Sunday, October 4th, 2026

The first week of Q4 is done. It went about how first weeks go. Two things I planned happened. Three things I didn't plan took over. And somewhere in the middle of it I learned a few things I'll actually use.

Three of them. Not things I thought about. Things that change what I do on Monday.

I'm six days out from a Spartan race, and the training plan I've been following has a feature I kept trying to skip.

Easy days.

Not rest days, exactly. Days where the plan says go out and do something, but keep it light. Short run, conversational pace, nothing that leaves a mark. And every time one of those showed up I'd look at it and think, I feel fine, I'll do more. So I'd turn the easy day into a medium day. Then the next hard day would come around and I'd be flat. Heavy legs, no snap, and a workout that should have built something just dug a hole instead.

It took me embarrassingly long to see what was going on. The hard days only work because of the easy days. The easy day isn't the absence of training. It is training. It's the part where the adaptation actually happens. Skip it and the hard day doesn't count for as much as you think.

Once I saw it in my legs, I couldn't unsee it at my desk.

I've run my business for years on a model where recovery is whatever's left over. Work until the work stops, then rest in whatever gap appears. Except the work never stops, so the gap never shows up, so the rest never happens, and I'd find myself on a Thursday in the middle of a heavy stretch making worse decisions than I made on Monday and wondering why.

It's the same mistake. I was turning every easy day into a medium day and wondering why the hard days felt so hard.

So here's what I'm changing. When I have a genuinely heavy week coming, a launch, a stack of client deliverables, a week full of sales calls, I'm now putting a light day on the calendar after it. Not a day off. A day with lighter work on purpose. Admin, catch up, a long walk with Sheldon, reading.

Scheduled in advance, before the heavy week starts. Because if I wait until I need it, I'll talk myself out of it every time. I always feel fine until suddenly I don't.

The lesson isn't rest more. It's that recovery has to be planned with the same seriousness as the hard work, or it won't happen at all.

There's a second half to this that I didn't expect.

The easy days are harder to do than the hard days. Not physically. Mentally. A hard day feels like progress. You finish it tired and you get to feel like you earned something. An easy day feels like you're falling behind. There's a voice that says everybody else is out there grinding and you're jogging slowly around the block like you've got nowhere to be.

That voice has run a lot of my decisions over the years. It's the voice that turns a light Friday into a full one. The voice that answers a client email at 9pm because answering it tomorrow feels lazy. The voice that says a day with nothing hard in it was a wasted day.

It's wrong, and my legs proved it this week in a way my calendar never could. The weeks where I actually took the easy days, my hard days got better. Measurably. I ran the same loop faster and felt better at the end of it.

I'm not sure why I needed a race to teach me something I've read in a dozen books. Probably because reading it never cost me anything, and ignoring it in training cost me a bad workout I could feel for two days.

The body is a better teacher than books for exactly that reason. It sends the bill right away.

I tracked my focus more closely this week than I ever have, partly for a piece I was writing and partly because I've been listening to a lot of people talk about focus lately and wanted to see if any of it held up for me.

Here's the one thing that did.

When I sat down to do real work, what happened in the first ten minutes predicted almost everything about the next hour and a half.

If I opened the document and started working, even badly, even writing sentences I'd delete later, the session went well. I'd get into it somewhere around minute fifteen and stay there a long time.

If I opened email "just to check first," or looked at my phone, or tidied up the task list, the session never really recovered. I'd do some work. I'd get some things done. But I never dropped into that clear, calm state where the good work comes from. I'd spend the whole block half in the task and half somewhere else, carrying other people's problems around in the back of my head.

The difference wasn't talent or energy or how important the work was. It was purely what I did first.

I'd been treating the start of a work session as a warm up. A few minutes to get settled, catch up, clear the decks. Turns out the start isn't a warm up. It's the whole game. Those first ten minutes set the direction for everything after them, and I'd been giving them away to whatever happened to be loudest.

The fix is almost too simple to write down. When I sit down for real work, the first thing I touch is the work. Not the inbox. Not the phone. Not the list. The work.

I did that four days out of five this week. The fifth day I checked email first, "for one thing," and lost the morning. Which was a useful reminder that I haven't learned this so much as I've started learning it.

The "one thing" is always the trap. It's never framed as "I'm going to go read my inbox for twenty minutes." It's framed as one quick check, one reply that's been hanging, one number I need to look at before I start. It feels responsible. It feels like clearing the way so I can focus.

What it actually does is load my head with open loops before I've done anything with my own priorities. Every email I read and don't answer sits in the back of my mind for the rest of the session like a notification that won't go away. I'm not thinking about it on purpose. I'm just carrying it.

There's a second thing I noticed, and it might be the more useful one. Starting badly is fine. Starting at all is what matters. The sessions that went best weren't the ones where I started with a great idea. They were the ones where I started with a bad sentence and kept going. The quality showed up around minute fifteen whether the first ten minutes were good or not. It just needed the first ten minutes to be on the actual work.

I'd spent years waiting to feel ready before I started, and it turns out ready is something that happens after you start, not before. You don't warm up and then work. You work, and the working is the warm up.

That's been said a thousand times by people smarter than me. I just hadn't watched it happen in my own day with a stopwatch until this week.

A few weeks back I spent a chunk of time reading about routines and protocols. How other people structure their mornings, their sleep, their training, their focus. And I did what I always do, which is try to adopt all of it at once.

Within two days I had a morning routine with eleven steps in it. Light, water, movement, breathing, journaling, reviewing goals, a particular kind of breakfast, no phone for the first hour, and a few more things I've already forgotten.

By the end of that week I was running late every morning because the routine took ninety minutes, and I was more stressed at 8am than I used to be before I had a routine at all. The thing that was supposed to set me up for the day was eating the day.

So that weekend I did something I should have done first. I went through the eleven steps and asked of each one whether it actually made a difference for me. Not whether it works in general. Not whether the research supports it. Whether I could tell, in my own day, that it mattered.

I kept two. It took writing Tuesday's letter this week for me to understand why the other nine had to go.

Getting outside early, which I'd been doing with Sheldon anyway, and which genuinely changes how I feel by 10am. And no phone for the first thirty minutes, which turns out to matter more than every other item on the list combined.

The other nine might be great for somebody. They didn't do anything I could feel, and they cost me time and a low grade sense that I was always failing at my own morning.

What I actually learned isn't that routines don't work. It's that someone else's routine is their answer to their problem. They built it around their body, their schedule, their weak spots, their life. When you copy it wholesale, you're copying the solution without the problem that produced it. And then when it doesn't fit, you blame yourself for not having the discipline, when the real issue is that it was never built for you.

The good version of this is slower. Try one thing. Notice whether it helps. Keep it or drop it. Then try the next thing. You end up with a much shorter list, and every item on it is there because it earned its place.

Your operating manual has to be written by you, for you, one tested page at a time. Other people's manuals are useful as a menu. They're terrible as a script.

I see the same thing in business constantly, and I've been guilty of it there too. Somebody hears how a successful operator runs their week, their sales process, their team meetings, and they bolt the whole thing onto their own company. Then it doesn't fit, and they decide either the system is broken or they're broken.

Usually neither. The system was built for a different business, with different people, different customers, and a different set of problems. It worked there because it was grown there.

The operators I respect most don't have the most elaborate systems. They have the most tested ones. Every piece in there has a reason, and they can tell you the reason, and usually the reason is a specific thing that went wrong once. Their manual is short because they've thrown out everything that didn't earn its spot.

That's the version I want. Not the longest list. The truest one.

There's something freeing in that. I don't have to do everything the smart people say. I only have to find the two or three things that actually work for me, and then be boringly consistent about those.

That's the week.

Three versions of the same idea, if I'm honest. What works is what you actually test on yourself, in your own life, with your own feedback. The legs, the first ten minutes, the two steps out of eleven. None of it came from reading. All of it came from trying something and paying attention.

Here's the small version for this week. Pick one thing you do every morning that you think helps. Skip it for three days. See whether you can tell. If you can't, you just got some time back.

Six days until race day. I'll let you know how the legs vote.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman