A notebook is a promise to your future self

The trick, if there is one, is not to be more disciplined. It is to make the first twenty minutes cheap enough that you are willing to spend them badly. A page you are allowed to ruin gets written. A page that has to be good stays blank.

Where it starts

I keep a running list of the small decisions a project asks for, because the list is the only honest record of where the time actually went. It is never the big architectural choice. It is the forty little ones underneath it, each of which felt like nothing.

Attention is not a quantity you have, it is a shape you make.

What finishes a piece of work is rarely inspiration. It is a deadline, a collaborator, or the specific embarrassment of having told someone it was nearly done.

What it costs

• Time, which you notice.
• Attention, which you do not.
• The other version of the work you did not make.

There is a particular kind of quiet that arrives about twenty minutes into a piece of work, when the part of you that keeps checking whether the work is going well finally gives up and wanders off. Everything useful I have ever made happened after that moment, and almost nothing useful happened before it.