Fourteen: a pen in hand is worth two in the holder unless that holder is insatiable and I need to stop feeding it

15 Aug, 2026

A number of things have... shifted in my life recently. The short upshot is that I have come out of a kind of fog — one of those fogs that, only once you're free of it, coalesces into the Thing that haunted your mind. What was diffuse mist becomes a solid. A familiar. And the exorcism of it, or whatever we're calling recovery these days, results in an increase in various Positive Ideals. Focus. Energy. Good vibes or some such. And in what is surely unbecoming of an eldritch sort like myself, I have been reconsidering my approach to my work life.

The realization, bolstered by the aforementioned shifting, was that my project backlog had gotten 100 items deep. That is 100 projects, not tasks. And I know some of them had progress started long enough ago that I'd taken a step down a specific path... but that path is now so covered over it is as good as lost. Vines and rot and bones of ambition composting quietly beneath a dark shroud.

It is too much, All Reading Eye; too much. I suffer from both a delegation deficiency and a desire for overmuch ownership. I am Quite Adept at capturing everything that might smell of a task and putting it into my little pouch to do Eventually, even if it really needs not be done — neither by me nor really anyone. I know I do not need to do everything. And yet...

100 projects. Each one a small mouth full with gripping teeth. Waiting.

SO. I have begun reconsidering all of how I do it and looking for ways to Slow The Fuck Down and Focus On Important Things. And I'm sure by pure happenstance, and not by the thoughts being there and pattern recognition working overtime, I encountered in the span of like an hour the other day these pieces that have been tumbling in my head since:

We treat friction as a cost, the price we pay for the pleasure. Turn it over and you find the friction is the pleasure. Effort makes a thing ours; waiting sweetens it; resistance is how the self knows it is there. A perfectly frictionless life is subtly deadening, because it leaves you nothing to push against.

Hunter Gatherer 21C, Friction is the feature

and...

Most digital note systems fail for the same reason:
they require you to decide what something is before you've finished thinking it.

OBTF removes that friction:

• You don't categorize.
• You don't organize.
• You don't interrupt your thinking.

You just write.

Christopher Sherrod, OBTF

Friction as an answer

It has been too easy to capture everything from everyone and try to manage it all with "urgency" when there's effectively nothing behind that urgency but habit and the persistent hum of guilt. All of my devices, save my work laptop, have assistive touch enabled which, when tapped, activates a shortcut. That shortcut requests text and saves it to the Reminders inbox directly. The task manager I HAD been using would siphon everything out of there into its inbox for morning triage.

Easy-peasy. And I think that's the true malady.

It has been TOO easy to capture everything, and that everything piles up. Not like a to-do list but like sediment. Geological. Fossilized urgency compressing into stone nobody will ever excavate.

And I cannot take it any more.

For one, it's interfering with my ability to work on the projects that actually matter. It creates this stress that I'm "not doing enough" and I'm even trying to micromanage people on my team doing things because I'm tracking stuff THEY are doing. And none of it matters. Whether those tasks enter the void of the world uncaptured or the void of my backlog, they still sit among the nothingness. My void, your void, our void — doesn't matter. No one is going in after them but me. These things are not beholden to anyone, barely even me, so it isn't like there are consequences for these things going undone. The consequences are for the doing. And the weight is the inventory alone.

And look: I am very good at my job but running myself ragged like this is untenable¹. Nor am I enjoying all of this², and that's just plain dumb.

So — 700 words, all to say I need to change. And I think adding the right friction is the correct direction. Friction for friction's sake is frustrating and unsustainable. But friction as membrane — as the skin between impulse and obligation — that has grip.

What friction looks like

Slowing down capture

I'm moving in steps from all-digital mad-dashing to fill the endless maw of productivity, toward something quieter: let's chill and think about the Stuff I'm bringing into my life.

First: I've stopped carrying all my devices with me when I go to work. Not having my laptop slows me down from grabbing everything and reduces the distraction of... all the cool things I have on here³. It also limits access to the "good" keyboard — the one I can use really easily, the one that makes capture feel like breathing.

Second: I've removed my iPad from its keyboard case for effectively the same reason. Also, the keyboard cases are so heavy.

Three: I dug out the Apple Pencil and am trying written input again.

Four: I moved to a much less "smart" task manager⁴.

Next: ????

Writing by hand is always a pleasant experience. My longer-term intent is to move back to fountain pens and paper, which is a joy more than just pleasant. The ink flows. The nib catches. And paper expresses every word with a direct compact from thought to writing to task. Every word costs something, even if it's only time, and that is the exact point. But for the current state, I need to wean myself off the mad dash. It's actually harder than I expected because I get frustrated juuuust a little when I start, say, trying to write a task in Notes and it doesn't auto-file.

Stop categorizing into a project on the spot

Auto-filing made everything tend to become a task that now I had to do. By not making that the default — anything task-y becomes a task for sure — I just have less crap floating around demanding attention. So I have to consider what to do later, when the note gets moved to Obsidian, and the proto, half-formed thought doesn't automatically transmogrify into a burden...

And then I reconsider that choice⁵ and ask if I need to capture this thing at all.

And then I often just... don't. Noting it down is enough. I'm more likely to recall it since I wrote it down, but I also DO extract that text to Obsidian anyway. So it's findable if it ever comes up again.

It never does.

And I'm generally happier because I have less noise and fewer unnecessary obligations in my life. The maw closes. Not satisfied — just... bored of me. Which is its own kind of peace.

????

It's been a little over a week and I feel much less overwhelmed and have actually caught up on for real critical projects that had been lagging. Less noise in my head means better focus on pretty much everything.

And that's what we truly need. Not fewer things to do — but fewer imposters pretending they need doing.

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#blaugust #productivity