-sentence, you’ll be back in your flow before they finish their request.

Get Interrupt Stack today on sale!

Take care of yourselves,

Matt

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You know that feeling when you hit publish and just kind of hope?

No data behind it. No real sense of whether the hook will land. Just you, a cup of coffee, and a prayer that the algorithm is in a good mood.

I did that for years. Still catch myself doing it.

The difference now is I have a tool that shows me what’s actually working before I write a single word. And it’s not just another AI chat that makes stuff up. It pulls from real outlier posts — the ones doing 17x a creator’s typical engagement — and helps you understand why they worked so you can make the idea your own.

The tool I’ve been using since it was called Kortex

Eden is the only creator tool that’s survived every purge of my app graveyard.

I started using it back when it was called Kortex, and I’ve watched the team ship update after update at a pace that doesn’t make sense. Every time I think they’ve hit the ceiling, they raise it.

The core idea is simple: find validated ideas, then make them your own. Two steps. That’s it.

The Discover tab shows you outlier posts across Twitter, YouTube, Substack, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. You can search by topic or creator. You can save posts to swipe file boards and chat with them later. You can reverse-engineer why something worked and apply the structure to your own writing.

If you’re a Substack writer, this is quietly one of the most useful things Eden does. You can research what’s landing in Substack Notes — what hooks are stopping the scroll, what topics are gaining traction — and use that data to sharpen your own essays and subject lines before you hit publish. You’re not copying anyone. You’re just not guessing anymore.

And the identity feature — this is the part that surprised me — actually learns how you think and write. So when you ask for variations, they sound like you. Not like a robot cosplaying as a human.

The bootcamp starts tomorrow

Eden’s Creator Bootcamp opens July 8. It’s run by and the Eden team.

The promise: walk away with clarity on the topics you own, a content system that runs on 60 minutes a day, and one idea that becomes a week of content.

Live calls, templates, prompts, and Eden access are included.

I don’t talk about tools and courses lightly. You probably know that by now. But here’s why I’m sending this:

Dan is in the community Discord regularly, answering questions and talking to users directly. That alone is worth the subscription price. You don’t see that from many founders once the thing takes off.

If you’ve been waiting for a clear month

You already know the month never comes.

But a cohort that starts tomorrow with live calls and a community of people building the same thing you’re building? That’s a real on-ramp.

If you’ve been guessing what to post and getting inconsistent results, this is the fix.

If you’ve got 12 content ideas and 3 half-written posts scattered across 4 apps, Eden was built to solve exactly that.

And if you’re tired of AI tools that generate generic slop with no connection to what actually performs, this is the other thing entirely.

The bootcamp starts tomorrow, July 8. Here’s the link:

Eden Creator Bootcamp

Full disclosure: that’s my affiliate link. I wouldn’t send it if I didn’t use the tool every day and believe in what they’re building. I’ve been on the inside long enough to know the difference between a cash grab and the real thing. This is the real thing.

Take care of yourselves,

Matt

P.S. If you want to poke around before signing up, here’s the Eden homepage — you can see the features, boards, and how the whole thing fits together. And Dan also put together a quick walkthrough video that shows the workflow from idea to scheduled post in about 10 minutes.

P.P.S. The Eden YouTube channel has deeper dives on individual features if you want to do your homework first. But the bootcamp starts tomorrow, so don’t over-research it into paralysis.

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I closed the laptop at 5:04 yesterday. Answered one last email with the kind of professional warmth that took me several years to calibrate. Walked upstairs.

My daughter looked up from the couch. “Dad, do you want to see the drawing I just made?”

I said yes. I meant yes.

But the first ten seconds of looking at that drawing, sadly, I wasn’t there. My body was standing in the living room.

My nervous system was still in a Teams meeting, still holding the residue of a meeting where nobody said what they actually meant (except for letting them know when you could see their screen), still running the low-grade hum of someone who’d been performing competence since 8:14 a.m.

If you’ve ever answered a question about your kid’s day with the same vocal temperature you used on a budget call, you already know the feeling I’m describing.

You were standing there. You just weren’t in the room.

I want to give you a word for what was missing in those ten seconds. And I want to give you three ways to build it into your actual weekday. Not the aspirational version. The one where the toddler is crying and the dinner isn’t started, and you have approximately 90 seconds of silence to work with.

The Calendar Solves for Time. Temperature Is a Different Problem.

You’re the most time-managed version of yourself you’ve ever been.

You’ve got the morning routine blocked. The deep work window. The pick-up reminder has two notifications, just in case, that have already been snoozed.

You’ve read the books. You’ve color-coded the Google Calendar so aggressively that it looks like a late-stage Tetris board.

And you’re still collapsing by 8 p.m.

Still catching yourself answering your kid’s question about third-grade math with the same vocal temperature you used on the Q3 projection call. Still wondering why rest doesn’t seem to refill anything.

The calendar is a brilliant tool. I use mine constantly.

But it was designed for one thing: managing tasks against time.

It can tell you when to start the meeting and when to leave for daycare.

It cannot tell you how to stop being the person who just handled a client crisis and start being the person who can hear about a Minecraft update without their eye twitching.

Researchers have a name for one piece of this. Sophie Leroy, at the University of Washington, calls it attention residue. When you switch tasks without any kind of closure, part of your cognition stays glued to the previous one. You’re not distracted. You’re residually present somewhere else.

No calendar app ships with a field for that.

Here’s what happens if you let this ride. The exhaustion you’re feeling has two layers.

There’s the physical tiredness from the day. And underneath it, there’s the drag of moving between incompatible versions of yourself: the performer, the parent, the partner. A dozen switches a week with nothing in between. Do that for a few years and you don’t just burn out. You start to forget which version is actually you.

Your kids stop asking as many questions because they’ve learned you’re sadly only half-listening anyway.

That’s the compounding cost of skipping the transition.

The Commute Was Supposed to Be the Buffer

Before remote work, the drive home served a function most of us never named.

Twenty minutes in the car. Radio on. Silence between exits. It was a decompression chamber between the cubicle and the kitchen, between the performance and the person.

For a lot of us, it stopped working somewhere along the way. The commute became a compression chamber instead. Same drive, but now you’re replaying the meeting. Drafting the email. Arriving home with a jaw so tight, you’re wondering if TMJ is starting to set in.

And then remote work arrived and deleted the drive entirely.

Now we go from Slack to the dinner table in the time it takes to close a laptop lid. No buffer. No decompression. Just a hard cut between identities, and somehow we’re supposed to show up warm?

Blake Ashforth and Glen Kreiner, two researchers who study what they call work-home boundary theory, describe this as the active work of managing role transitions. They point out that most of us were handed zero tools for it. The commute used to do the work for us, unevenly. Then we deleted the commute and didn’t forgot to upgrade from the beta version.

Who This Is Actually For

If your work badge comes off and the identity stays behind with it, you’re probably fine without this. The buffer is already built into your day.

But if your work follows you home in your pocket, stick with me.

I’m talking about the Slack notifications that buzz while you’re making dinner. The email you check one more time before bed. The meeting you’re still litigating in your head while your daughter explains the plot of a movie you haven’t seen. The version of your job that lives in your nervous system long after the laptop closes.

If that’s you, the airlock is for you.

The Airlock

I started calling it the airlock a few months ago. The name came from somewhere in the back of my brain. Probably a sci-fi movie I watched at 2 a.m. in college. But the image stuck.

An airlock is the chamber between two environments that can’t touch each other. You enter from one side. The door seals behind you. The pressure equalizes. Then, and only then, the other door opens.

That’s what’s missing between Work You and Parent You. Between the version of you that spent all day navigating office politics and the version of you that needs to be genuinely curious about a second-grader’s opinion on snack selection (how are they always hungry?)

Here’s what the airlock actually is: a deliberate, measurable pause between roles. Short enough to actually happen. Real enough that your body believes it when you say, “I’m off the clock now.”

A 45-minute meditation you’ll never do? Not the airlock. A gratitude journal? Not the airlock. Another thing to add to the calendar that’s already lying to you? Definitely not the airlock.

The airlock is small. Two minutes. One song. A sentence. That’s the whole category.

There’s neuroscience behind why this works.

Dr. Jud Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who runs the Mindfulness Center at Brown University, has spent two decades studying how the brain builds habits around anxiety and stress. His research found that chronic worry follows the same three-part pattern as any other habit: trigger, behavior, reward. The workday ends (trigger). Your brain still reaches for the worry engine (behavior) because mentally replaying the meeting gave you an illusion of control (reward). The loop runs on autopilot. And trying harder to stop the thoughts actually lights up the rumination circuits more. Brewer’s neuroimaging studies confirmed it.

Here’s an example.

You pull into the driveway and turn off the engine. Sit there for two minutes.

Not checking your phone. Not queuing up a podcast. Just two minutes of silence with the windows up and the seatbelt still on.

Sometimes, say it out loud: “I’m done.” Sometimes, don’t say anything.

The point is that the old version of you gets acknowledged and then released. The one who just navigated a day of meetings, decisions, and the specific exhaustion of being agreeable on purpose. You did your job, and now, you’re done.

Then you open the car door. And the person who walks inside is actually available.

My daughter gets a version of me that isn’t still writing emails in my head. That’s the whole payoff. That’s the only metric that matters.

How to Build Your Own

Three airlocks. None of them requires a car.

The three methods below share one thing in common: they’re all tiny acts of creation, not consumption. Like mentions, the more you consume, the less mentally healthy you are.

You’re not absorbing someone else’s podcast or someone else’s scroll. You’re making a ritual. That distinction turns out to matter more than you’d think.

1. The Song

Pick one song. Two to four minutes long. Nothing on a playlist you use for anything else. When you’re done with work for the day, you put on headphones, you close your eyes, and you listen to that song start to finish. No skipping. No checking notifications. Just the song.

The song becomes a Pavlovian signal. Your brain learns: when this specific sequence of notes happens, Work Mode ends. It sounds too simple to work. It works because it’s simple. Your brain likes ritual more than it likes complexity.

2. The Block

Before you leave whatever room you work in, walk around the block. One loop. No phone. No podcast. No agenda. Just your feet on the pavement and whatever the weather happens to be doing.

The walk does two things at once. It puts physical distance between you and the workspace. Your body gets the message faster than your brain does. And it gives the day’s residue somewhere to go. By the time you touch the front door again, you’ve metabolized at least some of what you were carrying.

If you’ve got kids and the block isn’t happening, the driveway works too. The front step. The three minutes between parking and unbuckling. The location matters less than the pause.

3. The Sentence

This one is almost embarrassingly simple, and it’s the one I use most often. Before I engage with anyone in my house after work, I say one sentence out loud. It can be “I’m done.” It can be “That’s the day.” It can be whatever words signal to your own nervous system that the performance is over.

Say it out loud. Not in your head. Your ears need to hear it too.

I know how that sounds. I have a BA in Theatre, so I’m predisposed to believe that speaking something aloud changes things.

But I also have a BS in Accounting, and the accountant in me has now logged enough data to say: the days I do this are categorically different from the days I don’t.

My kids can tell. My wife can tell. But most of all, I can tell.

Before You Add This to Your To-Do List

The airlock won’t make you more efficient. It won’t squeeze more output out of your evening hours. That’s somebody else’s sales pitch.

What it does is simpler and harder to measure: it keeps one identity’s exhaust from polluting the next one. Your child’s bedtime story shouldn’t carry the emotional weight of your Q3 review.

Your partner shouldn’t have to absorb the tension you built up in a meeting that had nothing to do with them. And you shouldn’t have to spend your evening trying to shake off a version of yourself that clocked out two hours ago.

Reminder: You cannot schedule your way into a regulated nervous system. Feel free to save that or bookmark this post to come back to.

But, dear reader, you can build a bridge so short and so slow that your body actually believes you when you say you’re done.

Try one of the three tonight. Not all three. Not a new morning routine. Just one small airlock between the person who worked all day and the person who gets to be home now.

The song. The block. The sentence.

Pick the one that fits your actual Tuesday, not the aspirational version. Do it once. See if anything shifts.

Gathered From (in case you want to go deeper)

• Sophie Leroy’s research on attention residue, the cognitive cost of task-switching without closure

• Ashforth & Kreiner’s work-home boundary theory, how role transitions work and why most of us are winging them

• Dr. Jud Brewer on anxiety as a habit loop, the trigger-behavior-reward cycle and how to break it

• Cal Newport on the shutdown ritual, the knowledge-worker cousin of the airlock

I organized the research for this piece using my Board Room prompt. It’s how I keep source material from turning into another pile of open tabs.

Take care of yourselves,

Matt

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P.S. If this landed, I write about this kind of thing every week: the systems, the pauses, the small moves that hold up under real life. No perfect mornings required. And if you have a moment, please consider hitting the heart and restack buttons on this post, as it’s one of the best (and free) ways to help with discovery on Substack.

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P.P.S. I have another newsletter called Daily Refill that helps busy parents and creators reclaim the margins of their day. It’s built for 12-minute windows, not 4-hour deep work blocks. You can check it out here.

P.P.P.S. If you’re further struggling for ideas and clarity in the hustle and bustle of life, you might also enjoy my Ikigai guide as well as my Topic Tutor for boosting additional learning opportunities.

For more on this topic…

The Habit Healers

Did Your Brain Accidentally Train Itself to Be Anxious?

You’re lying in bed. It’s 11:40 p.m. and you were almost asleep, but then a thought drifted in about tomorrow’s appointment. Within two minutes your chest is tight and you’re mentally rehearsing three worst-case scenarios about something that hasn’t happened yet. Or maybe it’s 7 p.m. and you’re standing at the kitchen counter reaching for something you…

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4 months ago · 1035 likes · 6 comments · Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Remember everything by deciding nothing in the moment.

I spent a Saturday morning in January setting up folders.

Not my first time. Not my second either. PARA in Notion. Clean labels. Color-coded icons. The whole thing looked like a productivity influencer’s screenshot — the kind where everything is named perfectly and nothing has been touched yet.

By Tuesday I had four notes. Two of them were reminders to use the system.

The other two? One was a recipe link I never opened again. The other said “newsletter idea — something about transitions.”

I still don’t know what I meant.

You probably know the version of this story I’m telling. The Medium writer who attempted a second brain five times in two years knows it. The person cycling through Notion, Obsidian, Capacities, Mem, Tana, and Roam — hitting the same wall in each one — knows it.

The internet keeps selling the dream harder. One viral post I saw this week: “Obsidian + Claude Code = your own personal JARVIS. Takes 1 hour to set up. Works while you sleep.” Nearly half a million views. Five thousand likes. The promise is always the same: build the system tonight and tomorrow you’re a different person.

I called it something else. Chaos notes. The brilliant newsletter idea from Tuesday, gone by Thursday. The voice note you recorded at a stoplight, never opened again. The client feedback you were sure you’d remember.

The average knowledge worker spends 76 hours a year looking for misplaced notes and files. Only finds what they need about half the time.

The problem isn’t capture. Our intake is fine. Most of us are excellent at saving things. Screenshots, highlights, bookmarks, “I’ll come back to this” tabs. The funnel is wide open.

The drain is clogged.

Nothing comes back out.

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The system was never the point

Tiago Forte’s Second Brain framework is genuinely useful. PARA — Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives — gave millions of people a shared language for organizing digital life.

As he explains it himself: “The purpose of PARA is really to answer the question how do I organize my notes and files once and for all and therefore to minimize the amount of time I’m making that decision every day.”

He wrote two bestsellers. He earned the influence.

Forte’s framework holds up. What happened after the book is the issue.

We treat building a second brain like building a house. Pick the foundation. Frame the rooms. Wire the electricity. Then stand back and admire the architecture. Never move in.

Forte’s own team warns against the most common trap: people try to sort every existing note into PARA at once, instead of migrating only what they need, when they need it. Nobody listens. We open the firehose on day one and wonder why we drown.

The frameworks themselves get in the way, too. PARA and Zettelkasten are borrowed logic. If you think in pictures, tables and tags fight you. If you think in broad strokes, fine-grained templates lose you. A system that ignores how your brain actually works becomes something you wrestle with instead of something that helps.

Cal Newport noticed the same pattern from a different angle. He argued that current second brain trends “focus more on the relentless accumulation of knowledge than on its processing.” We’ve built intake machines. Not thinking machines.

, who runs his own second brain software company, put it bluntly: “Most ‘second brain’ apps are just glorified note-taking software.”

Even the people selling the tools can see it.

Melany Gallant framed the real stakes:

Treat your notes like a bloodstream, not a vault. If nothing’s circulating, the system is dead.

The threat assessment problem

Building a second brain has no stakes. That’s the whole problem.

Choosing between Notion and Obsidian? Low threat. Designing your folder structure? Low threat. Watching another YouTube tutorial about the perfect tagging system? No threat at all.

Your brain runs a threat assessment the second stakes become real. A deadline that matters. Someone counting on you. Money involved. When the pressure arrives, behavior that felt fine in experimental mode gets flagged immediately.

Building is safe. Using — producing, publishing, making decisions with what you’ve saved — that’s when the amygdala taps you on the shoulder.

I know the difference because I’ve been both people. One version of me rebuilt his folder structure every January like a midwesterner shoveling the same driveway after the same storm. Productive feeling.

Zero forward motion.

The other version asked a different question. The one that actually moved things forward.

“How will I find this when I need it?”

Retrieval-first thinking

Most note systems optimize for intake. Where it goes. What folder. Which tag. How it connects.

Flip it.

Optimize for the moment six months from now when you’re tired, interrupted, holding a coffee that’s been reheated twice, and you need one specific thing you remember saving but can’t remember where.

That’s retrieval-first thinking. And it changes what you write down, how you write it, and whether you ever see it again.

Five small shifts. None of them require a new app.

1. Write every note to your future self

The person who needs this note is you in six months. Tired. Distracted. Twelve minutes to find something useful before a kid needs a snack or a meeting starts.

Don’t write “great idea about productivity.”

Write “the thing Dan said about batching creative work before 10am — try this with newsletter drafting on Wednesday mornings.”

A vague note is a tombstone. A specific note is someone leaving you directions on the kitchen counter because they knew you’d be in a hurry.

2. Add one trigger phrase

Nobody maintains a tagging system. I say this as someone who has built roughly fourteen of them and abandoned every single one.

One sentence — plain language, the thing you’d actually type into a search bar — that works.

“When I’m frustrated with my 9-5.”

“Kid schedule hack.”

“Newsletter idea — transitions.”

That’s the whole taxonomy. You don’t need a controlled vocabulary. You need the phrase your future self will think of first.

3. The Sunday 10-minute scan

You don’t need to review everything. You need to review what’s relevant to this week.

Open your notes. Scroll through the last two weeks. Pull three things that relate to whatever you’re working on right now.

Ten minutes. Tops.

It’s not a full inbox cleanup. It’s glancing at the fridge before you go grocery shopping.

4. Attach notes to projects, not categories

PARA got this right: Projects over Areas. But simplify further.

Every note gets tied to one thing you’re actually building. That article about morning routines? Attach it to “July newsletter draft.” Not “Health.” Not “Productivity.” Not some folder that will hold 47 articles and produce zero finished work.

If a note isn’t attached to a project, it’s not a resource. It’s a bookmark with extra steps.

5. Let bad notes die

Some notes are scaffolding. They served one purpose: they got a thought out of your head.

You don’t keep every grocery list you’ve ever written. You don’t need to keep a note that says “Costco brain fog thing” from 2023. (I’m not judging. I’ve written that exact note.)

The guilt comes from treating every captured thought like a permanent commitment. It’s not. Most of what you save will never circulate again, and that’s fine. The point isn’t a perfect system.

The point is that the stuff that matters can actually find you.

Beyond the content machine

Most of the second brain conversation orbits around one thing: producing more content. Books, newsletters, launch campaigns, marketing assets. The framework was built by creators, for creators.

But once you stop building and start using, other doors open.

Reuse everything. The article you saved about morning routines shouldn’t just live in a “Health” folder. It could feed a newsletter this month, shape a parenting decision next week, and inform a workflow redesign at your day job the month after that.

A retrieval-first system makes one saved resource available to every project you’re running. The note doesn’t sit in a category. It floats. And you can drop it into whatever you’re building this week without re-saving it or remembering which folder you buried it in.

I noticed this with my own stuff. A thread about burnout I’d saved for a newsletter turned out to be just as useful for a conversation with my manager about workload.

A framework for organizing creative projects became the backbone of how I planned a family trip. The categories had been blocking the connections.

Your second brain is a mirror. If you actually review what you save over time — not obsessively, just the Sunday 10-minute scan — patterns emerge that have nothing to do with output.

What do you keep coming back to? What do you capture obsessively and never use? What topics show up in your saves three months before you admit they matter to you?

Self-knowledge doesn’t require journaling. Sometimes it just requires paying attention to what you’re already saving.

I noticed I’d been hoarding articles about neurodivergence for a year before I was ready to name what was going on with my own brain. The system knew before I did. I just hadn’t been looking.

Track decisions, not just dollars. Financial clarity doesn’t come from a budgeting app. It comes from connecting decisions to outcomes over time.

A second brain can hold that. A note when you made a purchase, why you made it, what you expected it to do. A note six months later about whether it did.

Skip the spreadsheet. Build a trail. Trails are easier to retrace than numbers are to interpret in a vacuum.

What to do tonight

Open whatever app you already have. Apple Notes. A Google Doc. The back of an envelope.

Write one thing you’ve been holding in your head. Write it like you’ll need it in six months. Add one trigger phrase you’d actually search for.

That’s it.

Notion can wait. Obsidian can wait. The plugins and the templates and the YouTube tutorials will all still be there.

Louis L’Amour wrote that “knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.”

The 25-minute windows are already here.

Take care of yourselves,

Matt

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P.S. If you haven’t read Forte’s books, they’re both worth your time. Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method are the framework at its best — before the internet turned it into a 47-plugin obsession. Also, where you do you struggle with second brain building? Feel free to leave a comment below, and if this resonated with you, please make sure to hit the heart and restack buttons, as it’s one of the best ways to let Substack know from a discovery standpoint.

Leave a comment

P.P.S. I use Mem for my own notes. It’s built around search and surfacing, not folder building, which is why it stuck when the others didn’t. You can find my Mem link and everything else I use in my toolbox.

P.P.P.S. I organize my research boards in Eden — it’s where I drop everything before a newsletter like this one. All the links, tweets, quotes, and half-formed ideas in one place. Not a note app. A thinking space. My Eden link is in the toolbox too.

A family member of mine is moving soon. Closer to us, which is the good part.

But they’ve lived in the same spot for over 40 years. Four decades of habits, of knowing which drawer holds the tape, of the way the light comes through the kitchen window at 4 p.m. in October.

They’re experiencing what you’d expect: a whirlwind of emotions, some they can name and some they can’t.

I’ve moved several times myself. Each time, the same quiet question: will this place feel like home? Sometimes yes, sometimes it took years, sometimes it never quite landed.

So I posted a question on Substack a couple weeks ago. One question. (Feel free to add your own contribution to it, if you have already.)

I wasn’t sure anyone would answer. I’d been turning the word over in my head for a while, the way you do with something that’s been right in front of you so long you’ve stopped seeing it.

I live in a house. My family’s in it. My coffee maker’s in it. That’s home, right?

Then the responses started coming in.

Dozens of them. From Michigan and Macedonia and the Shenandoah Valley. From nomads and retirees and moms and people who’d lost their homes and people still looking for one.

And not one of them named an address.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to. I had a board full of answers from people I respect, people who took the time to write back to a stranger’s question, and nobody said “123 Maple Street.” Nobody said “the house I bought in 2019.”

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Jess, citing Gaston Bachelard, wrote that our childhood home is the first world we experience. “It’s where we learn about safety, warmth, belonging, and intimacy. It’s where a drawer can seem like a treasure and a wardrobe can feel like a secret doorway.” Even after we leave, that first home shapes how we feel about space forever.

A Gentle Reset Wellness Club said home is “the feeling of not needing to perform to be accepted. Where I can exhale, drop self monitoring and stop adjusting myself to fit the room.”

Tee Dee put it even sharper: “Home is the place I stop performing.”

Cassondra Tempest said it’s where she feels safest, free to express herself “without repentance or repercussions.” With her husband, bouncing ideas off each other late into the night.

Sensei Duncan called it “a place of belonging. It’s not a physical location, but can be represented by one.”

Adam Fraiel has been a nomad for eight years. He felt immediately at home in Macedonia, Samoa, and Paraguay. He couldn’t put his finger on why. He just knew.

Sean Mize said the place in his mind that’s home doesn’t exist. It’s a home in the country with caring people around, lots of love, kids playing in the meadow. “It’s certainly not where I lay my head.”

Brett Will Taylor called it an “inner state of sovereignty.” First experienced on Highway 10 in Arizona.

Melinda V King said it’s “a feeling of cosiness I get inside of myself. Regardless of what country I’m in.”

Emanuela B said it’s “a portfolio of places.”

Wendy Dumaresq: “Being at peace in my Heart and Spirit.”

Valentina, PhD: “A state of mind.”

Adele Walsh: “Within. I’m fine anywhere I can close my eyes and go within.”

Ruby Sengar: no peace of mind, no home. Mansion or studio apartment, doesn’t matter.

Ivelina Ivanova told a story about her apartment. She felt completely at home in it for years. Then she met her partner. They spent five days together. He left for Germany to pack his things and move to her country, and suddenly the apartment didn’t feel like home anymore. Nothing about the apartment had changed. Everything about her definition of home, had.

Melanie Goodman said home is “the sound of my family mid-conversation when I walk through the door. A feeling rather than a fixed address.”

Florence Acosta: where her son, husband, and mom are.

Afton Brazzoni: “My husband and my dogs.”

Nikki Finlay: “Home is where the cats and the hubby are.”

Phil Duncalfe grew up in at least three countries. Home became about his people, not his location.

John Marshall: “When I am with people I love and who love me, I am home.”

Joshua Robertson said it directly: “I spent time looking for a place or an idea that would feel like home, and realized I was carrying home inside me all along.”

The responses kept coming, and they kept landing on the same thing from different angles.

Not one address. Not one mortgage statement. Not one set of GPS coordinates.

The house is not the home, but we keep confusing them

We spend a lot of money and a lot of years chasing the house.

The square footage. The neighborhood. The curb appeal. I get it. I’ve done it.

But here’s what the responses made obvious: the house is infrastructure. The home is the thing that happens inside the infrastructure. Or beside it. Or despite it.

Gaston Bachelard wrote an entire book about this in 1958. The Poetics of Space.

He argued that the house we were born in is “physically inscribed in us.” It’s a group of organic habits. The house is not experienced as a collection of rooms; it’s experienced as a body of memories, smells, sounds, textures.

After twenty years, he wrote, “the water closet on the ground floor remains a water closet on the ground floor, and not some distant memory.”

Tracey at Stillwater Studio got the duality right away: “Home is both the 4 walls that keep me safe and warm and dry. And my mind and body that will go with me, are me, everywhere I am in this earthly existence.”

Both things can be true. The walls matter.

But they’re not the answer.

I’ve been both people

I spent years commuting to cubicles, driving home without much of a chance to transition from work to family. Somewhere in that compression chamber I lost track of whether the house I was driving toward felt like home or just felt like the place I stopped moving.

The land is beautiful. But the land doesn’t make the home.

My spouse makes the home. My daughters make the home.

The coffee in the morning and the quiet bike rides at 6 miles an hour and the chamomile in the late afternoon.

The Northern Lights on our 10th anniversary, showing up like something the universe booked without telling anyone.

The house holds it. But the house isn’t it.

If home isn’t a place, you can build it anywhere

Here’s the advantage, the thing the responses gave me that I wasn’t expecting.

If home isn’t an address, you don’t have to wait for the right address to feel it.

You don’t have to wait for the mortgage to be paid off or the renovation to be finished or the move to happen. You don’t have to wait for land to have a house on it. You don’t have to wait for the workday to end.

If home is the people, you’re home at the dinner table tonight.

If home is the absence of performance, you’re home the moment you stop adjusting yourself to fit the room.

If home is an inner state, you’re home when you close your eyes and go within, like Adele said.

There’s another thing this makes me think about.

Travel. We chase it. We save for it. We come back from a week away feeling more alive than we’d felt in months.

And we tell ourselves it was the place. The beach. The mountains. The cobblestone streets.

But what if it wasn’t the place? What if it was the novelty, the lowered expectations, the permission to just be somewhere without producing anything?

What if the thing we love about travel is that, for a few days, we stop performing — and we could incorporate some version of that at home right now?

A Thursday night where you treat your own town like a destination. A meal cooked slowly with no phone nearby. A walk after dark with no agenda except noticing what’s different.

Or maybe the other side of it: travel reminds you what you already have.

You come home and the coffee maker’s still there. The familiar corner of the couch. The way the light hits the kitchen. You’d stopped seeing it.

Now you see it again.

Three ways to find home without moving

1. The performance audit.

Tee Dee said home is the place she stops performing. Where in your day do you stop performing? Not where you’d like to. Where you actually do. The five minutes before bed when nobody’s watching? The car after you pull into the driveway but before you open the door? That’s home, or it’s closer to it than you think. Pay attention to that threshold.

2. The people test.

When Ivelina’s partner left for Germany, her apartment stopped feeling like home. Nothing about the apartment changed. Everything about who was in it did. Make a list: who are the people that, when they’re present, the room feels different? That’s your home, and it’s portable.

3. The inner address.

Brett Will Taylor felt home on Highway 10 in Arizona. Not because of Arizona. Because of something that shifted inside him while he was there. Where have you felt that? Not the place. The feeling. Write it down. Name it. That’s the address you’re actually looking for.

What to do tonight.

Open a note on your phone. Answer the question I asked, for yourself.

What does home mean to you? Not what it’s supposed to mean. What it actually means. Don’t edit it. Don’t make it sound good. Just write it.

Then look at what you wrote. I’m guessing it won’t be an address either.

And if you’re up for it, answer this too:

Leave a comment

This essay exists because of the people below. Every single one of them responded to a single question I posted on Substack. If you’re in this list: thank you. You wrote back to a stranger and helped him see something he’d been standing too close to notice. If you’re not in this list, I hope you’ll click through a few of these. The answers are worth your time.

With gratitude: Jess, A Gentle Reset Wellness Club, Tee Dee, Cassondra Tempest, Sensei Duncan, Adam Fraiel, Sean Mize, Brett Will Taylor, Melinda V King, Emanuela B, Wendy Dumaresq, Valentina, PhD, Adele Walsh, Ruby Sengar, Ivelina Ivanova, Melanie Goodman, Florence Acosta, Afton Brazzoni, Nikki Finlay, Phil Duncalfe, John Marshall, Joshua Robertson, Tracey at Stillwater Studio, Sheryl Keen, Mark Nickerson | Lead Calm, Running on wine and sarcasm, Chinedu Okelikwu, Erica, Irene, Diane Tilmann, Elizabeth H. Cottrell, Owen’s Slow Signal, Ceri H, Gloria Brewer, Howell Bigham, Kendra | We Writers Write, Right?, Mark Williams, Motherhood and Marketing, Laura Elliott, Lee Forzly, and AsChillAsACapybara.

Take care of yourselves,

Matt

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P.P.S. I used Eden Briefs to organize the research for this essay — all 40+ responses in one place, no tab chaos, no lost screenshots. If you’re doing community-sourced writing like this, it’s built for exactly this kind of work. Here’s my link if you want to try it.

P.P.P.S. If this essay landed, you might like the Mitten Dad Minute. One story-led essay every other week about building something meaningful in the margins of a real life. No perfect mornings required. Make sure to hit the heart and restack buttons, as it’s one of the best ways to help with discovery for Substack.

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I hit a number last year. A real one. The kind I’d been chasing for 18 months.

I closed the laptop. Waited for the feeling.

Nothing shifted.

You probably know the version of this story I’m telling. The promotion that didn’t fix the dread. The launch that didn’t fix the doubt. The subscriber milestone felt like just another day.

I believed crossing some invisible line would change me into a person who felt different.

It doesn't work that way.

Ikigai, the actual Japanese version, explains why the feeling never came.

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The four circles you’ve seen are not the practice

Here’s the version you’ve seen 100 times. Four overlapping circles. What you love. What you’re good at. What the world needs. What you can be paid for. The sweet spot in the middle is your ikigai.

It’s a clean diagram. It looks like the answer.

It has nothing to do with the original Japanese concept.

The book Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles makes this plain (I recently finished this and highly recommend it).

The Okinawan elders, the book studies aren’t talking about overlapping circles. They talk about reasons to get out of bed. A garden. A grandchild. A neighbor who needs help. A 6 am ritual with green tea and the news.

puts it bluntly in The 5 Types of Wealth: “Your purpose does not need to be connected to your profession.”

The Venn diagram is a career-planning tool with a Japanese label on top. It’s been doing laps on LinkedIn and self-help blogs for a decade, and the people sharing it are no closer to settled than the day they started.

The original practice is something else.

Ikigai is what you do on a Thursday

The Ikigai book quotes Washington Burnap from two centuries ago: “The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”

Three small things. The book lists them on the same page.

That’s the heart of it. Ikigai is the reason your feet hit the floor on a Thursday morning when nothing exciting is scheduled. The practice that fills the boring hours. The small ritual that means more to you than it would to anyone watching.

That’s an ikigai sentence, even if Tim didn’t use the word. The good things are already there. The practice is noticing them.

The book makes another point that hit me hard.

Ikigai works like a compass. The four-circle diagram works like a map.

MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito calls this “compass over maps”. In a world moving too fast for detailed plans, a clear direction beats a perfect route. A map promises you’ll arrive somewhere. A compass just keeps you pointed.

I know the difference because I've been both people. One closed the laptop. The other showed up at 6 am.

What I kept from those 18 months was the writing itself. The number was just where I stopped counting.

The person I became while chasing it is the only part I get to keep.

The creator’s ikigai problem

If you’re a creator, two of your circles overlap fast. You love making stuff. You’re good at it.

The other two are murkier. What the world needs from you is hard to read. What pays often corrupts the whole stack.

Creators don’t chase shiny formats because they lack discipline.

They chase them because they’re missing a daily practice underneath.

Every algorithm shift looks like an answer when you’re unanchored. When you have a practice, the shiny stuff filters itself.

Ikigai, the real version, is that filter.

It’s also why “hit 1,000 subscribers” was the wrong thing to fixate on.

The number was fine. The framing had me staring at a finish line instead of asking what Dr. Shoma Morita built a whole school of therapy around: “What do we need to be doing right now?”

That question is the practice. Right now. Thursday morning.

Three experiments to find yours

Start small. Three experiments, low-stakes, this week.

1. The Thursday morning test

Pick one Thursday morning. 60 minutes before the day grabs you. Do the thing you’d want to be doing if no one was watching, no money was coming, and no algorithm was rewarding it.

Write down what you picked. That’s a data point.

2. The four questions, slowed down

The four circles work better as a slow exercise than a quick checklist. 30 seconds gives you shallow answers. 10 minutes per circle gives you usable ones. Sit with each one:

• What did I love doing at age 9 that I no longer let myself do?

• What do strangers thank me for that I shrug off?

• What problem in the world makes me feel something close to anger?

• What kind of work do I get paid for that doesn’t drain me?

Write the answers in a paper notebook. The friction matters.

3. The notice list

Back to Tim Denning’s line. For 7 days, write down 3 things you noticed that day. Small things. The way your kid said your name. The light at 4 pm. The first sip of coffee.

By day 7, you’ll see what you actually care about. It’s seldom the thing you thought.

You’re after a compass that works on a hard Thursday, not a trophy you set on a shelf.

The Thursday-morning version of me already feels what I thought a 1,000-subscriber milestone would deliver. That’s the whole reveal.

What to do tonight

Open a note on your phone. Title it “Thursday morning.” (or whatever day of your choosing)

Write one sentence answering: if I had 60 minutes tomorrow morning before anyone needed anything from me, what would I do that would still matter in a year?

That’s the start. The rest unfolds over months.

If you want help going deeper, I built two things for this exact moment. The free starter is in the P.S. The paid pack is too.

Thursday morning. 60 minutes. What would you do?

Leave a comment

That’s the only ikigai question that ever mattered.

If this resonated, please make sure to hit the heart and restack buttons, as it’s one of the best ways to help discoverability of Mitten Dad Minute on Substack.

Take care of yourselves,

Matt

Get more from Matt Tilmann in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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P.S. A few things, in order:

1. The 8-Question Ikigai Starter (free). A PDF I’d hand my past self before he burned 18 months on the wrong number.

Ikigai Starter 8 Questions

47.5KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

2. The Ikigai AI Prompt Pack ($9). 60 prompts for Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok that turn your journal entries, skills list, and “what makes time fly” answers into a working ikigai statement in an afternoon. Paid MDM subscribers get it free.

Get It On Gumroad

Get 20% off forever

3. The Eden offer (and the rest). I keep a single page with every current partner offer I stand behind. Eden, Mem AI (code MITTENDAD, 20% off 3 months), and a few others. The easiest way to see what’s live.

4. For even more, be sure to check out Daily Refill, Systems That Stick, The Mitten Dad Show, and more. Be sure to head here.

At 9:47 on a Friday night, both kids finally asleep, I was 40 minutes deep into a Reels scroll about people organizing their pantries by color, or something along those lines.

I got diagnosed as a Level 1 Autistic at the end of 2025, along with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, at 41, and that scroll is part of why. By the time you finish reading this, you’ll have a way to read your own patterns without flinching, and one bedtime system that survives the worst night of your week.

That’s the deal.

I hadn’t moved off the couch. The laundry on the bed still needed folding. I had no intention of doing either. It took me a year of nights like that to figure out what the scroll actually was.

The Reels were unmasking. I’d spent the entire day being a person who answers emails, makes small talk, holds eye contact in meetings, and pretends fluorescent lights and noise in the grocery store aren’t a sensory event.

By 9:47, my nervous system had filed for unemployment. The phone was the only place quiet enough to put it down.

If any of that hits, keep reading. You might be running a brain you never got an owner’s manual for.

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If you’re nodding, you’re not alone

The phrases I hear from other parents in this same spot are eerily consistent.

I crave to be a Type A in a Type B brain. I thrive on routine, but I can’t hold one past day 9.

Every day is one thing after another. I’m in a constant state of burnout and fight or flight.

I never thought about autism until parenthood. Now I feel like I’m at a breaking point a lot.

Adult ADHD diagnoses now routinely land in people’s 30s and 40s. Most autistic adults are believed to be undiagnosed. The people most likely to slip past detection are the ones with above-average intelligence and socially acceptable obsessions.

The ones whose coping mechanisms held just well enough to hide the underlying load.

Pre-kid, those mechanisms held. You picked your environment. You controlled your time. You collapsed in private.

Then you had children, and the controlled environment evaporated.

The signs were always there. The cost of hiding them got too high.

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Why parenting hit you harder than your 20s ever did

Lindsey Mackereth, a Substack writer I read often and subscribe to, calls it the Neurocomplexity Resource Theory.

The idea is simple. The same neurological wiring expresses as “giftedness” when you have resources, and as ADHD or autism-like symptoms when you don’t.

Resources, in this case, mean money, sleep, sensory recovery time, predictable environments, and emotional bandwidth. The exact things parenting incinerates.

When you had a 7 am-3 pm office job, a quiet apartment, and full control over your evenings, the same brain you have now produced “high-functioning.” It looked like competence. Sometimes it even looked like brilliance.

Then a toddler walked into the room, and the resource spectrum collapsed. Becoming a parent stripped out the conditions that were holding it all together. The wiring stayed the same.

This is why your friends without kids still seem fine. They’re running the resource model that used to work for you.

You’re running the same hardware on a fraction of the input.

7 signs you’ve been masking longer than you realized

If you nod at 3 or more, the question to ask is what was always there, and what’s just now showing up because you finally ran out of room to hide it.

1. The witching hour wrecks you in a way it doesn’t wreck your partner. Decision fatigue compounds. Bath, story, water, last potty, pajamas, song, no the other song, kiss, leave the door cracked. By 8 pm, you’ve stopped parenting. You’re trying not to dissolve.

2. You crave routine and cannot hold one past day 9. You build the elaborate Sunday schedule. By Wednesday, it’s a guilt artifact stuck to the fridge. (Same brain, different season of life.)

3. People call you intimidating, confident, or “having it together,” and you have no idea what they see. Mackereth calls it the Confidence Paradox. The version of you that other people respect is the version you built to survive observation.

4. You disappear into a screen the second the kids are contained. Reels, Reddit, X, fantasy football. Your nervous system needs a corner with no eye contact, and the screen is the cheapest one available.

5. Rest doesn’t refill you. Six weeks of sleeping in on Saturdays and you still feel hollowed out by Tuesday. Megan Anna Neff, in Self-Care for Autistic People, points out the sensory regulation problem. If you can’t read your own internal signals, you can’t refuel them.

6. You were the kid who never had to try, until suddenly everything required trying. Gifted programs, then AP classes, then college, then your 20s, then a meeting at work you couldn’t follow. Resource Theory in a single arc.

7. You see your parents in yourself in ways you don’t want to. ADHD and autism carry 70-80% heritability. The overwhelmed, dysregulated, checked-out caregiver you grew up with may have been working with the exact wiring you’re working with now. (That’s the grief part. It’s allowed to land.)

Why are your systems failing

Most productivity systems assume infinite attention and consistent energy. They were built for nervous systems with reliable recovery loops.

Tiago Forte, citing James Clear in Building a Second Brain, makes the case directly: habits exist to reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity for creativity and focus. For brains already running hot from masking, simple systems are a neurological necessity.

The Sunday-night reset you abandoned in Week 3 failed because it required executive function you’d already spent. Depletion looks like laziness from the outside. From the inside, it’s a fuel gauge stuck on empty.

Jessica McCabe’s How to Stick to Habits and Routines Without Falling Off is the best 15 minutes of ADHD-friendly systems advice I’ve found on the internet, and it doubles as a primer on why “just try harder” stops working in adulthood.

This is the foundation under everything else. Until you have one system that works on the worst day of your week, no other system stays alive.

The Minimum Viable Evening

Here’s the system. Three steps. Designed to survive a kid with a fever, a missed nap, and your last functioning neuron.

1. Pick one anchor task. Just one.

Teeth before pajamas. Lunch boxes by the door. Plates rinsed in the sink. Pick the one task that, if it happens, makes tomorrow morning recoverable. That’s your anchor. Everything else is a bonus.

2. Externalize the next step.

Whiteboard on the fridge. Sticky on the bathroom mirror. Voice memo to yourself before you sit down. Working memory is the first thing masking burns through. If it’s in your head, it’s already gone.

3. Lower the bar on purpose.

“Good enough” tonight protects “showed up at all” tomorrow. The version of you that wants to crush all 6 things is the same version that triggered the Reels scroll at 9:47.

I built the same logic into a full weekend version in Sunday Night Panic: Weekend Prep for Busy Parents. The Minimum Viable Evening is the same idea, scaled to a 2-hour window between dishes and dead-eye scrolling.

One anchor. Externalized. Bar set low. That’s the whole system.

In Closing…

Mackereth wrote a line I keep coming back to: “You didn’t break anything. You revealed something that was already broken. And your nervous system refused to pretend otherwise.”

Diagnosis gave me the words for what was already happening. It turned on a flashlight in the room where I’d been moving by memory for 41 years.

You’re allowed to take the question seriously. You’re allowed to read your own history without flinching. Tonight, pick one anchor, write it down somewhere you’ll see it in the morning, and let the rest go. Leave a comment below letting me know what you might try out, and what your thoughts are on this.

Take care of yourselves.

Matt

If this resonated with you, please make sure to hit the heart and restack buttons as it’s one of the best (and free) ways to let Substack know that content like this matters to you, and helps with discoverability.

Get more from Matt Tilmann in the Substack app

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Leave a comment

P.S. If you want to start exploring this on your own, two free screeners are worth knowing about. The CAT-Q is autism-focused and explicitly accounts for masking. The RAADS-R is the most-cited adult autism self-report. Both are starting points. A screener is not a diagnosis. If you want a real evaluation, find a clinician who specializes in adult assessment.

P.P.S.

A tool I actually use: Eden

I’ve been using this since the early Kortex days, and the evolution into Eden has been worth following.

Eden is where I build my research and gather ideas before I write. You can save YouTube videos, articles, links, and notes into one workspace — everything gets automatically transcribed, tagged, and made searchable. When I’m ready to write, I’m not hunting across six open tabs. The material is already there, connected, and ready to pull from.

For creators who do any kind of research before they publish, it’s the clearest solution I’ve found for getting out of capture chaos and into actual output.

7-day free trial, no card required. Check it out here:

Try Out Eden Today

(Affiliate link — I only recommend tools I use.)

P.P.P.S. I built The 15-Minute Chaos-to-Clarity Reset for nights exactly like the one I described in the open. It’s free for paid MDM subscribers, along with everything else in the shop. If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, this is the issue.

Get 20% off forever

P.P.P.P.S. If you want this same message landed in audio form, watch If You Have ADHD, Please Watch This from ADHDVision. Skip to lesson 17 if you only have a minute. Title of the lesson: “You’re not lazy, you’re just wired differently.” It’s the same flashlight I described in the close, held up by someone else.

FAQ

Can adults be diagnosed with autism or ADHD in their 30s or 40s?

Yes. Adult ADHD diagnoses commonly happen in the 30s and 40s, and the same is increasingly true for autism. Many adults who go undiagnosed for decades have above-average intelligence and developed effective masking strategies in childhood. Diagnosis often happens after a major life change like parenthood, job loss, or burnout that overwhelms the compensation strategies.

Why did parenting trigger symptoms I never noticed before?

Parenting collapses the resources that previously kept your nervous system regulated: sleep, predictable routine, sensory recovery time, and emotional bandwidth. The Neurocomplexity Resource Theory frames it clearly: the same wiring expresses as competence when resourced, and as ADHD or autism-like symptoms when depleted. The conditions changed. The wiring stayed the same.

Are free online screeners like CAT-Q or RAADS-R reliable?

They’re validated as screening tools, not diagnostic tools. A high score on the CAT-Q or RAADS-R suggests a formal evaluation may be worth pursuing. For an actual diagnosis, work with a clinician who specializes in adult assessment, ideally one familiar with masking presentations.

Last week’s issue handled the easy clutter. The cables. The apps. The cosmetics that expired in 2019.

This one is the box you’ve been avoiding.

By the time you finish, you’ll have a 3-question filter you can run tonight on one shelf, one folder, or one camera roll.

No purge weekend. No guilt sermon.

I have oodles of boxes in our garage that haven’t been opened in years.

Every time I’m out there, I notice it. I tell myself I’ll go through it “when I have more time.” Then I go back in, refill my coffee, and forget about it until the next trip outside.

The boxes don’t move. The decisions don’t get made. The thinking-about-the-boxes runs in the background like a tab I can’t close.

The instinct most of us have is that we need a long, emotional weekend to do this properly. Light a candle. Cry it out.

Hold each item to our chest and feel something profound.

That’s a beautiful idea that has stopped roughly 100% of the parents I know from ever starting.

Why “wait for the right moment” never works

The right moment doesn’t show up. Your kids will not pick a Saturday to nap simultaneously. Your work week will not get lighter.

Your grief, if that’s what’s parked in the box, will not show up on a calendar.

The sentimental box sits there drawing a small mental charge every day, while you wait for an emotional weather window that’s not coming.

The same is true digitally. Your phone has 47,000 photos. Your iMessage thread with someone who’s no longer here.

The drafts folder with the unfinished essay. The Google Doc your kid typed when they were 6 and just learned where the period was.

You can’t run a 15-Minute Triage on any of that. Not honestly.

You can run something else, though.

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What the sentimental category actually is

Marie Kondo names it cleanly in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: “There are only two reasons we can’t let something go. Attachment to the past or fear of the future.”

For the sentimental pile, it’s usually the first.

That box is storing a version of you. The child you were. The relationship you had. The parent who’s gone. The object is the receipt.

That’s why “just throw it out” advice feels offensive. It is. The advice treats the object as an object.

Your brain promoted it to something else a long time ago.

The Sentimental Sort: a 3-question filter

This is the system. One question for each box you open. One question for each photo folder. One question for each old thread.

Question 1: Does the memory live in the object, or in me?

Kondo writes: “It is not our memories but the person we have become because of those past experiences that we should treasure.”

If you can recall the memory clearly without holding the object, the memory lives in you. The object is a receipt for a transaction that has already cleared.

Photograph it. Keep the photo. Pass the object on. Digitize it. The memory comes with you.

Question 2: If this disappeared in a fire tomorrow, what would actually feel lost?

This one is the hardest. Most of us have never asked it.

The answer is seldom “the object.” Usually it’s “what the object was supposed to keep me connected to.”

If the connection is the thing, the object might not be necessary.

If the object is actually irreplaceable, a handwritten letter, a piece of jewelry that was worn, the only photo of someone, that’s a signal. Those go in the keep pile.

Question 3: Who am I keeping this for: past me, present me, or someone else who isn’t here?

Past me kept a lot of theatre programs. Present me has never re-read one.

Sometimes the honest answer is “for my kids when they’re older.” That’s a real reason. Photograph the items, save them in a labeled folder, and put 3 representative pieces in a single keepsake box per kid. The other 47 boxes are for the past you.

What this looks like for your phone

Same 3 questions, applied to pixels.

Old text thread from someone who passed: question 2 settles it. Keep the thread. Screenshot the moments that matter. Back them up to a folder you’d grab in a fire.

47,000 photos: question 1. The photo of the grocery receipt from 2014 doesn’t carry a memory. Delete that. The photo of your kid’s third birthday does. Star it.

Drafts folder of half-finished essays: question 3. Past you wrote them. Present you doesn’t need them as a museum.

Cal Newport calls this “a philosophy of technology use” in Digital Minimalism. You choose, on purpose, what gets to keep occupying you.

The 4-step protocol

The 3 questions are the engine. Here’s the runtime.

Step 1. Pick one container. One physical box, one digital folder, one camera roll per year, one thread.

Step 2. Hold each item. Run the 3 questions. 10 seconds per item.

Step 3. Three piles: Keep, Photograph-then-Pass, Release. The photograph step is what makes this work. It moves the memory out of the object and onto a backup before the object leaves.

Step 4. Limit yourself to 15 minutes or 1 container, whichever comes first. Then stop.

Like the 15-Minute Triage, it works because it’s small enough to actually start.

The guilt question nobody answers honestly

If you donate someone’s stuff, you didn’t undo them. If you pass on a gift, you didn’t insult the giver. If you delete the photo of the receipt from 2014, you didn’t insult 2014 you.

Héctor García and Francesc Miralles write in Ikigai: “Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow.”

Flow doesn’t happen in a room you’re emotionally cohabiting with the ghosts of 12 different versions of yourself. Calm doesn’t either.

The Sentimental Sort gives you a way to choose, on purpose, which versions of you and which people get to stay loud in your house.

A few writers are doing good work on this

If you want a weekly drip on this topic from someone other than me, these are good follows.

• Peggy Hall on decluttering sentimental items. She leans hard on the scan-or-photograph workaround.

• Elle Penner’s Modern Minimalism. The 30-Day Minimalism Game I mentioned last week is hers.

• Emily P. Freeman on soul minimalism. Frames decluttering as a soul-level practice, which lands for the inherited categories.

• Tom Watson on the magic of decluttering. A good companion read.

Quick FAQ

How do you let go of sentimental items from someone who has passed?

Run question 2 first. Keep 1 to 3 things that are actually irreplaceable. For the rest, photograph the item, write 2 sentences about why it mattered, and pass it on. The 2 sentences usually hold the memory better than the item ever did.

What if my partner won’t get rid of anything?

Start with your own things. Decluttering is contagious. Quiet modeling beats nagging every time, and Kondo says the same thing in Tidying Up with more receipts than I have.

Is digital decluttering really the same as physical?

Mostly, yes. The mental tab is the mental tab, whether it’s a junk drawer or a folder of screenshots. The 3 questions work on both. The friction is lower digitally, no donation run, no awkward conversation with your mother-in-law, so it’s often a good warm-up.

How long should I keep a triage box before donating?

30 days. If you haven’t pulled anything out of it in a month, you weren’t going to.

What should I do with kid artwork without throwing it all away?

One box per kid, per year. Photograph the rest in batches on a Sunday afternoon. The photographed versions go in a shared family album so the kids can scroll through later. The originals you keep are the ones you’d save in a fire.

Is digital minimalism just about deleting apps?

Deleting apps is one move inside a bigger frame. Digital minimalism is choosing, on purpose, which tools earn time on your screen. The 3-question filter applies to apps the same way it applies to a closet. Cal Newport’s full definition lives in Digital Minimalism, and it’s worth the read.

Your one action tonight

Tonight, not this weekend, tonight: pick one container.

Set a timer for 15 minutes. Run the 3 questions on every item you can pick up before the timer ends. Photograph anything that hesitates. Stop when the timer stops.

That’s it. The pile in the basement does not get smaller by being thought about.

P.S. If today’s piece resonates, please make sure to hit the heart and restack buttons, as it’s one of the best and free ways to let Substack know that this matters to readers on the platform.

P.P.S. I use Mem (code MITTENDAD for 20% off 3 months Pro) to capture the 2-sentence “why this mattered” notes when I photograph something before letting it go. It’s the digital equivalent of writing a memory on the back of a photograph, except the back of the photograph is searchable.

Take care of yourselves.

Matt

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The thing about clutter is that it doesn’t sit there.

You walk past the pile on the counter, and your brain notes it.

You open the closet you’ve been meaning to tackle since last April and, somewhere in the background, it files a tab.

The junk drawer. The bookshelf. The phone’s home screen has 23 apps you haven’t opened since 2023.

All of it runs a small, quiet charge on your attention every single day.

By the time you finish reading this, you’ll have a 3-step system you can run tonight in 15 minutes. No weekend required.

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Every pile you walk past is charging you something

There’s research on this. Darby Saxbe and Rena Repetti at UCLA found that cluttered home environments were associated with elevated cortisol levels in women throughout the day, whereas tidier, “restorative” spaces were not.

The brain doesn’t cleanly separate what’s “in use” from what’s simply present. Things in your visual field compete for working memory, even when you’re not consciously thinking about them.

You’re not imagining that you think more after you clear the kitchen counter.

That’s real.

Clutter doesn’t give you a choice. It deploys your attention for you, on things you didn’t choose, every time you walk past them.

One post making the rounds on Reddit this week said the same thing differently: every physical thing comes with a burden. The burden is the tiny mental claim it places on you. You see it, register it, decide to deal with it later, and then repeat the whole cycle every time it crosses your path again. Not fun.

If you’re carrying a full schedule and trying to build something on the side, whether that’s a creative project, a business, or a life that feels like yours, those cycles add up fast.

How minimalism became one more thing to fail at

Pick any popular decluttering challenge right now. Elle Penner’s 30-Day Minimalism Game is everywhere. Day 1, 1 item. Day 30, 30 items. Neat math.

By day 14, a lot of people quietly quit.

Minimalist content was designed for people with time and energy to spare.

A full purge weekend. Labeled storage bins. Curated open shelving. And the popular version of minimalism has drifted toward an aesthetic to achieve, clean counters that belong on a design account, matching baskets, Scandinavian-looking everything.

Which is fine if you want that, no shame.

But the aesthetic brings its own weight: now your home has to look a certain way, or you’re doing it wrong. Don’t we already face enough judgment?

That’s one more standard layered on top of a complicated day.

And that’s before factoring in the obstacles: sentimental items, things that cost money, partners or kids who have opinions (kids have a lot of them these days), and the truth that decision fatigue is a thing that gets worse as the afternoon goes on.

The 15-Minute Triage: For people who don’t have a weekend to spare

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Here’s a simpler frame. One question.

When was the last time this thing helped me?

Focus on recent use. When did this object, this app, this account, this subscription genuinely help you in your life, if ever?

If the answer is longer ago than a year, it goes into the triage box. A box, not the trash. You can always go back. What you’ll find, almost every time, is that you won’t.

A few years ago, I started applying a principle called OHIO: Only Handle It Once.

The idea is that when you pick something up, you deal with it right then. You don’t set it back down in a “maybe” pile, because that pile is where clutter goes to live indefinitely.

It sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most of us are wired to defer.

We pick something up, feel the friction of deciding, and put it back down to handle it “when we have more time.” Then we will handle it again tomorrow. And again next week. The object doesn’t move, but the mental tab stays open (like a red notification badge - you were triggered just thinking about it, weren’t you?).

OHIO cuts that cycle. One touch, one decision.

James Clear writes in Atomic Habits: “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” A rule you can apply in 10 seconds beats a weekend purge you’ll reschedule twice and never finish.

The system:

Step 1. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Pick one zone: one shelf, one drawer, one category (books, cables, kitchen gadgets, your notification settings). One zone.

Step 2. Handle each item once. Pick it up, ask, decide. Keep, triage, or clear. If you can’t answer the question in 10 seconds, it triages. That hesitation is useful information.

Step 3. Stop when the timer goes off. Put the triage box in the car or a closet. Anything you haven’t pulled from it in 30 days gets donated.

No manifesto. No weekend. One question, applied in short bursts, over time.

Your phone is running the same tab as your closet is

Digital clutter works the same way. Notification badges on apps you haven’t opened in months. A saved video queue you’ll realistically never watch. An inbox in the thousands. Each one is a small claim on your attention, a quiet tab open in the background.

An aside, one of my favorite tools for helping to delegate content has been Readwise. With my affiliate link, you can get 60 days to check it out instead of the usual 30. It’s been huge for storing Kindle highlights as well, and I use it daily.

Cal Newport states it directly in Digital Minimalism:

Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates a negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each item provides in isolation.

The goal is intentionality. Keep what adds value in your life. Let the rest go, if able.

You can run the 15-Minute Triage on your phone the same way you’d run it on a shelf. Pick one thing: your notification settings, your home screen apps, or who you follow on one platform. Ask the question.

Give it 15 minutes.

On the guilt of getting rid of things that work

One of the most common friction points in any decluttering conversation is the guilt around waste. You paid good money for that thing. Someone gave it to you. Donating it feels like throwing away the decision to buy it.

The cost was paid when you bought it. Keeping something you don’t use doesn’t recover the money. It continues the attention tax indefinitely.

You’re not obligated to warehouse things forever to honor what they once cost you.

Your one action tonight

Pick one drawer, one shelf, or one digital space.

Set a timer for 15 minutes. Ask: When did this last help me?

Move anything with no good answer into the triage box.

Tonight. Not this weekend. Tonight.

Marie Kondo wrote something that’s stayed with me: “Putting things away creates the illusion that the clutter problem has been solved.”

The 15-Minute Triage works because it removes things, not relocates them. But it handles the obvious category well: the cables you haven’t touched, the apps you never open, the books you finished three years ago and will never reread.

That is easy once you have a rule.

The harder category is everything that’s left after that. The inherited things are with a person attached. The item that costs money and feels wrong to just donate.

The partner who sees a perfectly good thing where you see dead weight. The sentimental pile you’ve been circling for months.

That’s a different problem, and it deserves its own conversation. Before I write it, I want to know where you actually are on this topic.

P.S. I talked about building systems around the life you have, not the one you wish you had, on a recent episode of The Mitten Dad Show:

P.P.S. The 15-Minute Chaos-to-Clarity Reset goes deeper on this exact system. Paid subscribers get it free. Everyone else can grab it here: https://mittendad.gumroad.com/l/chaos?layout=profile

Take care of yourselves.

Matt

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In this episode of The Mitten Dad Show, I walk through Calm Infrastructure: a 4-step system for getting mental clutter out of your head and into a structure that actually holds it. Capture, Reduce, Schedule, Protect.

There’s also a free Weekly Reset Template in the show notes if you want to run the 20-minute version tonight.

Take care of yourselves.

Matt

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The Daily Refill is now a podcast.

Same idea. Same calm morning reset. Just in audio form.

The first episode is called “Feeling Behind? Rude Little Brain.”

It’s for the mornings when the coffee hasn’t even kicked in yet, but your brain has already decided you’re behind.

We talk about the kitchen counter, the judgmental mail pile, the mental tabs left open all day, and one small question that can help you feel a little more human:

What would make me feel 5% more human?

Listen to the first episode here:

https://dailyrefill.beehiiv.com/podcast/s/daily_refill/feeling_behind_rude_little_brain

And if it helps, subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts so these little resets can find you again (note, it just launched, so it may take a bit to reach Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc, but keep your eyes peeled!).

(Share this with someone who could use a gentle pause in their day.)

I’m still awaiting approval on Apple Podcasts, but you can also check it out here on Spotify and YouTube. Any likes, follows, subscriptions, you name it are helpful to help with distribution on platforms!

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You did everything right. Long weekend. Early nights. A Saturday at the park with the kids, where you left your phone in the car.

Monday morning, you sat down and felt the same.

By the end of this, you’ll know which type of burnout you’re dealing with — and the 3 questions that start the fix. Five minutes of work. Tonight.

One Friday in March, I closed my laptop at 4 pm.

Didn’t check email. Didn’t open a doc. Watched a movie with my kids, ate leftover pizza straight from the box, went to bed at 9:30. Did that the whole weekend. Sunday night I felt almost human again.

Monday morning, the weight was back before I finished my first cup of coffee.

I’d rested. I’d actually rested. And it hadn’t moved the needle.

What I didn’t understand yet: the burnout I was carrying had nothing to do with how much I’d worked that week. It had to do with what I was working toward, and whether the structure of my days was even pointed in that direction.

Rest fills a cup. It can’t fix a cup that’s cracked at the base.

The 3 Types of Burnout (And Why Advice Targets the Wrong One)

Ali Abdaal, in Feel-Good Productivity, breaks burnout into 3 categories. Most productivity advice conflates all of them and prescribes the same fix: rest more, do less.

That works for one of the three.

Overexertion burnout is the one everyone talks about. You’re working too many hours, saying yes to too many things, running on fumes. The fix is doing less. Real problem, real solution.

Depletion burnout is quieter. You’ve been going without genuine recovery for long enough that the tank reads empty even after a good night’s sleep.

The fix here involves actual rest: sleep, nature, stretches of time where nothing needs to get done. This is what most recovery advice is designed for.

Then there’s misalignment burnout. This is the one high-functioning folks are carrying, and the one rest can’t touch.

Misalignment burnout happens when what you’re spending your days on has drifted away from what energizes you.

From the outside, everything looks fine. You might even be succeeding.

But the work sits at an angle to the life you want, and over time that friction accumulates into something that feels a lot like exhaustion — except sleep doesn’t fix it.

As Abdaal puts it: “Misalignment burnouts arise when we spend time on goals that don’t match up with our sense of self.”

You can be a senior analyst, a newsletter writer, and a parent, and be tired from all three things for different reasons. Overexertion from the day job. Depletion from never leaving it. Misalignment from building something on the side that’s quietly drifted from the reason you started.

Rest is the right tool for two of those. The third one needs a redesign.

What Misalignment Looks Like

It’s not dramatic. That’s what makes it hard to catch.

It’s the morning routine that looks right on paper but was built for someone else’s life, someone without a kid who wakes at 5:47 or a nervous system that needs 20 quiet minutes before it’s ready for anything.

, who scaled a company to $51M ARR and burned out doing it, said it plainly: “Burnout is about loss of control. It’s not about working hard.”

When what you’re building stops feeling like yours, recovery time becomes preparation for more of the same.

Cal Newport’s research on context switching adds another layer.

Every time you fragment attention — bouncing between day job mode, creator mode, dad mode, with no real separation between them — you pay a cognitive tax. Newport calls it “continuous partial attention”: you’re never anywhere, and every mode is weaker and more draining than it should be.

That’s not a rest problem.

The 3 Questions That Start the Redesign

Misalignment burnout needs a redesign, not more recovery. It needs an honest look at what you’re building and whether your days are aimed at getting you there.

Three questions. Sit with them:

What work leaves you more energized after finishing it than before you started?

Not “what feels important.” Not “what pays.”

What work, when you set it down, makes you feel like yourself?

That’s your signal. Everything else is negotiable.

Where is context switching eroding the quality of the time you give each role?

For parent-creators, the problem isn’t hours. It’s bleeding. Dad mode, creator mode, and analyst mode are all running in the same 45-minute window, and none of them is getting the conditions they need to work well.

If you stripped this back to what you’d build if no one was watching, what stays?

Abdaal frames this as the deathbed question, made practical. You don’t have to answer it tonight. But five honest minutes with it will surface something you’ve been quietly setting aside in favor of what performs, what pays, or what you told yourself you were building six months ago.

Those answers are the redesign brief.

Calm Is Infrastructure

I spent a few years treating calm like the prize you collect when the list is finally done.

Calm is the condition that makes sustained work possible. When your days are built around misalignment, you’re running a structural deficit that evenings on the couch can’t repay.

The nervous system isn’t overworked. It’s confused.

It’s running 2 or 3 jobs that don’t naturally coexist, and the friction between them is what’s costing you.

Getting the alignment right doesn’t mean doing less. It means doing the right things in conditions that work for your brain, your family, and the life you’re trying to build.

When the alignment is right, rest works.

Tonight

Grab something to write on.

Write the last 3 times you felt genuinely energized after working on something. Look for what they have in common.

That’s your alignment data. That’s where the redesign starts.

Tonight, not this weekend, tonight: five minutes, paper, and pen.

Matt

P.S. — If this one landed, I will go deeper on it and topics like this in The Mitten Dad Show. Come listen on Spotify or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

P.P.S. — If you want a structured first move on the redesign, I built a 15-Minute Chaos-to-Clarity Reset for exactly this. Grab it on Gumroad. Paid subscribers get it free.

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We got back from Chicago earlier this month, and I couldn't shake a feeling I didn't expect: clarity.

Not about the trip.

About my regular life.

In this episode, I talk about why travel feels so alive, why most of us let that feeling disappear by Monday, and three questions that can turn any trip into something more useful than a photo album.

If you've ever come home and felt that quiet deflation of re-entry, this one's for you.

Before you close this tab, answer one question in the comments: what's one thing from the last trip you wish you'd kept? I read every response.

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It’s 10 pm. Everyone is finally asleep. You have 45 minutes before your brain starts shutting down, too.

You open LinkedIn. Or Substack. Or any platform you’ve been meaning to “get serious about.”

You scroll. You see someone who started 6 months ago, building something real.

You think about posting, draft something in your head, decide it’s not ready, and close the app.

You have plenty to say.

The problem is the gap — the distance between what’s in your head and what’s visible to anyone. It feels impossibly wide when you’re running on 45 minutes and a nearly-empty tank.

You close the app, tell yourself you’ll do it properly this weekend, and go to bed.

Weekend comes. You don’t.

I studied theatre in college. Spent four years learning how to walk into a room and be present — how to take up space, make a choice, and commit to it before you were sure it was the right one.

The one thing every acting teacher said the same way: the audition is the practice. You get better by walking into the room.

I spent two years forgetting that lesson.

Smarter than I was willing to admit. More experienced than I was willing to show.

Invisible because invisible felt safer than inadequate.

The gap closes at 10 pm, with the 45 minutes you have.

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The Mistake Almost Every 9-5 Creator Makes

You’re waiting for the right conditions. Charlie Hills’ recent LinkedIn playbook is a fantastic read, but if you’re short on time during the day at the moment, it may be hard to take it to its full advantage.

So you continue to make the excuse that you don’t have enough time or a clear angle. Something that feels complete enough to publish.

You’re waiting to feel ready.

Meanwhile, someone with half your experience is posting 3 times a week, quietly building the credibility that compounds over months. They stopped waiting.

That’s the difference.

put it this way: build distribution alongside reputation, not before it. Otherwise, your audience will care about a fleeting aspect of you rather than your work.

The version of you that posts before it’s perfect will build something.

The version that waits until it’s ready might not.

What Invisible Costs You

Being the best-kept secret feels modest. Humble, even. That’s a comforting story.

Every week you’re invisible is a week your work isn’t compounding.

Content published last year is findable. Conversations started 6 months ago are open.

The person who shows up consistently is building an asset. You’re building nothing you own.

Sahil Bloom puts it this way: “Society assures you that it’s okay to feel time-poor as long as it’s a by-product of a chase for more money. Busy has become standard fare — equal parts reality and pseudo-dystopian status symbol.”

Busy and invisible at the same time means you’re spending everything and building nothing that belongs to you.

The Margins-First Method: 5 Ways to Stop Being Invisible

1. Choose a lane before you feel qualified to

9-5 creators try to post about everything because commitment feels like a trap.

Pick one thing you can’t stop thinking about and plant a flag there — a perspective, not a topic.

Dan Koe calls it the Identity-Lifestyle Fit gap: the distance between the version of yourself you perform publicly (the polished LinkedIn headline, the respectable job title) and the version that shows up when you’re alone, doing what you care about.

That gap is where your lane lives.

The content that sustains you for years comes from the Sunday afternoon version of you, the one that shows up when there’s nothing to perform for.

Someone who believes that calm is the operating condition for everything else, and that most systems fail because they were built for people without kids and without a day job — that’s a lane.

Specific enough to attract the right people.

True enough to sustain you for years.

Start the direction. Refine it in motion.

2. Build in the margins, on purpose

The obstacle is the belief that 20 minutes doesn’t count.

Your fractured schedule is your format. Your reader lives the same life.

When you write from inside the constraint instead of apologizing for it, something shifts: people recognize themselves.

A post written in 20 minutes at 10 pm, tired and showing up, lands harder than the polished one you wrote on Saturday morning with a clear head.

Because the first one is honest.

3. Your day job is not a liability

There’s a tension here, and I’m not going to pretend there isn’t. Every employer is different.

Every industry has its own unwritten rules about what the public looks like. You know your situation better than any framework can or anything I write here. Your life is yours and your responsibility alone.

What I’ll say is this: your professional experience is a differentiator; you decide what to do with it. The analyst who writes about systems thinks about them differently than the freelancer who does.

The nurse who writes about burnout has earned that credibility in ways a wellness coach hasn’t.

The parent-creator who has a day job, a mortgage, and stakes brings something to the table that the 24-year-old who quit to build in public doesn’t have (yet).

That combination of professional depth and creative ambition is hard to replicate. Your constraints are part of the specificity that makes your perspective hard to copy.

You don’t have to broadcast your employment status.

You don’t have to apologize for it.

4. Capture when full. Publish from the archive.

9-5 creators try to generate and publish in the same session.

That’s why Tuesday at 10 pm feels impossible. You’re asking a depleted brain to come up with something and execute it at the same time.

Separate the two.

Capture ideas constantly — commute, shower, 3 minutes between meetings. One inbox. One place.

I use Mem because it gets out of the way faster than anything else I’ve tried, and it does not judge you for voice-memoing in a grocery store parking lot, which I appreciate. (Code MITTENDAD gets you 20% off 3 months if you want to try it.)

When you sit down to publish, you’re choosing from a list that exists and is waiting for further creative input.

The creative work happened in the margins.

The publication is an assembly.

That’s what keeps a creator compounding instead of burning out. (If you want the full system for this, I went deep on the infrastructure side in Why Your Chaos Is an Infrastructure Problem.)

5. Consistency compounds

waited until his business was earning 2x his salary for 3-6 consecutive months before quitting his job.

That compounding took time. Consistent, unremarkable time.

, who writes Forget Growth Hacks. THIS Is Why Newsletters Succeed., puts the formula: Growth = (Content Value × Distribution) ^ Consistency. The exponent is consistency. Everything else gets multiplied by it.

One post a week, published reliably for 12 months, will do more for your visibility than the perfect month followed by 6 weeks of silence.

The algorithm rewards showing up.

A realistic timeline: the first 90 days will feel like you’re posting into a void. That’s how compounding works at the beginning — the interest is there; you can’t see it yet. Here is when folks quit.

The ones who don’t are the ones you’re currently watching and feeling behind.

Josh Spector, who writes For the Interested, says what most people know but keep forgetting: vulnerability creates trust faster than polish does. The post you’re embarrassed to send is the one that gets the most replies, more times than not.

Show up with something real. Show up again next week. Do it when you’re tired and 45 minutes feels like not enough.

It is enough. It’s compounding.

What This Looks Like Tonight

If you’re staring at a blank screen, here’s a simple scaffold. Three types of content that are always available:

A personal story with a lesson at the end. Something that happened, what you thought it meant, what it actually meant.

A professional insight you’ve earned that most people in your field haven’t articulated. The thing that seems obvious inside your expertise and surprising outside it.

An honest observation about something you’re watching happen — in your industry, in your home, in yourself — that you think others are experiencing but not naming.

Pick the bucket. That’s the inspiration system.

Tonight, open your tool of choice you use to capture notes and write one thing — from any of those three — that you haven’t said out loud yet.

Something that feels obvious to you but that you rarely see said.

That’s the post.

The one thing that is said enough that someone else recognizes themselves in it.

Post it this week. Monday counts. Wednesday counts. Even Thursday at 9:30 at night.

The gap between the best-kept secret and the known person is the reps.

Start tonight.

Take care of yourselves.

Matt

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The quiet ones will win the AI agent era. Parents and creators who build the least of it. People who treat agents as boring infrastructure instead of 24/7 employees.

It’s a Saturday morning in April. Your 7-year-old is in the driveway, wobbling on a bike with training wheels she’s supposed to have outgrown by June.

You’ve got a coffee cooling next to you and a laptop, closed, that’s been pulling at you for an hour.

There’s a Reddit tab open behind it. Someone built a 7-agent content engine over spring break. Another person replaced 3 contractors with one autonomous pipeline. Your brain starts running the math: if you just spent the afternoon setting up an agent that drafts your threads, answers reader DMs, and pulls analytics, you’d free up your evenings.

You know how this ends. You’ve done it before. The agent breaks by Wednesday.

The “free time” gets spent debugging memory loops. And your kid is still circling the driveway, waiting for a push.

The hope is real. The setup steals the thing you were trying to protect. There’s a quieter way to do this, and it starts with building less on purpose.

What Parent-Creators Are Actually Dealing With Right Now

Spend 10 minutes in r/AIAgents or any of the serious AI subreddits, and you get the honest picture. Demos look miraculous. Production looks like duct tape.

The war stories repeat. Agents that nail a task 8 times in a row, then hallucinate on the 9th and send a client the wrong file.

Multi-agent setups where one bad output poisons the chain, and it slips past every check until a reader replies confused. Memory that works until it doesn’t, and debugging sessions that eat the Saturday you were going to spend at the park.

The Catch-22 is cruel. The people who most need quiet agents (overcommitted parents, solo creators, anyone running a job plus a business plus a family) have the least available time to babysit brittle systems.

The people with time to tune them don’t need them as badly.

Creation itself has gotten easier.

An AI can draft a thread, repurpose a podcast, and summarize a 40-tab dashboard in under a minute. What hasn’t gotten easier: distribution, storytelling in your actual voice, and being present at bath time without a partial mind still on the laptop.

Most of us end up carrying more cognitive load, not less.

New tools, new context switches, new things to check on.

If you’ve been feeling stuck lately (the kind of stuck the 3-question check was designed to surface), this hype wave can make the overload heavier instead of lighter.

The Presence-First Agent Framework: A 3-Step Calm Approach

Cal Newport calls his version of this “slow productivity,” which he defines as “doing fewer things, at a natural pace, with an obsession for quality.” The Presence-First Agent Framework borrows that spirit and applies it to automation.

Three steps. All boring. That’s the point.

Step 1: Start Minimal and Human-Centered

Pick 1 agent. Maybe 2. Never 7.

The test is specific: what repeatable task, if it ran quietly in the background, would give you back an hour a week without you babysitting it?

For most parent-creators, it’s something unglamorous.

Turning voice notes into rough draft threads.

Summarizing weekly analytics into 3 bullet points. Drafting a first-pass reply to reader emails that you still approve before anything goes out.

One quiet agent solving one specific pain beats a 7-agent crew that needs a full-time supervisor (you, on a Saturday, again).

Step 2: Build on What Already Works

Agents should sit on top of the infrastructure you already trust. Your note system. Your weekly rhythm. Your re-entry rituals after chaos.

If your note-to-content flow already runs through a tool like Mem (code MITTENDAD gets you 20% off 3 months of Pro) or NotebookLM, that’s where the first agent belongs. Keep the stack exactly as it is.

Bolt one small automation onto the tool you already open every morning.

Test it during low-demand periods, too. Not during a product launch. Not during spring break with the whole family underfoot.

Stand it up on a quiet Tuesday when you can watch it behave for a week before trusting it with anything real.

Step 3: Protect the Human Edge

Set hard boundaries before you set up a single trigger.

Your agents never touch the family calendar.

They never send a final reader-facing message without your eyes on it. They never post anything in your voice to a public account. The parts of your work that carry your humanity stay human.

Then run this diagnostic every few weeks: Is this agent giving me back time with my kids, my partner, and myself? Or is it creating new maintenance I didn’t have before?

If it’s the second, kill it. No sunk-cost guilt. You’re allowed.

Here’s what this looks like in real life.

Imagine a single agent that listens to the voice notes you record on walks, cleans them up, and drops a rough draft into your inbox by the time you’re back.

That’s it. It doesn’t post. It doesn’t schedule. It doesn’t try to run your content calendar (quietly judging you from across the room).

It does one small thing well, and gets out of the way.

The evenings it gives you back get spent exactly how you want them spent: not working. That’s what protecting a life you actually want looks like.

Why the Boring Way Wins Long-Term

The quiet advantage compounds slowly.

While other creators chase the next agent framework, the next multi-agent orchestration stack, the next breathless thread about autonomous workflows, calm parent-creators are doing something less exciting.

They’re keeping distribution human. They’re staying in direct contact with their audience. They’re adding 1 small, reliable automation every few months and leaving the rest alone.

Most of the complex setups you see demoed this year will get abandoned by next summer.

The survivors are almost always the people who kept their systems embarrassingly simple and their relationships personal.

This is infrastructure for calm. It’s the same reason a 4-step morning routine works and a 47-step productivity stack doesn’t. Low cognitive load. Few moving parts. Enough slack in the system for a kid to get sick, a deadline to shift, a Saturday to stay a Saturday.

The goal is to transfer the mindset you have on vacation (present, patient, actually there) into your ordinary Monday. Quiet agents, used sparingly, can help with that. Loud ones rarely do.

Your One Action Tonight

Picture yourself in 2027. Do you want more agents managing your to-dos? Or more space to be the parent, the creator, the partner you originally set out to be?

Run this 3-question check before you set up your next agent:

1. Does this reduce my overload, or just relocate it?

2. Does this protect presence with the people I love?

3. Does this play to my human strengths, or replace them?

If you can’t answer yes to all 3, the agent isn’t ready. Or you aren’t.

Either way, wait.

Tonight (not Monday, not when things “calm down”), pick 1 repeatable task you wish could run quietly in the background without stealing your attention. Write it on a sticky note. That’s your first agent candidate.

Then reply and tell me what you wrote. I read every note.

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P..S. If your days feel louder than you want them to, the 15-Minute Chaos-to-Clarity Reset is the fastest way to get your head above water this week. Paid subscribers get it free, always.

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Take care of yourselves.

Matt

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A clean inbox. A finished to-do list. A week that worked on paper.

The kitchen is a whole ‘nother topic for another day.

And on Friday at 4:47 p.m., you close your laptop and feel… tired.

Bone-tired. Somehow more tired than when you started.

You’ve been moving all week without going anywhere.

(If you’re parenting while doing this, multiply everything by 3 and add juice boxes.)

Lao Tzu had a line about this, roughly 2,500 years ago.

Read it twice. Something goes quiet in your chest the second time.

In the next 4 minutes, I’ll show you why most “ruts” are direction problems wearing a willpower mask, share the 3-question check I run when I feel stuck, and give you one small turn you can make this week.

No new app. No planner. No weekend overhaul.

Stuck usually means pointed wrong

Here’s the part I had to learn the hard way. Most ruts look like motivation problems and solve like direction problems.

Your to-do list ages. Your goals age. Your kids age (yes, all the cliches are true).

Your capacity shifts. And the checklist just sits there, quietly demanding you be the version of yourself who wrote it.

(I covered this from a different angle in You Didn’t Fail Your Productivity System. It Expired., Same idea, different door.)

A quick real-world example: Khe Hy spent a decade writing about escaping the corporate grind from “semi-retirement.”

Just last fall, he published I went back to work and launched an AI consulting firm.

The old direction had simply stopped being his.

Here’s the a-ha that unstuck me: a flight from New York to LA that’s off-course by 5 degrees lands in Tijuana. That’s the math on 5 degrees over one trip.

Over 12 months of your life, 5 degrees is a different zip code, a different job, a different marriage, a different version of you.

A 5-degree turn costs you nothing this week. Over 12 months, it changes the country you land in.

Think about that.

The 90-second direction check

When I catch myself in a rut, I run three questions. They take about 90 seconds.

You can do this in the car line, the parking lot, or the bathroom while you’re reading and bookmarking this post. (No judgment.)

Question 1: Is this goal still mine?

Goals fossilize. The one you set at 31 might not fit the 37-year-old you.

Read it out loud. Does it feel like yours, or does it feel like an older version of you tapping you on the shoulder?

If you hesitate, that’s data.

Question 2: Has the finish line moved?

What looked like success 12 months ago, does it still?

I’ve had quarters where I hit a goal and felt nothing, because the finish line had quietly shifted.

Sprint harder toward a moving goalpost, and you’ll tire out without scoring. (Ask me how I know.)

Sahil Bloom calls this the Clarity Curve: clarity is downstream of action. If you can’t tell where the line is, take one honest step.

The line will show up (it just may not be overnight).

Question 3: Am I busy toward something, or busy around something?

This one stings.

A lot of parent busy-ness (and non-parent busy-ness, looking at you, 11th Slack channel) is avoidance in a productivity costume.

The costume is excellent. I have several. (I covered this fully in Why Busy Feels Like Progress (And Why That’s the Trap).)

Activity and direction are two different things. You can run 10,000 steps in a circle and call it a day, and still be in the same spot you started.

If any of the three questions made you wince, congratulations. You found your turn.

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What “change direction” actually means

Let me be concrete here, because “change direction” sounds like a TED Talk and feels scary.

I mean, one small turn. This week.

Something you can do between now and Friday without anyone noticing.

A few examples from my life and from readers:

• Cancel one recurring commitment that no longer fits. For a month. The meeting will survive without you. So will you.

• Replace one 30-minute task with the 10-minute version. That’s allowed. Nobody is checking.

• Pick one deferred dream you’ve been quietly circling for 2 years and put 15 minutes of it on this week’s calendar. Literally. Block the time. Call it “admin.” I don’t care.

Small turns compound. A 5-degree heading change held for 12 months lands you in a different country. (Tijuana, again. Sorry, Tijuana.)

Jenny Blake writes about this exact phenomenon in Why Big Changes Start Small: the “big change” you think you need is a stack of tiny ones you keep postponing. Start the stack this week.

If you want a structured version of this work, Tiago Forte’s Pillars of Productivity is the cleanest framework I’ve found for matching what you spend time on to what actually matters to you. (Just a small note that that’s an affiliate link. Means I get a small kickback if you buy. Same price for you. I really enjoyed the course, though, and still use much of it to this day.

If direction is what you’re short on, a better compass beats a louder whip.

Healing opportunities hide inside ruts

One reframe worth carrying with you: every stuck patch is also a healing opportunity.

The quiet dread underneath is information. It’s your system politely telling you the heading has drifted.

The people I watch get unstuck tend to do the same three things, in order. They pause. They check the compass. They turn.

Then they take one step.

(If this week actually broke you and you need a reset before you can turn anything, start here: The Re-Entry Stack. And if your plate feels heavier than you can name, I wrote about that in Cognitive Overload for Parents: The Demand Load Explained. - non-parents will be able to relate as well)

This week’s one turn

Before you close this email, pick one turn. That’s the whole assignment.

• One commitment to cancel.

• One task to shrink.

• One deferred dream to schedule, even for 15 minutes.

Overhaul the whole system later. Or never. (Never is a legitimate productivity strategy. Please don’t tell anyone I said that - David Allen may frown.)

Today, pick the turn.

I’ll leave you with this. If the line is “you may end up where you are heading,” the reverse is also true. You can end up somewhere better.

It just takes a turn.

Small. Today. One.

Poll: What’s keeping you stuck right now?

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PS: The kitchen is still a separate conversation. I did block 15 minutes on Thursday for the thing I’ve been circling since 2023. That’s my turn this week.

What’s yours?

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As always, remember to take care of yourselves.

Matt

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