My phone was ringing. I’m in a dark hotel room, blackout curtains stopping any tiny glimpse of light getting through, helping me blindly sleep through the phone ringing for the 10th time.

Neil, it’s Gary. Where the f*** are you.

I look at the clock. 9.20. I was hosting 30 customers at a big training event up in Manchester.

I’ll be there in 10. Can you cover. Sure.

Gary was a good guy. A slick, old school sales trainer we used every now and then to give our customers a bit of sales enablement. We’d been doing roadshows up and down the country and this was the last one. The intelligent thing to do would have been tucked up in bed nice and early, 8 hours of sleep, sharp and fresh for the morning.

There were 3 of us. Gary doing his sales academy piece, Mark delivering the full product training, and yours truly, here to open, close and discuss the commercial offering.

I got down at 9.29, with exactly one minute to spare. Straight into autopilot, giving my usual spiel before handing over to Gary, who strides in and starts delivering some exceptional sales training with total confidence. I slope off wondering what on earth had happened to Mark.

Last I’d seen him it was 4am and he was entertaining a room full of people by doing handstands. Mark was in his late 50s and could always be found sloshing a glass of Malbec and telling the most amazing stories. Halfway through the night he’d convinced a lady at the next table, also in her late 50s, that he had better legs than her, and that he’d prove it by putting on a pair of women’s tights. She disappeared off, returning with a brand new pair of semi-opaque sheer tights.

It was my turn to ring him. He didn’t answer. And then he did. At 1.25 in the afternoon.

Where are you, Mark?

I’m in the bath.

You’re in the what?

The bath. I couldn’t face getting up, so I rang reception, booked another night at the hotel and decided to have a bath.

But Mark, you’ve got a training session starting at 2.

I can’t even stand up. You’ll have to cover.

So I did. Hungover as hell, annoyed at Mark for throwing me under a bus, counting down the seconds until I could finish talking and fall asleep in a comfy chair somewhere. Gary grinning at me from the back, smug that he had indeed had an early night and 8 hours of sleep.

But you know what. It was one of my standout moments. To say I delivered would be an understatement. I smashed it out of the park. The audience loved it, and they all had a stack of questions afterwards, which I asked them to email to me before skulking off to meet Mark at the bar. He was drinking a glass of Malbec with a grin.

Hair of the dog, I ask?

The thing about you, Millis. I can always rely on you in a crisis. Now, can I get you a glass?

The Crash

I’ve always imagined what it would be like to be on a trading desk during a market crash. The chaos. Everyone on their phones trying to close positions. Pure panic, people scrambling to protect what they can or profit from the wreckage.

November 2021. I remember it well. My walk to work from Bank tube station was nothing special. I stopped at Grind for a soya latte and strolled into the office. Within 15 minutes, it was chaos.

Two major data centres in the UK had outages that completely killed the network. In short, 1 million business users suddenly unable to make or receive calls. By some weird quirk, the 20 phones my sales team were using sat on a different part of the network, protected from the issue that had taken everyone else’s out.

Then it started. With no access to support lines, and our partner network down too, we were the only 20 working phones out of a million. Call after call after call. People dialling in from their mobiles, furious, wanting a fix. What was happening. Why. When would this be fixed. This is a disgrace. Your company is a joke.

I rolled up my sleeves and joined my team. We were the only line of support these people had. It was going to be a long day. We kept a separate line open to the war room, the engineers fixing the issue. It was widespread, all the big tech companies with a presence in those data centres were down too. It was our black Monday.

And then it was over. I loved it. I took the team out for a beer and a curry to thank them. That wasn’t their job, they were salespeople. But we all pulled together. We were a team. We made a difference.

This is where I have to be brutally honest. I love the chaos. The look on other people’s faces when everything seems to be crashing down, and I calmly tell them it’s all ok. We got this.

Let everyone else be John Travolta in Pulp Fiction with his cool dancing. I am Harvey Keitel. The Wolf. The fixer.

Next day I open my laptop and see an email. One of our partners has a standard billing issue they want to escalate to me. I start to draft my reply.

Then I stare out the window, and wish I was somewhere else.

This has sat in my drafts for weeks. There are different versions of it dotted all over my phone, laptop, notebook and any scrap of paper I could find. The problem I am trying to solve came close to never seeing the light of day because of the problem itself.

I never finish anything.

The amount of projects I have that are 87% complete is ridiculous.

The problem is twofold. First, people with brains like mine lose interest or drift off from a task, and the closer you get to the end, the more likely it seems to happen. Second, if you do drift off, daydreaming, scrolling at things you really shouldn’t be scrolling at, or distracted by a newer, shinier task, how do you come back?

Most productivity apps and books assume you are going to remember to use them, or return to the project with the same energy you started it with.

The usual answer is another app, another system, another productivity expert selling their $1,000 course. The assumption is always that memory is causing the issue. But if we were just forgetful, we wouldn’t be able to remember certain things perfectly. I can remember a conversation I had with a friend when I was 7, but not what my exact action was from my previous meeting.

Memory is not the problem. Here is the problem.

You feel like a fraud. Someone in a leadership position who has spent most of his career saying “leave it with me” while knowing it should be “lose it with me.” Why would anyone trust me, when we both know I’m not coming back to you?

And I don’t want to be fixed. I certainly don’t want someone else doing the fixing. I don’t need to be told that to be a success I must get up at 5am, journal, make my bed, drink my Lion’s Mane tea, meditate for 30 minutes and fast for 16 hours a day. That is a productivity prison, and just more things I will undoubtedly give up after two or three weeks of effort.

The tax is this. Agreeing to something in a meeting, fully intending not to let the person down, but deep down knowing that the minute I start my next task it will be lost forever, and I will indeed let that person down.

I remember form class at school. While the other kids chatted about what they’d done the night before, I’d be scrambling through my homework under the desk, desperately trying not to be seen by the teacher. My school years were one constant panic of getting told off for not doing what I’d promised. Weirdly enough, I never did get found out. I sometimes feel like that man on the news who threw out a hard drive with a fortune in Bitcoin on it. Thankfully my carelessness has yet to cost me hundreds of millions. Just a few panicky meetings and some very stressful mornings at school.

Then Sunday evening arrives, and with it the dread, because you know all the things you’ve left open or forgotten to write down. You scramble a to-do list together from your notes and scraps, but it is a waste of time. Most of it is lost. Gone forever. And the dread continues.

I nearly didn’t launch this because of the exact problem it solves. The idea has been brewing for decades, hidden away in old iPhone notes. A system for the daydreamers, never seeing the light of day because its founder was too busy daydreaming.

Not this time. Here is the system.

Catch

Do not remember anything. You need one place of capture for every thought, idea, crazy notion, request. Make the assumption it will be forgotten. Your mind is not a bucket, it’s a sieve. Imagine every piece of information you’re given is the winning lottery numbers for tonight’s draw. You wouldn’t risk not writing them down.

Don’t commit to a thing until an action is attached.

Return

What most systems miss is that they assume you are present. They assume you are disorganised, or lazy. Trust me, you’re not. Well, at least I’m not. I am just miles away. You’re asking me to remember something but my brain is desperate to explore. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes bad. It’s not always in fairyland. Sometimes it’s somewhere darker. Either way, it would rather disappear there than do the job in front of it.

But we all know what the return feels like. An animal runs out into the road in front of you, and you react. You brake, you check your mirrors to see if the car behind has seen the danger, you swerve onto the opposite side of the road knowing it’s clear, and you avoid both killing the animal and causing an accident. Then you carry on driving, wondering how any of that was possible when you cannot remember where you were for the previous 15 minutes of the drive. What the scenery was like. What was on the radio. Your brain was miles away, but you came back. You were forced to change state, and you did.

That is all we need to do. Change state. One minute of breathwork, 4 seconds in, 6 out. Ten seconds flexing your biceps or clenching your fists.

Then you do the work. To avoid distractions I put focus music on. Not your favourite sing-along, that will have the opposite effect. You need focus music, the kind engineered to be ignorable. I use the Balance app, but there’s plenty on Spotify and Brain.fm to get your head in the right place. If music isn’t your thing, try white noise, or even some recorded affirmations.

Close

If you’re like me, I bet you don’t power off your laptop at night. You stick it on sleep mode, because there are 17 open tabs in your browser and 5 nearly finished emails, one of them written to yourself with some half-written actions for tomorrow. I once had my work laptop stolen from a bar in London during a work social. My biggest fear wasn’t the cost, or the personal items in the bag. It was what was on it that was unfinished.

This is your peace of mind. This is how you sleep peacefully and avoid the Sunday evening dread. Review your Catch list and action everything. Schedule it, add it to tomorrow’s to-do, or my favourite, bin it. Tomorrow’s commitments should only ever be 3 key achievable actions. Any more and you will fail, I promise. Daydreamers will fail on twenty, but 3 is a great achievement.

So what is this?

For the last 10 years of my career and life, I have been my own test subject. Understanding my brain, and how to get the best out of it while simultaneously having a good life, is my one goal.

I’m not writing this as someone who has finished the marathon. I’m coming up to halfway. But my wandering mind has still managed to create a wonderful family, a career, a life. So I must have done something right. I don’t yet know all the answers. That’s why we’re here.

I finally found the receipt, by the way. The one I was sure had a version of this manifesto scribbled on it. It didn’t. It had my top 10 films on it, in order of release.

The Playbook

I wasn’t presenting that year, which was the only reason I could enjoy it.

A colleague, I’ll call him Mark, was on stage. Mark is the most natural presenter I have ever seen. A genuine storyteller, the kind who can hold a thousand people in the palm of his hand and not appear to be trying. I once watched him take an audience from tears of sadness to tears of laughter in the space of a few sentences. So when I say even Mark was nervous about this one, you’ll understand the scale of it.

He was interviewing Louis Theroux for our annual partner roadshow.

If you don’t know the name, Louis Theroux is one of Britain’s finest documentary makers. His whole craft is walking into difficult rooms, sitting with people most of us would never get near, the extreme and the guarded and the closed-off, and somehow getting them to open up. He makes people warm to him almost against their will. It’s a rare talent and it looks, from the outside, like the most natural thing in the world.

So Mark asked him about it directly. How do you do that. How do you understand people so well that almost anyone will open up to you.

And Louis said something I wasn’t expecting.

I’m paraphrasing from memory, but the gist of it has stayed with me for years. He said this was the strange part. That he had always felt like an outsider. Like everyone else had been handed a playbook at some point, told how to be, how to talk to other humans, how all of this works. And that he walks into a room and feels, always, like everyone else is in on something he isn’t.

I looked around the auditorium.

I reckon five, maybe ten percent of the room understood what he’d just said. Properly understood it, felt it land somewhere behind the ribs. The rest were thinking, what’s this guy on about, he’s one of the most beloved broadcasters in the country, he’s being falsely modest.

He wasn’t. I could see it. And so could the other ten percent.

Because I’m one of them.

Walk Into the Room Like You Own It

On paper I’m the opposite of an outsider.

I moved from a technical role into sales, and then into commercial leadership, which is the career path of a confident man. A go-getter. The sort of person who wakes up, high fives himself in the mirror, and strides into every meeting like he owns the room.

That is not what happens.

What actually happens is that I walk into most rooms quietly certain that everyone in them is better than me. More capable, more polished, more entitled to be there. And that at some point, probably soon, they’re going to work out that I’m not. That I’ve been bluffing. That I got here by smoke and mirrors and a run of good luck that’s about to end.

So how does someone who feels like that end up leading sales teams. Standing on stages. Walking up to strangers at industry events.

The honest answer is that I learned it. I copied it from someone who had it naturally.

A Little More Paul

His name was Paul. Still is. He’s one of my best friends to this day.

In my first sales role Paul was a whirlwind. He’d walk into a room, tell a story, and have everyone smiling within ninety seconds. He had no apparent fear of what people might think of him, which was the exact thing I had too much of.

I once watched him tell a customer, a serious corporate customer, the story of how he had soiled himself halfway round a company golf day. The whole thing. The horror, the binning of the underwear, the long furtive walk back to the car park praying not to be seen. By any rule I understood about how you’re supposed to behave with important clients, this was career suicide.

They became one of the biggest accounts the business ever had.

So I became, slowly, a little more Paul. A little less worried about what people might think. A little more willing to let some of the real me out into the room. I’d share a story, take a small risk, say the thing instead of swallowing it.

I won’t pretend it was clean. Most days I’d walk away from a conversation thinking, why did I say that, and then spend the next fortnight quietly re-analysing every personal detail I’d shared, turning it over, certain I’d misjudged it. But it got easier. The gap between saying the thing and the wave of regret got longer, and then most of the time the regret didn’t come at all.

This isn’t a guide to making it in business. But if it were, that would be a chapter. Let go a little. Let a bit of yourself out. People don’t warm to the polished version. They warm to the one who tells them about the golf day.

The Fourth Floor

Roll the clock forward about ten years.

I’m in Glasgow, back at my hotel after taking my team out for drinks. I’ve had a few too many. I get to my room, strip off, and fall straight into bed.

Some time later I wake up, dazed, with no idea where I am. I get up to find my bearings.

Clink.

Oh no.

Some context. As a child I sleepwalked. I’d come to in the kitchen, or the living room, baffled, and shuffle my way back to bed. I hadn’t done it in years. But apparently a skinful of drink in an unfamiliar hotel was enough to summon it back, because I was now standing in the corridor, completely naked, as the self-locking door of my room clicked shut behind me.

This was one of those modern hotels with no reception. You check yourself in. You make your own key. There was no kindly night porter downstairs to call. There was just me, on the fourth floor, with no key, no clothes, and, I should mention, a fairly urgent need to find a toilet.

The next fifteen minutes were among the worst of my life and, in hindsight, among the funniest. I’ll spare you the full choreography. It ended with a cleaner taking pity on a naked, desperate man and letting him back into his room, which is a sentence I never expected to write about myself.

I Told It Better

About a year later I’m at a work do, and Paul’s there.

He’s standing in the middle of a crowd, the way he always is, mid-story, and the crowd is already leaning in. So I wander over to catch the end of it.

So I’ve only gone and locked myself out of my hotel room, he’s saying. Completely starkers.

Hang on.

I stand there and listen to my own worst fifteen minutes, the clink, the fourth floor, the desperate search for a toilet, the cleaner who took pity on me, all of it delivered with perfect timing to a crowd that is absolutely falling apart. He lands every beat. He gets a bigger laugh out of the cleaner than I ever have. It is, and I say this through gritted teeth, a masterclass.

Eventually the crowd drifts off and it’s just the two of us.

Mate, I say. What the hell. That was my story.

He looks at me with a cheeky smile.

I know, he says. But I told it better.

And the thing is, he had.

Twenty years ago I borrowed his confidence. He’s been borrowing my life story ever since.

Fair trade, I reckon.

JAAACCCKK

For the hundredth time. Can you please get ready.

He can’t hear me. Not really. He’s standing in the middle of his bedroom, half a school uniform on, holding a bag of marbles he bought at the weekend up to the light. There is apparently something fascinating about the way the colours move when you turn them. There is, objectively, nothing fascinating about putting on the second sock, which is the actual task at hand and has been for some time.

Alex is away with work. So this morning it’s me, two kids, a school run, and a forecast call I need to be back for, all balanced on a timeline that is rapidly stopping being a timeline and starting being a problem.

Can’t he see how stressful this is, I think. Can’t he just get ready.

And then, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how my own brain works, an uncomfortable truth arrives.

This is me.

Not the marbles, although give it time. The reason we’re late. Because while Jack was being nine years old in the way nine year olds are, I was sitting downstairs scrolling on my phone for an extra five minutes before I got round to making the packed lunch and laying out his clothes. I didn’t build in enough Jack-needs-to-mess-around time, because I was busy not building in enough Dad-needs-to-stop-scrolling time.

I’m not managing a time-blind child this morning. I’m a time-blind adult who didn’t plan for the one entirely predictable variable in the system. Which is that Jack will always, always, find the marbles.

No Worries Mate, I’ve Got This

Let me tell you about a different kind of deadline.

A while back a work colleague, I’ll call him Andy, sat me down with a particular look on his face. His wife was unwell, and he needed to be at home to look after her and their daughter. Which meant he couldn’t do the roadshow. The roadshow being a thirty minute slot in front of more than two thousand people, the kind of polished, high-production company event you might think of as a TED talk for the UK tech world. The roadshow he had been preparing for, meticulously, for two months.

He needed me to step in. I had three days.

I felt it in the pit of my stomach immediately. The nerves, the low hum of dread. Presenting has always made me faintly sick, if I’m honest. There is nothing natural about being the one person in a room facing the wrong way while everyone else looks at you. Some quiet part of my brain has always been entirely convinced that everyone in the room can see straight through me and has concluded, reasonably, that I’m rubbish.

Which makes it strange that I have spent my entire career volunteering for exactly this. Putting myself forward for the big presentations, the high stakes pitches, the rooms that scare me. Partly because I’ve always believed you get nowhere in life being a slave to your phobias. Partly because of a stubborn, possibly unhealthy obsession with walking straight at the thing that frightens me to see what happens.

So I looked at Andy and I said the only thing there was to say.

No worries mate. I’ve got this.

And I did. Three days to prepare something that had taken him two months, and I was completely fine. Better than fine. Calm, sharp, present in a way I almost never am on an ordinary Tuesday.

Here is the thing I cannot explain to people whose brains work normally. I can stand in front of two thousand industry peers with barely any notice and feel something close to joy. But ask me to answer a handful of emails and make three phone calls on a quiet Monday morning and I will find roughly forty things to do instead, none of them the emails.

Give me the room on fire. I’ll run the room. It’s the quiet days I can’t do.

The Work of Art

I have a one to one with a junior member of my team.

They’re good. Genuinely good. But they’ve been getting stressed, stretched thin, and they’ve asked me to help them get on top of their diary and their inbox. There aren’t enough hours in the day, they tell me. Everything’s piling up.

So they show me their setup, and I have to be honest with you, it’s a work of art.

The inbox has folders I would never have thought of. Subfolders inside the folders. The calendar is colour coded with a precision that borders on the beautiful, every meeting carefully described, agendas written in advance, the whole week laid out like a thing you’d hang in a gallery.

And I sit there thinking two things at once.

The first is, am I a complete fraud. Because here I am, the senior person, about to give advice on organisation to someone whose system is objectively a thousand times better than mine. My inbox has no folders. My approach to planning is best described as starting the thing and finding out what happens. I’ve never believed you can plan a project properly before you’ve begun it, because how can you possibly know how long it’ll take or what’ll go wrong until you’re in it. I’m not even sure that’s right. It might just be a story I tell myself to excuse the fact that I don’t plan.

The second thing I think is, this person is drowning. Not despite the system. Because of it.

They are spending so much time organising the work that there’s no time left to do the work. The folders, the colour coding, the pre-written agendas, all of it is a beautiful, elaborate way of feeling in control while the actual tasks sit there untouched.

So I tell them this. Write down your next five tasks on a piece of paper. Just five. Put them in order of importance. Then do them, in order, one at a time. Don’t diarise when you’ll do them. Don’t plan how you’ll do them. Don’t write up notes afterwards about how it went. Just do the five things.

I’m not certain I’m right. I want to be honest about that. There’s every chance their careful system would serve them better than my scrap of paper if they just dialled it back a notch. But I’m certain they’re over-planning. I’m certain the system has become the job. And sometimes the impatience that makes me a poor planner is the exact thing that cuts through all of that and says, who cares how many archive folders you have, the work is still there, go and do it.

It might be a flaw. Some days it’s clearly a flaw. But some days my refusal to over-think the thing is the most useful thing I bring to the room.

Two Peas in a Pod

Back to Jack.

He does his homework at the last possible minute. So did I. He’s never actually late for anything, but he lives permanently on the very edge of it, arriving in the final available second with his shoes half on. So do I.

Which is its own private hypocrisy, because I hate lateness. Hate it. If I’m never late, the logic goes, then none of my team should ever be late either. What I conveniently leave out of that lecture is that I am almost never late by the comfortable margins of an organised person. I am never late the way a man sprinting for a closing train is never late. Technically successful. Internally chaos.

He is, in almost every way that matters, me. The marbles in the light. The homework at the buzzer. The brain that can’t be hurried towards the boring thing but will lock onto the interesting thing completely. The permanent, cheerful, maddening proximity to the edge.

And I love him to bits for it.

That’s the part I didn’t expect to feel, standing in his doorway this morning with a forecast call bearing down on me. Not just frustration. Recognition. A kind of tenderness for the wiring, because I know where it leads. I know it leads to a man who can walk calmly into a room of two thousand people on three days’ notice. I also know it leads to five minutes of scrolling when you should be making the packed lunch.

I just wish, this particular morning, that he’d put the marbles down and find the second sock.

We got there. We always get there. Final second, shoes half on, both of us.

The Bar

It’s a good bar, if I’m honest.

Open air, right on the water, the kind of place where the gap between the sea and the sky is so small you’re not entirely sure where one ends and the other begins. There’s a ceiling fan turning slowly overhead even though there’s already a breeze coming off the water. The kind of detail your brain invents when it has too much time and not enough to do.

I’ve been thinking about the music. Something classic, I decide. Suzanne Beware of the Devil by Dandy Livingstone, maybe. Or if the crowd skews younger, something from the Aggrolites. Either way the tempo is right. Unhurried. The kind of music that makes everything feel like it can wait.

It can’t, as it turns out.

Neil.

Daryl is looking at me from across the table. He’s my Chief Revenue Officer and he has just asked me a direct question in our monthly one to one. I have been in this meeting for approximately forty minutes. I have been present for perhaps twenty five of them.

Honestly Daryl, I say, I would go with your gut on this one.

He nods. You’re right, he says.

I have absolutely no idea what I’ve just agreed with. Based on the way he phrased the question I’m reasonably confident it involves another member of staff. I spend the next ten minutes hoping very hard that nobody has been fired as a direct result of my input.

Nobody was. As far as I know.

It Wasn’t Just Daryl

I want to be clear about something. That wasn’t a one off.

Over the course of a career that spanned two decades, multiple companies, and more meetings than I can count, I developed a reputation for being considered. Thoughtful. Someone who listened carefully before speaking. A calm presence in the room.

I was mostly just somewhere else.

Customer meetings where I had drifted into thinking about what to have for dinner by the time the client got to their second objection. Sales presentations where I caught myself mentally replaying a conversation from three days ago while my mouth continued to produce something that sounded like a pitch. Team one to ones where I sat across from someone I genuinely liked and respected and spent a meaningful portion of the meeting in an entirely different country.

The skill that developed alongside all of this was not something I planned. It emerged slowly, through necessity, the way most useful things do. I got very good at reading the emotional temperature of a conversation from fragments. A tone of voice. A body posture. The specific way someone pauses before asking a question. From those fragments I could usually reconstruct enough of what I’d missed to produce something credible.

Thoughtful pause before answering. Classic technique. Usually I was just buying time.

A therapist would probably have something to say about the amount of cognitive energy that went into appearing present rather than simply being present. I’m not sure I want to know the exact figure.

The Interview

The stakes were higher than a one to one with Daryl.

It was a senior leadership role at a major technology company. The kind of interview where you prepare for weeks, where you know the panel have seen fifty CVs and you made the shortlist for a reason, where everything you’ve built across two decades is sitting on the table in front of you.

I was doing well, I think. Structured answers. Good examples. The right balance of confident and considered.

And then somewhere between one question and the next my brain quietly left the building.

I genuinely can’t tell you where it went. That’s the honest answer and it’s more revealing than any specific destination would be. It might have been the football. My team were playing that evening and I’d been half planning the logistics of watching it since that morning. Home or pub. Whether Alex could manage both kids at bedtime. Whether I’d even get back in time.

Or it might have been somewhere less comfortable.

Because the daydreaming brain doesn’t only wander to beach bars and imaginary spaceships. Sometimes it goes somewhere darker and more familiar. The self-critical spiral that arrives without warning, mid-conversation, mid-interview, mid-moment when you can least afford it.

Why didn’t I prepare that answer better. They know I don’t know this. I can see it in their faces. What is wrong with me. I’ve wasted their time. I’ve wasted my own time. I’m sitting in this room performing competence while somewhere behind my eyes a quieter voice is compiling a list of every reason this isn’t going to work.

The strange experience of evaluating your own performance while you’re still giving it. A commentator at a match you’re also supposed to be playing. Watching yourself from slightly outside yourself and finding the view not entirely reassuring.

I snapped back. Found my footing. Said something that must have been adequate because the interview continued.

But I’ve thought about that moment since. The one where the room contained everything I’d been working toward and my brain decided it had somewhere more important to be. Or somewhere it needed to punish itself. Or both, in a sequence too fast to follow.

That’s the part of the daydreaming brain that doesn’t make it into the funny stories.

What You Get Good At

Here is the strange inheritance of a career spent partially elsewhere.

I became genuinely good at things that had nothing to do with my job description and everything to do with survival. Reading rooms. Sensing shifts in energy before anyone had said anything to cause them. Knowing from the angle of someone’s shoulders whether a meeting was going well or about to go sideways. Producing answers that sounded considered because I needed the extra seconds that consideration buys you.

I got good at the re-entry. The moment of snapping back and finding your footing without anyone noticing you’d left. There’s a particular skill in that. A kind of cognitive fast-forward where you reconstruct the last two minutes from context clues and insert yourself back into the narrative without breaking its surface.

None of this appears on a CV. None of it came up in the interview debrief. But it’s real and it’s mine and I’m not sure I’d have developed it any other way.

The cost of the daydreaming brain is real. I’ve been honest about that across this series. The meetings half attended, the moments missed, the interview where my brain went somewhere I still can’t fully name.

But the adaptation is real too. The quiet competence that developed in the gaps. The ability to land quickly and look like you never left.

I’m not recommending it as a strategy. I’m just saying it wasn’t only loss.

Closing

I never did find out exactly what Daryl was asking me about that day.

Whatever it was, it resolved itself. The team kept their jobs, as far as I could tell. Daryl never mentioned it again. The bar in Barbados remained exactly as I’d imagined it, ceiling fan turning, music at the right tempo, the sea doing what the sea does when nobody is asking anything of it.

I think about that bar sometimes. Not with guilt anymore. More with a kind of wry recognition.

My brain built it out of nothing in the middle of a working day and furnished it with specific music and the right quality of light. That’s not nothing. That’s imagination doing what imagination does when it isn’t being pointed at anything useful.

The trick, I’m slowly learning, is to notice when the bar appears. To register it, nod at it, and choose whether to stay or come back.

Most days I come back.

Some days I stay for one more song.

If this sounds like someone you know, send it to them. They'll probably recognise the bar.

The Therapist’s Question

She asked it simply, the way good therapists do. No preamble, no build up, just the question sitting there in the room waiting to be answered.

Can you think of a single moment in your life where you felt a genuine sense of achievement? Something you completed, something you were proud of, something you actually celebrated?

I paused.

The kind of pause where you’re genuinely searching. Running back through decades of a life, a career, relationships, moments that by any objective measure should qualify. I wasn’t being modest. I wasn’t deflecting. I was actually looking.

Nothing came.

Not a single moment where something finished and I thought, yes, that. That was worth it. That landed.

I told her that. She didn’t look surprised.

The Cubicle

I didn’t start in sales.

My first proper job was in a tech support team, programming telephone systems and helping remote engineers fix things over the phone. We sat in a corner of the office, separated from everything else by choice and by temperament. The conversations were about computer games and the relative merits of different operating systems and a shared, slightly performative contempt for the sales team on the other side of the building.

But I watched them.

The pub lunches that started at one and didn’t end at two. The incentive trips to Vegas, the energy, the noise, the particular confidence of people who seemed to be playing a completely different game to the rest of us. The way the office seemed to organise itself around them without anyone deciding that was how it should be.

I told myself I didn’t care about any of that.

I was lying.

I wanted in. Not because of the money, though the money was obviously part of it. Because of something harder to name. The feeling that something was happening over there and I was on the wrong side of the building watching it through a gap in the partition.

So I did what I always do when I decide I want something. I found a way.

Siobhan

It started with Friday lunches.

Not an official campaign, nothing as organised as that. Just a decision to stop eating sandwiches at my desk and start showing up where the sales team went after the week ended. Slowly, over months, I became a familiar face. Someone who could talk about the technical side without being boring about it. Someone who got the jokes.

The Sales Director was called Siobhan. Sharp, direct, the kind of person who noticed things without making a performance of noticing them. One afternoon she stopped by my desk.

You’re good on the phone, she said. Fancy a go at sales?

I said yes before she’d finished the sentence.

I’d like to tell you it was easy from there. It wasn’t. Call after call to resellers who had no interest in what I was selling, working through rejection with the particular determination of someone who has something to prove and isn’t entirely sure what it is. It’ll be worth it, the experienced reps told me. You can’t imagine the buzz of your first big sale. Just wait until you top the leaderboard.

I was waiting.

The Leaderboard

Then I got lucky.

A major competitor had gone bust overnight, leaving a significant gap in the market and a short window before someone else filled it. I had the relationships, I had the product knowledge, and I had the kind of tunnel focus that the daydreaming brain can produce when something genuinely interesting is at stake.

The next week I signed up a large percentage of the available business. By the end of the month I had made my first significant sale and I was sitting at the top of the leaderboard.

I took a picture of it. Specifically to preserve the moment. To have something to look at later and feel whatever it was I was supposed to feel.

Then I waited for the feeling to arrive.

It didn’t.

No elation. No satisfaction. No urge to call Alex and tell her. No sense that something had shifted or that I had proved whatever it was I had been trying to prove since the days in the cubicle watching the sales team through the partition. The leaderboard said I had won. My brain had already moved on to the next thing.

I smiled when people congratulated me. I said the right things. Inside it was quiet in a way that I didn’t know how to explain and didn’t try to.

It never really changed.

The incentive trips happened. Private jets to Mykonos, evenings in places that people spend years saving up to visit. I rang the sales bell. I hit three hundred percent of target. I stood in rooms full of people celebrating and felt, each time, a version of the same quiet.

Everyone talks about imposter syndrome. The feeling that you don’t deserve the recognition, that someone will eventually work out you’ve been bluffing. I understood that feeling. But this was different. It wasn’t that I felt undeserving. It was that the winning simply didn’t register in the way it was supposed to.

I had closed the loop. My brain just didn’t seem to care.

What Was Actually Happening

I’ve been reading about dopamine recently.

Not in a self-help way. In a trying to understand why my own brain works the way it does way.

The ADHD brain, or the VAST brain, has a complicated relationship with the dopamine reward system. Specifically, it tends to respond strongly to novelty, to pursuit, to the interesting and the unresolved. The chase is where the chemical reward lives. The problem that hasn’t been solved yet. The leaderboard that hasn’t been topped yet.

The moment the loop closes, the novelty is gone. The problem is solved. The leaderboard has been topped. And the brain, which was running on the fuel of unresolved pursuit, simply moves on. Not because the achievement wasn’t real. But because resolved things aren’t interesting and the brain was already somewhere else before the moment could land.

The incentive trip to Mykonos was exciting when it was a target on a whiteboard. By the time I was on the plane it was already filed. Already the past. Already less interesting than whatever was next.

This isn’t the hedonic treadmill, the idea that humans adapt quickly to positive changes and return to a baseline level of happiness. That’s about adaptation over time. What I’m describing is more immediate than that. The feeling never quite arrived in the first place.

It wasn’t emptiness. It wasn’t ingratitude. It wasn’t a character flaw dressed up in psychological language.

It was a brain that experiences the world through the lens of what’s unresolved, and finds resolved things, by definition, less compelling.

The achievement was real. My brain just couldn’t find it interesting anymore.

Staying in the Room

I went back to my therapist the following week.

She asked how I’d been getting on since the previous session. I told her I’d been thinking about her question. The one about achievement. The pause that followed it.

I told her I thought I understood it a little better now. That it wasn’t absence of feeling exactly. It was more that the feeling lived in the wrong place. In the pursuit rather than the arrival. In the problem rather than the solution. In the chase rather than the leaderboard.

She nodded in the way therapists nod when you’ve arrived somewhere they were waiting for you to reach.

What would it mean, she asked, to stay in the room for once? Not to move on to the next thing. Just to let something land.

I didn’t have an answer.

I’m still working on one.

But I still have the picture of the leaderboard. First time I’ve looked at it in years.

Maybe that’s a start

.

The Spaceship

It’s not a pen.

It never was, really. It just looks like one from the outside. From where Mr Coe is standing at the front of the classroom, it’s a pen sitting between the fingers of a boy who should be paying attention. But from where I am, it’s a spacecraft. Small, yes. Cylindrical. But unmistakably a vessel of some kind, drifting through the particular silence of deep space.

I’m thinking about the people on board. What they’re having for breakfast. Whether the living quarters are comfortable. I’ve decided they’re like student dormitories, each one personalised, worn in. Mine would have a dart board. There’s probably a bar on each floor, somewhere to decompress after a long shift, and a gym, and maybe a common room where everyone ends up eventually, and

MILLIS.

Mr Coe’s voice arrives like a hand on the shoulder.

I asked you a question. Is my lesson not interesting enough for you? Away with the fairies again. Let me tell you something. This constant daydreaming will get you nowhere in life.

I came back to the classroom. Pen in hand. Thirty faces turned to look at me.

I said sorry and meant it, the way you mean sorry when you’ve been somewhere else and don’t quite know how you got there. Mr Coe moved on. I tried to follow.

The spaceship drifted on without me.

Mr Coe Wasn’t Wrong. He Wasn’t Right Either.

I don’t tell that story to make Mr Coe a villain. He wasn’t. He was a teacher with thirty kids to manage and one of them was reliably somewhere else. His frustration was reasonable.

But that line stayed with me. This constant daydreaming will get you nowhere in life.

I’ve been thinking about it recently, now that I’m old enough to look back at the classroom from the other side. Because in one sense he was right. The daydreaming did cost me things. Lessons I didn’t absorb. Opportunities I drifted past. Teachers who wrote me off as someone who wasn’t really trying.

But in another sense he was completely wrong. The same brain that built spacecraft out of ballpoint pens went on to build teams, lead organisations, navigate genuinely difficult problems. The imagination that made me useless in that classroom made me surprisingly good at other things. Seeing around corners. Thinking differently. Making connections other people missed.

The daydreaming didn’t get me nowhere. It just took a very strange route.

What Mr Coe didn’t know, what nobody knew back then, what I didn’t fully understand until embarrassingly recently, is that the drifting wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t laziness or disrespect or a failure of character. It was a brain doing exactly what it was built to do, finding somewhere more interesting to be, because the signal to stay present had simply never arrived.

That’s not an excuse. But it is an explanation. And explanations matter when you’ve spent forty years wondering what’s wrong with you.

I Can Always Tell

My wife has a line she uses.

I can always tell when you’ve been in the kitchen.

She doesn’t mean this as a compliment.

She means the cupboard doors. All of them, open. Because I made a cup of tea, reached for the mug, thought I might need something else in a minute, left the door open just in case, made the tea, walked away, and moved on entirely. The cupboard door question was answered satisfactorily by my brain and filed. Whether the door itself was closed was a different matter entirely.

It’s not just the cupboards. It’s the microwave left open after reheating something. It’s the drawers on my chest of drawers, the bottom one in particular, which my wife has taken to calling the leg breaker because of what happens when she navigates the bedroom in the dark and her shins make contact with it at full speed. It’s the fridge, which has a sensor that pings when the door is left open too long, a feature the manufacturers presumably added for normal people and which in our house has become a kind of early warning system for my presence in the kitchen.

Every open door is an unclosed loop. A task technically started, never quite finished. The tea was made. The loop felt complete. Everything else was detail.

And here’s the thing. It’s exactly the same at work.

At any given moment I have twenty draft emails sitting open. Read, considered, mentally replied to, never quite sent. I have browser tabs that have been open for three weeks because closing them feels like admitting I’m never going to read that article. I have a laptop that I put into sleep mode at the end of every day rather than shutting it down, which means somewhere in there is a collection of open windows from days ago, tasks I was half way through, thoughts I was mid-sentence on, all of them still technically running in the background.

Sound familiar?

Here’s a test. At the end of today, when you’re done with work, what do you do with your laptop?

If you shut it down properly, clear the tabs, close the windows, you probably don’t need this newsletter. You close loops naturally. You’re already living in a way that most productivity books describe and very few people actually achieve.

If you put it on sleep or hibernate, if there are tabs you haven’t looked at in days, emails half written, documents open from last Tuesday, you’re leaving a trail of open loops that your brain has already moved on from but never quite let go of. The mental energy of all those unclosed things is still running somewhere, quietly, in the background.

Try this. One week of shutting the laptop down properly. Write tomorrow’s three tasks before you close it. Then close it. All the way. Every tab, every window.

Close the microwave. Close the cupboards. Spare your wife’s shins.

Not because it will fix everything. But because every closed loop is one less thing your brain is quietly carrying.

The Long Game

Mr Coe told me this would get me nowhere.

I understand now that he was looking at the pen. He wasn’t looking at what I was doing with it.

The daydreaming brain isn’t broken. It’s expensive to run and occasionally exhausting to live with and it leaves a lot of cupboard doors open. But it also builds spaceships out of ballpoint pens and finds its way to places that people with tidier minds sometimes can’t imagine.

The trick, and I'm still learning this, is not to ground the spaceship. It's to notice when you've landed, look around at where you actually are, and choose to stay for a while.

The Petrol Station

It was an ordinary Tuesday morning. I needed petrol, which is about as unremarkable a start to a story as it’s possible to have.

I pulled in, filled the tank, walked inside and paid. All perfectly normal. All perfectly responsible. Then I smelled it. Fresh coffee and warm pastries, sitting behind the counter of the little supermarket attached to the garage, directly opposite my office.

I bought a latte and a pain au chocolat, walked across the road, sat down at my desk and got on with my day.

Eight hours later I left the office, walked to the car park, and felt the specific cold panic of a person who cannot find their car. I stood there running through the possibilities. Had I walked to work? Had I got a lift? Had someone stolen it?

Then I glanced across the road.

There it was. My company car. Still parked at the pump where I had left it at eight that morning. The petrol station staff had worked around it all day. When I walked over to collect it, trying to arrange my face into something approaching dignity, they found it absolutely hilarious.

I laughed too. It is a funny story. I’ve told it many times.

But there are other moments I can’t laugh about quite so easily.

The Island

A few years ago I sat on a terrace overlooking the sea somewhere that people save up for years to visit. The kind of place that appears in photographs and makes people stop scrolling. Blue water, warm air, complete stillness.

I was making lists in my head.

Not consciously. Not deliberately. My brain had simply decided that this was an excellent opportunity to plan a business I hadn’t started yet, refine an idea I hadn’t told anyone about, and mentally draft a strategy for a problem that didn’t yet exist. The sea was there. I was somewhere else.

This is the part of a busy brain that nobody really talks about. Not the funny stories about cars at petrol stations or trainers on roofs. The quieter cost. The moments that were objectively beautiful, objectively precious, that passed while your mind was elsewhere building something that probably never got finished anyway.

Holidays half experienced. Meals you don’t remember tasting. Conversations you were present for physically but somewhere else for entirely. The people you love, talking to a version of you that was only partially there.

For a long time I thought this was just how I was wired. Some people are dreamers. Some people are present. I was clearly a dreamer and that was simply the deal.

Then I learned what was actually happening inside my brain. And it changed how I understood everything.

Why Your Brain Won’t Land

There are two networks in your brain that matter here.

The Default Mode Network is your brain’s resting state. It’s where you go when you’re daydreaming, planning, imagining, wandering. It’s creative and associative and it’s where a lot of interesting thinking happens. It’s also where you are when you’re staring at a beautiful sea and mentally drafting a business plan.

The Task Positive Network is your brain’s engaged state. It’s where you go when you’re present, focused, actually inhabiting the moment in front of you.

In most people these two networks take turns. One comes on, the other steps back. The switching is automatic and largely invisible.

In the ADHD brain, or what researchers are beginning to call the VAST brain, Variable Attention Stimulus Trait, that switching misfires. The Default Mode Network keeps running. You’re physically in the room but cognitively somewhere else entirely. Not because you chose to leave. Not because you don’t care. Because your brain never received the signal to land.

A paradise island, however stunning, is not novel. Your brain processed it, filed it, and moved on to the next interesting thing before you’d finished your first drink. This isn’t ingratitude. It’s neurology.

Understanding this doesn’t undo anything. But it does change the word you use. Not distracted. Not ungrateful. Not selfish.

Absent. And absent for reasons that have nothing to do with how much you love the people sitting next to you.

That distinction matters enormously when I tell you about Jack.

Jack

My wife and I had been in the hospital for five days when our son was born.

Five days is a long time to be anywhere. Five days in a hospital, waiting for a labour that kept stalling, watching the person you love most in the world exhaust herself completely, is a different kind of long. By the end neither of us had slept properly in days. My wife had been through more than I have the words to describe here. She was induced, she was exhausted, she was in the kind of pain that redefines your understanding of the word, and when it became clear that Jack had no intention of arriving without significant encouragement, the decision was made quickly.

Emergency delivery. I was marched out of the room and handed a set of scrubs. I remember standing in a corridor putting them on, moving on autopilot, operating purely on adrenaline and the particular focus that arrives when everything becomes suddenly serious.

And then Jack was born. Healthy, which was the only thing that mattered. My wife was tended to by the medical team, and I was handed my son.

Just me and him. In the first hours of his existence.

I want to tell you that I was completely present for every second of it. I want to tell you that I held him and the world narrowed to just that room, just that moment, just this new person who had arrived after five days of struggle and needed nothing from the world except warmth and safety and his father’s arms.

But I wasn’t there. Not fully.

I don’t know where my brain went. I couldn’t tell you now what I was thinking about. Probably nothing important. Probably something that evaporated entirely within days, some half-formed plan or idea or thought that felt urgent in the moment and meant nothing at all. My brain had done what it always does. Found somewhere else to be.

And then I snapped back.

I looked down.

Jack was looking up at me. Newborn and unfocused and completely unaware that his father had just been somewhere else entirely. Vulnerable in the way that only the very new are vulnerable. Needing nothing from me except to be held.

I have never told anyone that before. Not the full version. Not what it actually felt like to be handed the most important thing that had ever happened to me and to spend part of it absent.

I’m telling you now because I think some of you already know exactly what I mean. And I think you’ve been carrying it quietly, the way I have, because it’s a hard thing to say out loud. That your brain left the room at the wrong moment. That it wasn’t the petrol station this time. That the cost wasn’t a blocked pump and some amused staff.

That the cost was a moment you can’t go back to.

What Changes

Understanding why it happens doesn’t return the moments already gone.

Jack is older now. He has opinions about dinosaurs and a specific way he likes his toast and a laugh that appears without warning and makes everything else irrelevant. I have been present for a great deal of his life and absent for some of it, and I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, to notice the difference in real time.

That’s what changes. Not the brain. The brain is what it is. What changes is the moment of recognition. The ability to notice when your Default Mode Network has taken over, when you’ve drifted somewhere that isn’t here, and to choose to come back.

Not through discipline. Not through a system or an app or a productivity framework. Through understanding what’s happening and making a different choice. Imperfectly. Repeatedly. Without self-punishment when you get it wrong.

Because you will get it wrong. Your brain will leave the room again. It will do it at inconvenient moments and occasionally at important ones. The goal is not perfection. The goal is a shorter gap between leaving and returning.

Come back faster. That’s all.

Closing

Last week Jack was at the kitchen table drawing. He does this for hours, completely absorbed in whatever world he’s building on the page. He called me over to show me something he’d been working on. Some intricate piece of nine year old imagination that had been taking shape all afternoon.

I felt my brain starting to drift. The familiar pull of somewhere else.

I came back.

I sat down. I looked properly. I asked him to tell me about it.

He talked for twenty minutes. I was there for all of it.

I’m not trying to fix my brain anymore. I’m just trying to come back a little faster than last time.

Let me tell you about the shoes.

A few years ago, my now wife and I were staying at a friend’s place the night before a wedding. Smart occasion, nice venue, the kind of event where you make an effort. I got ready, suit on, looking the part. The car park was muddy so I kept my trainers on for the walk, swapped into my smart shoes at the car, and drove off feeling organised and on top of things.

The trainers were on the roof.

I didn’t realise until I was well down the road and by then they were gone forever. To make matters significantly worse, I was heading on holiday the following week. I discovered this at the airport, standing in departures in a holiday shirt, chinos and a pair of smart shoes that had absolutely no business being there, handing over an embarrassing amount of money for airport trainers and vowing never to speak of it again.

This is not the story of someone falling apart.

This is the story of someone who, by most external measures, has things reasonably together. I grew up with nothing, worked my way up, and spent the better part of two decades in leadership. I’ve built teams, managed significant budgets, and sat in rooms making decisions that actually mattered. I have a good marriage, a family I’m proud of, and enough self-awareness to know when something isn’t working.

And I still left the lawnmower out for three days last summer.

Not because I forgot where the shed was. Not because putting it away was hard. My brain just moved on. Task complete, loop open, lawnmower in the garden until my wife mentioned it on day three with a look I’ve come to recognise.

This is not a story about lawnmowers or trainers.

It’s about the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. About being a functioning adult who has read Getting Things Done twice, built elaborate Notion databases at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, and downloaded more productivity apps than I care to admit. And still left the lawnmower out.

If you’re the kind of person who starts things enthusiastically and finishes them inconsistently. Who has seventeen browser tabs open and a Notes app full of ideas that never quite became anything. Who can spend forty-five minutes designing the perfect task system and then not open it for a week.

This is for you.

I don’t have a formal ADHD diagnosis. What I have is a brain that moves fast, gets bored, chases the next interesting thing, and occasionally abandons footwear on moving vehicles. Sound familiar?

Here’s what I’ve learned.

The Pattern

I have a shelf, physical and digital, that tells a story.

Atomic Habits. Getting Things Done. Tiny Habits. The One Thing. Deep Work. A worn copy of something about morning routines I bought in an airport three years ago, possibly around the same time I was buying emergency trainers, and definitely finished. Probably.

I’ve tried the systems too. GTD with its inboxes and next actions and weekly reviews. Colour-coded calendars. A Notion workspace so beautifully structured it felt like a shame to actually use it. Microsoft To Do. Apple Reminders. A paper notebook phase that lasted eleven days.

Each one made complete sense when I discovered it. Each one solved the problem, at least in my head, at least for a while.

The pattern goes like this. I encounter a new system or idea. I feel genuine excitement. This is the one, this actually fits how I think. I set it up properly, maybe spend a weekend on it. I use it consistently for somewhere between four days and three weeks. Then life gets busy, or something more interesting appears, and quietly, without drama, I stop.

The system doesn’t fail loudly. It just fades. And six weeks later I’m reading about a new approach, feeling that familiar spark of recognition, thinking: this is the one.

Here’s what makes this particularly strange. I’m not someone who visibly has it together at work either. My inbox is a mess. My OneNote is organised in the same way a skip is organised. I struggle with follow-through on tasks that come across my desk every single day. Work is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain, because underneath the functioning exterior I am constantly managing open loops, chasing things I should have filed, and recovering from things I meant to do yesterday.

And yet I’ve delivered projects, hit targets, led people through genuinely difficult periods. The skills are clearly there. The chaos is just always one step behind me.

That gap, between what gets done and what it costs to get it done, is where most productivity advice completely misses the point.

I’m not telling you this to be self-deprecating. I’m telling you because if you recognise this, you’ll know that the problem isn’t the systems. The systems are fine. GTD is genuinely good. Atomic Habits is genuinely useful.

The problem is that every single one of them assumes you’ll remember to use it.

And that’s precisely what we’re not great at.

The Real Problem

For a long time I thought this was a memory problem. If I could just remember to check the system, use the app, follow the process, it would all work.

It isn’t a memory problem.

It’s an attention loop problem. The brain moves on before the task is complete. Not because it’s lazy or broken, but because it’s wired to find the next interesting thing. The lawnmower is done, the grass looks great, and somewhere between the shed door and the kitchen the brain has already moved to the next thing. The loop never closes because closing it isn’t interesting enough to compete.

This shows up everywhere once you notice it.

The email you read, mentally composed a reply to, and never actually sent. The book you got to 70% and then somehow never finished. The brilliant idea you captured in your notes app at 11pm that you haven’t opened since. The conversation where someone asked you to follow something up and you absolutely meant to.

It’s not forgetfulness exactly. It’s more like your attention has already left the building before your body has caught up.

I’ve since learned there’s a name for this pattern. Open loops. Your brain holds onto unfinished tasks, burning low-level energy trying not to forget them, while simultaneously being distracted by whatever is new and interesting. It’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to people who don’t experience it. You can end a day feeling completely drained without being entirely sure what you actually did.

The cruel irony is that this brain also has genuine strengths. It’s fast. It makes connections other people miss. It can focus with almost frightening intensity on things it finds genuinely interesting. It generates ideas constantly, some of which are actually good.

The problem isn’t the brain. It’s that most systems aren’t built for it.

They’re built for people who are already organised, who just need a framework to channel their existing discipline. They assume a level of consistent follow-through that, if you had it, you probably wouldn’t need the system in the first place.

What you actually need is something different. Not more discipline. Not a better app. Not another book, and yes, I’m aware of the irony of saying that here.

You need a system that works when you’re not paying attention.

What Actually Helped

I want to be careful here. I’m not going to tell you I cracked it. The lawnmower still occasionally spends a night outside. But some things have genuinely shifted, and they’re simpler than anything I found in a book.

Rule one: Don’t put it down. Put it away.

This sounds obvious to the point of being insulting. Stay with me.

The moment you put something down, physically or mentally, your brain treats the task as done. The lawnmower is in the garden instead of the shed because at some point I made a decision, consciously or not, to defer the last step. Same with the email I’ll reply to later. Same with the thing I’ll just leave here for a second.

The rule removes the decision entirely. Not later. Not in a minute. Now, or not at all.

It doesn’t work every time. But it works more often than any app I’ve downloaded.

Rule two: If you can’t finish it, park it properly.

This is where something like GTD actually earns its place, not as a full system, but as a single concept. If a task can’t be completed right now because you’re waiting on someone, or it’s genuinely not the right moment, it needs to go somewhere your brain trusts.

The reason open loops are exhausting is that your brain keeps checking on them. Did I follow that up? Was I supposed to do something about that? Parking a task properly, writing it down somewhere you’ll actually look, tells your brain it can let go. It’s not forgotten, it’s filed.

I use three lists only. Today, which has a maximum of five items. Next, which is everything waiting on someone else or not yet actionable. And Later, which is everything else. No sub-categories, no tags, no colour coding.

The simpler the system, the more likely I am to actually use it.

Rule three: Do the daily reset.

Ten minutes, end of day. Clear what you captured during the day. Move unfinished tasks. Set tomorrow’s Today list, maximum five items, ideally three.

This is your put-it-away moment for everything that accumulated during the day. It stops things falling through the gaps overnight and removes the low-level anxiety of feeling like you’ve lost track of something important.

I won’t pretend I do this every day. But on the days I do, the next morning feels noticeably different. Clearer. Less like I’m already behind before I’ve started.

None of this is revolutionary. You’ve probably read versions of all three in the books on your shelf. The difference isn’t the idea. It’s accepting that your version of the system needs to be smaller, simpler and more forgiving than the one designed for someone else’s brain.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s the part I’ve had to sit with.

The reason I know so much about productivity systems, ADHD traits, habit loops and attention management is that researching them feels productive without requiring me to actually do anything differently. Reading about the problem is more interesting than solving it. Finding the next system scratches the same itch as using the current one, with none of the friction.

I noticed this recently when I caught myself deep in a conversation about building an app for people like me. People who are full of ideas but struggle to finish things. The irony was almost too neat. Here I was, generating a new idea about not finishing ideas, while the things I’d already committed to sat quietly waiting.

That’s the trap. And it’s a comfortable one because it always feels like forward motion. You’re thinking, researching, planning, building. You’re not procrastinating, you’re preparing.

But preparing indefinitely is just procrastinating with better branding.

The uncomfortable truth is that none of the systems matter, not the three lists, not the daily reset, not any framework anyone has ever written down, unless you finish something. One thing. Completely. Before starting the next.

This essay is, genuinely, an exercise in that for me. Not because it’s the most important thing I could be working on. But because finishing it matters more than whether it’s perfect, whether it reaches the right people, or whether it leads anywhere.

The lawnmower goes in the shed. The email gets sent. The essay gets published.

Not later. Now.

You’re Not Broken

If you’ve read this far, something in it probably landed.

Maybe it was the lawnmower. Maybe it was the trainers on the roof. Maybe it was the Notion database you built and quietly abandoned. Maybe it was the shelf of books that individually made complete sense and collectively changed very little.

I want to be clear about something. This is not a character flaw. The brain that leaves loops open is the same brain that makes unexpected connections, gets genuinely absorbed in ideas, and occasionally produces something surprising and good. The frustration isn’t evidence of failure. It’s evidence of a gap between what you’re capable of and what your current systems are designed to support.

You don’t need more discipline. You don’t need a diagnosis. You don’t need another book, and if you’ve made it to the end of this one, you already know that.

You need smaller systems. Fewer decisions. A rule or two that works when your attention has already moved on.

And occasionally, you need someone to remind you that the shed is right there.

If this resonated, I’m going to keep writing about it. Not as a productivity guru, I am spectacularly unqualified for that role, but as someone genuinely figuring this out in real time, lawnmower and all.

If that sounds useful, stick around.