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Writing

First-person notes on focus, time, and building systems that hold when you do not.

The Time Coffin

A seven-part first-person series on escaping the hour that disappears, adapted from the Operator's Manual.

  1. Part 1

    The Time Coffin

    I have a drawer of planners. Every one of them is filled in at the front and blank the rest of the way. Here is what the drawer was actually telling me.

  2. Part 2

    The Time Autopsy

    I collected data on other people's worst years for a living. It never once occurred to me to run the instrument on my own week.

  3. Part 3

    Schedule the Play First

    In the worst stretch of my life the only thing that got me vertical was a rescue dog named Bob Barker. That is not a sentimental detail. That is the mechanism.

  4. Part 4

    The Sock Drawer Problem

    There is a Coach Hype story where I build a brass cyclotron to clean one coffee mug. It is the most accurate thing anyone has ever drawn about me.

  5. Part 5

    The Focus Shield

    I stepped back, unaware that the serpent was behind me, not in front of me. Thirty years later that is still the most useful thing I know about attention.

  6. Part 6

    Time Management Is Fake

    Six jobs in twenty years. My father went job to job to job before me. I am not going to diagnose a dead man, but I know that shape from the inside.

  7. Part 7

    The Time Sanctuary

    I sang solo at Carnegie Hall at twelve. It was not my voice. Here is the question the whole system exists to answer.

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