Jul 7, 2026
We went to Oscar’s sports day today. It had already been delayed twice due to the temperature, but third time lucky, I guess. It was similar, but a bit different to previous years.
During the last year the school has made a few changes and one of them is that all the kids are now in houses. There are four across the school, and Oscar is in water (the others are, of course, earth, air and fire) and over the year they can earn points for their house and at the end there will presumably be some kind of Harry Potter style ceremony where the winner is announced.
That’s the background and that’s why the teachers and support staff were taking the points more seriously this year. The kids got points for all the events they took part in and you know what I figured out pretty early on? They couldn’t have cared less.
If they actually cared about the points, they could have easily gamed the system by just having the people who were best in each event take part. That kid who could throw the most accurately would have done all the throwing and they would have racked up the points. But that’s not what happened at all.
The kids all wanted to take part in the events because they were fun. It didn’t matter to them whether they were good or not. It didn’t matter to anyone whether they were good or not. They took it in turns, they made sure everyone got a go and they had a great time.
It got me wondering why the school is trying to instigate the whole point system and it was pretty easy to figure out: because that’s what adult life is like. If you’re good at your job then (in theory) you get more points (money) and that kind of makes sense, but we do it to ourselves as well when we don’t pursue something because we perceive ourselves as being no good at it, completely forgetting the most important metric of all: whether we enjoy it.
Jul 6, 2026
An incomplete list of things that make me feel better and I should make sure I do more often.
I feel better when I…
– spend time with my family
– spend less time online, particularly on algorithm driven sites like Reddit
– do things to help other people
– am physically active
– read books and long form content rather than skimming through dopamine trap headlines
– don’t have to worry about money
– get on with the work rather than endlessly tinkering with the scaffolding around it
– have purpose
– eat well
– drink enough water
– know that I have used my time wisely
– put on new socks
– focus on doing one thing at a time
– slow down
– am not too hot and not too cold
– sleep well
– feel as if what I am doing has value
Jul 5, 2026
Do you know that I love seeing piles of notebooks that someone has been using to document their lives? Even better if they’re all the same brand and they line up neatly on a shelf and you can look through the whole stack and see the spines with the dates on them. I look at them and I think ‘they’ve really got it figured out’. The same with bullet journals and digital tools. It makes me feel like a ragged mess by comparison because I keep changing what I’m using every few months.
And yes, I realise that part of the reason for that is procrastination. I’m aware of myself enough to realise that. But it’s also because I’m contantly pursuing what my version of that shelf of perfectly matching notebooks is. Every time I make a change, I’m thinking ‘this is it, this is the thing that I’m going to stick with forever and one day I’ll be able to look back at this glorious archive’.
But if there’s one thing the last few years have taught me is that change is constant. Family, jobs, finances, responsibilities. It’s always changing and maybe it’s insane to think I can find this one perfect system for work that I never have to change. Maybe change is just something I’m going to have to figure out how to cope with.
For a while I’ve been trying to do everything in Obsidian and for the most part, I’ve figured out ways to do that. Or at least have it be my source of truth. But stuff is changing again in my life and it’s not working for me at the moment.
When this kind of thing has happened in the past it turns into a whole soul searching thing where I have to admit that what I was doing before isn’t going to be my ‘forever system’ and that I was wrong to commit to it. But I don’t have to do that. It’s up to me how I frame that stuff. And the truth is that for a while it was working perfectly, and if everything hadn’t changed, it would probably have continued working. But things have changed and I need to change with them.
Obsidian as an everything tool was fine, but now it isn’t. I need different tools and systems to get the things done that I need to get done. And that’s fine. Maybe in a few months the current setup will feel like overkill and that doesn’t mean it was always wrong, only that it’s wrong for that hypothetical point in the future.
Who knows, maybe in a few months time I’ll be back to being all in with Obsidian, or maybe even back to using analog tools. I don’t know what things are going to be like then, just like I didn’t know what life was going to be like now, back in January.
Jul 2, 2026
It has been a while since I published a book and a few years since I was doing it regularly. Although I have been writing the whole time, it just hasn’t been coming together. I couldn’t tell you how many half-finished manuscripts and abandoned drafts are scattered around my office.
I jumped from tool to tool. Some stuff is in notebooks, buried on the shelves amongst stacks of other half-filled books. There are things written in Scrivener, in Markdown, in Google Docs.
It’s easy for me to look back now and see that it’s all a symptom of other stuff going on in my life, but it felt like the cause at the time and there’s every chance I’m not over it yet. I feel like I’ve settled on a system now, but maybe in a months time this will just be another failed project to throw in with the rest. Most of the time we’re pretty crap at seeing what’s really going on while it’s happening.
But right now I’ve got a system and although it might be temporary, there’s one thing about it I’m fairly sure is going to stick around: going slower.
When I started publishing thirteen years ago, I went fast. At my peak I was publishing a book a month while holding down a full time job and all the other stuff I had going on. And it was fun and exciting but it was totally unsustainable. Even before other stuff happened, I was dropping projects half done and the pace of publishing was slowing.
That’s the biggest change right now. I don’t feel like I’m in a race anymore and I’m optimising for enjoyment. Which I think come out in the writing.
I’ve always felt more comfortable writing by hand. The slower pace forces me to think more about what I’m writing. The dread of the blank page and blinking cursor just doesn’t exist when I’ve got a pen in my hand. Everything feels more relaxed.
There is a lot of flexibility with my new system. My current WIP started in a notebook, now I’m working on the same story in GoodNotes. Neither contains the full draft but it doesn’t matter because at the end of each writing block, I take what I’ve written and convert it to plain text using Claude, then copy and paste that into Obsidian.
That text file in Obsidian is the source of truth. It doesn’t actually matter whether I use a notebook, GoodNotes, or scraps of paper, as long as it ends up in that file. In theory, if I decide I do want to start writing on a computer again, I can do it without missing a beat.
It’s slower, but that doesn’t matter because I find it much easier to be consistent. And it’s better for me to write 800 words every day than it is to write 3,000 words one day, 2,000 words the next, and then nothing for the rest of the week.
The next step is figuring out the editing process because I want to do that with the same approach. Slow and consistent, not quick and sporadic.
Jul 1, 2026
AI is a thing I’m still trying to figure out. I’ve gone from curious to skeptical to loathing. Right now I’m not sure where I stand because on the one hand it seems inevitable, but on the other it is an ethical nightmare built from stolen data and consuming the worlds resources more quickly than any other technology ever has. Conflicted barely covers it.
But if I’m being honest, there is one thing I’ve started using it for and it does it better than any other tool I’ve ever used: OCR.
I’ve always loved the idea of hand writing books. In the past I have completed first drafts of stories on paper and although I enjoyed the process, I could never bring myself to take the next step and type the thing up for editing. So all those stories (not many, but a few) are still sitting in a drawer somewhere or, more likely, lost forever. But this is where AI comes in. I can take a photo of a page, ask it to convert it to text and it does, with something close to 100% accuracy.
It has opened up this whole new way of working for me and I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but I can’t argue with the results.
What I’ve been doing with my current story is writing in GoodNotes on my iPad, exporting the page as a picture, and pasting that into Claude for the OCR conversion. So I now have close to 8,000 words of editable text that I can start editing without having to type anything.
Doing it this way does lose one of the advantages of writing by hand: the natural second draft you automatically create when typing it up, but I’ve never really gotten to that stage so I’m not losing anything. And I think my writing is better when I work by hand than typing, so I’m already better off.
I am conflicted though and maybe there are some less ethically questionable options out there. But this is the first time I’ve seen how AI can aid me creatively without actually having any input in the process. It’s not writing anything for me, it’s taking words I have already written and changing the format.
There is absolutely no way I will ever let AI create words for me, but this is a useful little service it can provide.
