I'm an engineer-turned-writer obsessed with the mental software we run on.
The newsletter exists because I kept noticing the same thing in every conversation with other knowledge workers: we all felt more productive than ever on paper, and more scattered than ever in our heads. New tools arrived faster than we could metabolize them. Our attention was getting fractured in patterns we hadn't yet named. And most "productivity" advice either ignored this entirely or treated it as a willpower problem.
It isn't a willpower problem. It's a design problem. The environment changed, and the mental protocols we inherited from a slower era don't hold up anymore.
What you'll find here
Every Monday morning I publish a free essay. Usually it starts with a historical story — a 1700s weaver, an Intel engineer in 1986, a telephone operator named Emma Nutt — and uses that story as a frame for something happening right now in knowledge work.
Paid subscribers also get the Wednesday framework (a deeper, applied protocol) and the Friday tool (a template or audit they can use that weekend). About a third of readers pay. That's enough to keep this independent, so I never need to sell anyone anything they didn't come here for.
What I won't do
I won't use hustle-bro language. I won't pretend there's a productivity system that solves everything. I won't sell courses on things I haven't actually done. And I won't stop writing when the algorithm rewards something else.
If that sounds like the kind of thing you want in your inbox, subscribe. If not — no hard feelings, there's a lot of good writing on the internet.
Thanks for reading.