Welcome to As It Turns Out, occasional field notes on the constant experiments I’m running in the background. Sometimes I move too fast and break things I shouldn’t, and sometimes I discover a really cool idea that’s worth sharing. If it don’t break, I’ll try not to fix it?

If you’ve been here long enough, you may remember the Meaning Map.1 It’s a visual I’ve been playing around with for a couple of years, a bunch of ideas that haven’t quite solidified into something I could point at and go, ta-da. 👋

Writing The Only Thing, my essay on discernment and befriending, changed that a little. The map kept coming back to mind. The ideas in that essay—noticing, naming, befriending where you are—seem to ask for some kind of practical exploration, somewhere to land. I think the Meaning Map might be that place.

So I made a video! It’s an introduction more than an explanation—I’m still figuring out what this is and what it wants to be. But I wanted to get it out there and see how it lands with you.

Where are you on the map right now? I’d love to know.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Welcome to As It Turns Out, occasional field notes on the constant experiments I’m running in the background. Sometimes I move too fast and break things I shouldn’t, and sometimes I discover a really cool idea that’s worth sharing. If it don’t break, I’ll try not to fix it?

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Working from home, starting a business, making your own decisions… There’s a lot to love about it. It can feel a bit lonely, but that’s not quite the word for what’s missing.

In a previous life, I worked with a team. A real one, not just people who showed up and did tasks, but persons who each brought something the others didn’t have. I’m a 4 on the Enneagram. Another teammate was a 2, and another a 6. Between the three of us, we built a team and rhythms that worked, and being intentional about the gaps was part of why it worked. When we added new people, different tools, changed processes, we looked at what we were missing and tried to solve for that.

The 6 on the team kept us honest. She could read the undercurrents of the larger organization: who was nervous about what, where a proposal would snag, how to introduce ideas in a way that would actually land. And she was relentless about asking the question I didn’t always want to hear: Love the vision. But if you do X, Y and Z are going to happen. Are you ready for that, and what’s your plan?1

Sometimes I was like, “Why you harshin’ my flow?” But if you’re going to build a team to cover your gaps, you have to be willing to listen when those gaps get called out.

Now, I’m on my own. Which I chose: the freedom, the clear vision, the work that’s fully mine. And I love that. On the one hand, I own all of it. On the other hand, I own all of it.

The thinking. The ideation. The execution. The planning. The reading of the room when there’s no room to read and no one else in it. It’s all mine, baby.

I noticed the gap more recently when I came across the concept of an “AI boardroom,” an LLM prompt to trigger a set of AI personas that stress-test decisions, give different perspectives, and push back. What resonated for me wasn’t so much the novelty of the tool or the specific personas. Rather, it was the principle beneath. I already had clarity about my direction. What I didn’t have was coverage: the angles I can’t see from inside my own head. The questions I don’t think or want to ask.

The idea that seemed so brilliant at 3am launches to crickets three months later. The sunk costs of building a tool that appeared to solve all the problems only to create a headache when it breaks down and the bug can’t be traced. The service offer that flattens like a whoopee cushion when presented to a business coach, who gives you hard but necessary feedback.2 When four out of your five strengths on the Clifton StrengthsFinder all fall with in the strategic quadrant alone, these are the kinds of pitfalls you encounter.3

So I took this idea of the boardroom and built something a little smaller and more focused: I distilled the idea of eight personas into four lenses, each designed to surface what I haven’t examined (not to tell me what to think). It’s a rough substitute for my former co-worker’s stress-testing instinct, but it nudges me toward the tactical and operational consequences I might miss because I was too close to the idea.

There’s a lot of to’ing and fro’ing about whether AI is good or bad these days. I understand it; I do. But it’s also a frustrating conversation, because the tool doesn’t remove the need for us to bring ourselves to it. As put it: “If the responsibility for bad AI output belongs to you, then the credit for good AI output also belongs to you. Think about that for a second.”4

The panel doesn’t make the decision for me. But it does help me to have the other half of a conversation I need, and can’t have alone. In the end, I still have to choose what to do and how to act on those choices.

The panel also doesn’t replace the ambient presence of other people working, what’s known as body-doubling. There’s sometimes just something about the low-grade pull of a shared environment: everyone’s at their desks, so you’re also at yours. That’s a different gap, and the panel can’t close it.

It also doesn’t replace the lived experience of knowing an organization’s history and dynamics. The relational intelligence, the reading of undercurrents, the sense of how something will land in a group: that requires people, not prompts. It requires someone who knows your whole situation, remembers what you said last month, and will ask the question you’ve been crossing your fingers no one asks.

The AI panel is a workaround for me right now, a way to generate the other of half of a conversation I’m always having with myself, especially when I’m not doing the best job at it. But I’ve learned something from needing it: what I miss isn’t just company. It’s a particular kind of thinking that only happens between people with different perspectives and skills: the colleague who reads what’s underneath, the friend who catches what you’ve stopped seeing.

You can build for that when you have the people. You can approximate it, imperfectly, when you don’t. I think the approximation is worth building, not because it solves the problem, but because the alternative is making decisions alone at 10pm and finding out six weeks later where you went horribly wrong.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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We started with our SloDo by looking at our daily habits, not to judge them but to notice what they reveal. That gap between the life we say we want and the one our practices show we’re pursuing? It’s not failure. It’s data.

Then our Deep Dive essay explored why that gap exists—how we lost eternity as our measure and replaced it with goals that promise fulfillment but can’t deliver. The arrival fallacy isn’t just a psychological phenomenon; it’s a theological problem. We’re desiring creatures oriented toward becoming, and goals assume we’re achieving creatures oriented toward getting.

The practice audit in our Focal Things helped us see this pattern in our own lives. Where are we being formed by rituals we haven’t named? What cultural forces shape us more than we’d like to admit?

And then our Character References Sam and Galadriel showed us what the alternative looks like: Sam tending his garden regardless of whether it makes him a hero; Galadriel spending three thousand years becoming someone who could pass a single test. Purpose gives direction without demanding specific outcomes. It sustains us through failure because it’s not about achievement—it’s about becoming.

Here’s what I keep thinking about: becoming takes time. Not the optimized, hacked, 90-day transformation kind of time. The boring, repetitive, day-after-day kind. The kind where you might not see results for years, or decades, or millennia. The kind that requires believing there’s a measure beyond productivity metrics and quarterly reviews.

Recommendation

This article by Liz Bucar is super interesting, but I especially loved learning about training an “analogical imagination”:

Tracy argued this analogical imagination isn’t some mystical gift you either have or don’t. It’s a trained capacity. A learned skill for seeing possibilities embedded in the present moment, for recognizing patterns that point toward transformation.

Religious traditions, he’s saying, have been teaching people how to look at the world as it is and simultaneously hold in their minds what it could become. Not through fantasy or denial. Through what he called “disciplined attention to what reality itself suggests is possible.”

Tracy called this “the one finite hope of liberation to the essential.” I’d call it: the ability to work for something you can’t yet prove will happen.

Religion, Reimagined

What If Trevor Noah Is Right About the Left and Religion?

A month ago, I heard something I can’t shake…

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3 months ago · 3304 likes · 467 comments · Liz Bucar

This note by popped up in the feed at just the right time, too.

And maybe the bravest thing we can do in an age obsessed with being exceptional…is choose to be rooted, grateful, and present— and let that be enough.

Other Things I’ve Worked On

• Chat with Marie Poulin and Ben Borowski about what it looks like to reimagine being human

• Using a discbound planner designed to be trashed, and what I learned from experimenting

• The Chaos Club finally enters 2026 with C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet and Project Hail Mary (the book)

And finally…

It’s tacofredag!!

When I lived in Northern VA, my family and I loved to go to this hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant for the best nachos on the planet: the Nachos Grande platter. Truly, they were well-named. We moved from NoVA years ago, and I discovered that the restaurant became a casualty of COVID, so there’s not even the hope of a visit to top up on Nachos Grande someday. I do sometimes pause in silent honor of this fallen hero.

I share this minor elegy in order to set up just how jubilant I am to have discovered my NEW hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant with very, very good nachos indeed. They’re not quite Nachos Grande (that might be impossible), but they deliver that same somnolent, sated, all-is-well-with-the-world feeling that you get with the right combination of seasoned beef, luxurious queso, fresh guac, and kicky salsa. I’m trying to decide how soon is too soon to go back; I don’t want to seem too eager. Or gluttonous. Or do I?

Aren’t the small local hole-in-the-wall places the absolute best?!

I’ve done a little rebrand of my coaching services recently. Systems Therapy is now Purpose-Focused Productivity.

Same single-session, personal guidance from me; more focus on helping you connect your purpose to your daily systems. Be sure to check it out!

Purpose-Focused Productivity

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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There’s a lot going on in the world right now. Every time we check the feed, it’s a new crisis, a new outrage, a new burden to carry. That’s on top of everything else you’re already dealing with. And beneath it all, there’s the question that won’t stop asking itself: who am I becoming in the midst of all this?

If that question won’t let go of you, and you’re not sure how to answer it, let’s talk. In a Curiosity Call, we’ll name what’s resonating, what’s not, and where you’re finding friction in connecting your purpose to your daily systems. This is a free 15-minute conversation that you can book by clicking the button.

I'm Curious!

And, I had so much fun on my first podcast appearance that I want to keep doing it. If you host a podcast, or have a favorite show that you think I should check out, message me!

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

People Watching explores what it looks like to be a flourishing human through the relationships that shape us. I share conversations from real folks about the role models they’ve found in their everyday lives, and “character references” from historical, fictional, and contemporary folks who shed light on what it looks like to live with purpose in any age.1

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True confession: when it comes to Lord of the Rings, Frodo (the literal, actual main character) has never been my favorite. It’s always been Sam.

I love that Samwise Gamgee has this bedrock knowledge of self; he knows exactly who he is. This knowledge isn’t arrogance, but rather, a hidden confidence: he sees through the seductive promises of the Ring because he knows what he actually wants (his garden, his home, Rosie). This knowing enables him to stay true to the why of the quest, when Frodo can’t see or remember it.

My other favorite character is Galadriel of Lorien. I love her humility. It’s hard-won but it’s true. She knows what it’s like to do things for the wrong or misdirected reason, and by the time we meet her, she’s lived into her purpose for so long. Frodo offering the ring was a test that truly tempted her, but her memory and her purpose were solid enough enough to anchor a real and costly choice.

Who models this for you?

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Sustainable Systems provides purpose-focused humans with deliberately designed processes, tools, and practices that are sustainable, meaningful, and beautiful.1

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Take a look at your current goals. If you achieved every single one, who would you become? Now ask: Is that who you actually want to be, or just who you think you should be? Are your current goals serving a deeper purpose, or have they become the purpose themselves?

We usually start trying to discern and articulate our purpose by looking at the big picture. This week, let’s approach this from a different angle. Let’s start by looking at what we do day in and day out. What do our actions say about what we live for?

This week’s Focal Things practice is inspired by James K.A. Smith’s “Practice Audit” in Desiring the Kingdom.

First, write down the habits or activities you do on a weekly or daily basis, whether it’s exercise, commute, app checking, watching tv, and so on. We often do things mindlessly, on autopilot, so be sure to take a pause to really think about your schedule and actions throughout the day. Make note of what you do, and how much time you spend doing different sorts of activities.

Next, revisit your notes in response to our SloDo: what is your vision of the good life?

With that in mind, take 20-30 minutes to audit your activities using the following questions. Pay special attention to what you’re tending—the small, daily practices you keep returning to regardless of whether they make you impressive.

• What are some of the most significant habits and practices that really shape what you think and what you do?

• What do you think are the most important ritual forces in your life? If you were honest with yourself, are these positive or negative?

• What do you think of some of the most potent practices in our culture or, if you have kids, what are the cultural forces that you don’t want your children shaped by?

• As you step back and reflect on them, are there some habits and practice you might’ve originally thought were neutral, but upon further reflection, you see as more formative or significant?

• Which of your practices have you been doing so long they’ve simply become who you are—not means to an end, but expressions of the life you’re already living?

This isn’t an exercise in judgment, but in noticing. We can’t change what we haven’t named. If your vision of the good life includes leisurely meals with good friends, but you find yourself more often than not eating fast food in your car on your commute, ask yourself how that came to be. The answers you discover in that gap are clues, not cudgels.

Let me know what you discover.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

Trying to figure out how this applies to your life? That's what Systems Therapy provides. One session gets you a personal guide with tested solutions ready to implement, plus two weeks of email support as you integrate them.

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Human Be(com)ing explores how to desire better, decide wisely, and act differently in an often overwhelming and bewildering age.1

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Ah, 2026. You’ve promised yourself that THIS is the year you make that change you’ve been wanting to make in your life—the reading change, the health change, the adventure change, the change to rule all changes. THIS IS THE YEAR.

Meanwhile, your workplace has already had its strategic planning sessions, and you’ve submitted your OKRs for the first quarter (possibly even all four quarters). You’re trying to figure out how to accomplish your personal goals alongside your professional ones. And all the while you’re thinking about how to quietly quit All the Things, because you’re just TIRED of being told to optimize and improve and stay on the fucking treadmill.

You may find yourself sitting in traffic on your evening commute, wondering what it’s all for. What is the point of goals and objectives and results, and all the hustle?2

That, my friends, is a fantastic question. We should ask it more often.

When this image popped up in my IG feed, I cracked up. I don’t know about you, but my brain does love that dopamine spike it gets from smashing the “Buy It Now!” button. But then I realized...there’s something a little deeper going on here, something a bit more insidious than we might guess at first.

Our desire to “do something” with our lives has been co-opted and commodified, trained to transform a desire to move toward purpose into an impulse to buy and acquire new stuff. Goals have become a mechanism for this transformation—and I think we need to ask what we’ve lost along the way.

What We’ve Lost

Lewis Mumford once observed that, in the transition to an industrialized society, “eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.” There was a time when eternity—the full flourishing of human life and our ultimate home—measured and focused how we lived our lives. But somewhere along the way, we lost that horizon. And when we did, something else had to fill the void.

Before we get to what that was, though, we need to ask a more fundamental question: What kind of creature are we, anyway?

Every approach to living assumes things about human nature. The “goals” approach assumes we are primarily achieving creatures—beings whose fundamental orientation is toward acquiring and completing. But the Christian tradition suggests that we are, first and foremost, desiring creatures—oriented by love toward some vision of the good life. We’re not static containers for ideas; we’re dynamic, always on the move, pursuing something. I love how James K.A. Smith puts it: we’re like existential sharks—we have to move to live. We are becoming creatures, directed toward something, pursuing some larger vision of life.

Smith goes on to suggest that we are shaped far more by practices and rhythms than by ideas alone. Our deepest desires don’t show up primarily in what we say we want, but in what our daily life and habits reveal we want. You can tell what someone truly loves not by asking them, but by watching how they spend their time.

If we’re creatures oriented by desire and shaped by practice, then our ultimate orientation matters immensely. Where are we being formed to desire? What are we becoming? This is where eternity enters the picture—not as abstract doctrine but as the horizon of our becoming.

The Christian vision of eternity isn’t about endless tomorrows where nothing matters because there’s always another day. That’s the critique philosopher Martin Häggland makes—that a belief in, a life oriented toward, eternal life removes all stakes, leaving us with meaningless succession. And honestly, if that’s what eternity really is, he’d be right to reject it. A lot of us carry that image around, whether we’d admit it or not.

But that fundamentally misunderstands what eternity is.

Eternity is greater aliveness, not infinite extension. C.S. Lewis suggested something like this in The Great Divorce: we can think of our lives here as practice, and who we are now is who we will continue to be in eternity—only intensified, brought to full flourishing. This long view creates proper stakes. It gives us a measure for our actions that transcends the tyranny of the urgent, the anxiety of productivity metrics, the exhaustion of endless achievement.

Purpose—that sense of what we’re oriented toward, of who we’re becoming—expresses our longing to see all things made new.

But when we lost eternity as our measure and forgot our nature as desiring, becoming creatures, something else rushed in to fill the void. Goals—with their promise of achievement and their focus on getting rather than becoming—became the default measure for a meaningful life.

The problem is, they can’t bear that weight.

When Goals Become Our Measure

Goals now carry the burden that eternity once carried. What began as a theological claim about grace—that hard work signals divine favor—became an individualist achievement ethic. We lost “eternity as measure” and kept only the anxious striving. Goals have become the container for that anxiety.

They’ve become the answer to “what makes life important or successful?” But they’re too small for that role, too focused on acquisition rather than formation (though they do, in fact, form us). And perhaps most importantly, they take our nature as desiring and becoming creatures and warp it into unrecognizable shapes.

The clearest evidence of this failure is what psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar calls the “arrival fallacy”—achieving a goal we’ve pursued, expecting lasting fulfillment, only to find that happiness disappointingly elusive. You get the promotion, lose the weight, publish the book, buy the house—and then what? The achievement becomes the new normal almost immediately, and we set our sights on the next milestone.

This happens because we’ve made goals into absolute statements of identity. We invest them with the expectation that this achievement will finally make us who we’re meant to be. So when we don’t reach the goal, we haven’t just failed at a task; we’ve failed at being ourselves. And when we do achieve it, it becomes just another marker pointing to the next thing that really will complete us. This time. For real.

This identity problem shows up in two crucial ways. First, when goals carry our identity, every setback feels existential. It’s not “I failed at this specific thing.” It’s “I failed at being me.” Goals detached from any deeper purpose become either arbitrary (why this goal and not another?) or anxiety-producing (what if I don’t make it?). The finish line keeps receding, and we’re left exhausted, chasing something we can never quite reach.

Second, goals disconnect us from the very behaviors and processes that actually shape us. We’ve designed goals to end—you either fail or achieve them, and then move on. There’s no lasting satisfaction because goals aren’t designed for satisfaction; they’re designed for completion. This is the opposite of practice, which is ongoing, formative, and focused on presence rather than outcomes.

Ask me how I know.

I’ve tried the goal-setting thing faithfully. Quarterly planning, concrete OKRs, recording targets, linking them to monthly projects, delineating tasks, reviewing progress. The whole productivity stack. And you know what? It was demoralizing. I’d see all these tasks ticked off with no discernible effect on the results I wanted. The goals never connected to my actual behaviors, my contexts, my relationships, the daily life where I actually lived.

I realize now that goals effectively set their object apart from everyday life, as if to say: “This is a thing separate from your world BUT! It will reshape that world if you accomplish it. So accomplish it OR ELSE.” Goals became referendums on who I was, not projects in becoming who I’m designed to be.

Goals assume we’re achieving beings when we’re actually becoming beings. Achievement culture offers us this container for living without ever asking “toward what end?” We’re given tools for efficiency without any sense of direction, like being handed a high-performance engine with no steering wheel.3

We need something more stable, something that aligns with our nature as creatures oriented by desire and shaped by practice. We need purpose.

Purpose as Proper Measure

Purpose recovers our sense of what kind of creatures we are. Unlike goals—which change, shift, get achieved and replaced—purpose provides a stable orientation. It expresses our longing to see all things made new, our glimpse of eternity breaking into the present. Purpose “stains backwards” through our lives, as it were, reshaping what we see and imagine, claiming stakes in the world as it ought to be.

When we have purpose, we can act as if we live in that world already—and in doing so, we bring the kingdom of God a little bit closer to now. Purpose says nothing about specific outcomes, whether we’ll get what we want or like what we get. Instead, it describes something that doesn’t fully exist yet, but remains compelling enough to sustain us in the journey, like lembas bread for the long journey.

Here’s three ways that purpose functions differently than goals:

Purpose as Destination

Purpose orients us toward who we’re becoming, not what we’re getting. A destination isn’t the same as a goal, though. A goal is a specific, measurable outcome: “lose 20 pounds,” “make $100k,” “publish a book.” A destination is more like “becoming the kind of person who cares well for their body,” “becoming generous and free from financial anxiety,” “becoming someone who creates beauty and meaning through words.”

Goals are about getting. Purpose is about becoming. And becoming takes time, patience, attention to daily formation—all the things goals tend to short-circuit.

Purpose as Standard

Purpose also provides a measure by which we evaluate our choices and behaviors. It lets us ask whether our present actions align with our deeper convictions about who we’re designed and called to become. Remember: our deepest desires manifest in our daily life and habits, not just our stated intentions. Purpose connects the big picture to the daily practices that actually form us. It asks not “did I hit my target?” but “is this shaping me into who I’m meant to be?”

This asks a lot more of us than goal achievement, honestly. You can achieve a goal and still be oriented in completely the wrong direction. Purpose keeps asking the harder question: which way am I going?

Purpose as Filter

Finally, purpose helps us navigate the overwhelming smorgasbord of modern options. It helps us see which option better enables us to move toward our destination and which moves us away from it. When you’re facing several equally good options—this job or that one, this city or another, this commitment or a different one—purpose becomes the filter that makes the choice possible. Not because it gives you a formula, but because it reminds you who you’re becoming and lets you ask: which of these fits that becoming?

From Goals to Projects

So what do we do with goals? I’m not suggesting we abandon all structure or direction. Rather, I’m suggesting we dethrone goals from their position as the ultimate measure and make them subject to purpose.

When you have purpose as your north star, goals become experiments in living out that purpose rather than referendums on your identity. Failed experiments teach you more about how to express who you’re becoming; they don’t mean you’ve failed at being yourself.

In future essays, I’ll explore the practical framework—how commitment spheres help us locate purpose in actual domains of life, how projects and experiments become ways of honoring commitments in a given season without turning into identity referendums. But for now, the crucial shift is this: start with purpose, not goals.

An Invitation

So let me ask: What would change if you started with purpose rather than goals?

I won’t pretend discovering purpose is quick or easy. It’s not another productivity hack. It’s about recovering our nature as desiring, becoming creatures. It’s about taking the long view that eternity provides—not to escape the present but to measure it rightly.

Purpose is our glimpse of eternity. It’s the expression of our longing to see all things made new. It’s the measure and focus that our actions desperately need. Not so we can achieve more, but so we can become who we’re designed to be.

And that, my friends, sounds far more compelling than any goal.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

If this essay resonates but leaves you wondering how to actually live this way given your real constraints—the competing responsibilities, limited energy, complex realities—you're not alone. Systems Therapy helps bridge that gap with personal productivity solutions that honor your whole design.

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Also: A Note About AI

I use LLMs (or chatbots, or Clippy’s sophisticated older cousin) at the END of my writing process. This helps me edit the work, zoom out to find patterns I’ve missed, and generate social media posts, title ideas, and other related tasks that make me want to shrivel up in a corner and die. The blood, sweat, and tears are wholly my own.

To kick off 2026, we’re reading C.S. Lewis’ The Space Trilogy, starting with Out of the Silent Planet.

Then we start talking about everything else we’ve read so far, uniting in our minority position as readers who don’t get the hype about Project Hail Mary (the book, not the movie!).

Listen in, drop a comment, and enjoy!

Oh, gosh, y’all!

Not only did I get to meet a real-life role model last year, but I got to talk with her AGAIN!1 I was delighted to sit down with Marie Poulin and Benjamin Borowski on their podcast Grief & Pizza — and now it’s here.

Listen Now!

Marie and Ben are such hospitable hosts. They created a space for an intimate conversation about big questions — vulnerability, flourishing, and what it looks like to serve others well. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

A few things that stayed with me:

“It’s not being driven. It’s not being pushed. It’s not brute forcing your way into something. It’s a conversation. It’s a conversation with your life. It’s a conversation with your community.”

“You actually have to be vulnerable in order to build trust.” — something a mentor said to me years ago that I still haven’t finished working out.

“There is nothing left to go harder with at this point. So what can I receive instead?”

I hope you'll go take a listen, and that you find something that resonates and stays with you.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Has it been a crazy week? Feeling a bit overwhelmed and discombobulated?

Here, have a SloDo.1

SloDos are an invitation to mindful communication, an opportunity to open channels of awareness within ourselves, between each other, and with the divine. Grab your favorite note-taking tools and take a few minutes to turn aside from the noise and listen for the clear signal. Here’s this week’s prompt.2

What vision of the good life animates your daily habits and goals—not the life you say you want, but the one your actual practices reveal you’re pursuing?

What are you tending? What small, growing things have you committed to care for, regardless of whether they make you impressive?

What have you been practicing for so long that it’s simply become who you are?

What did you find most helpful in this reflection? Most challenging?

Let these questions serve as invitations to awareness - follow the thoughts that resonate most for you and see what comes up.

Sometimes our awareness reveals systems that aren't working—communication patterns that drain us, routines that fight our design rather than support it. If this prompt surfaced a specific frustration you're ready to address, Systems Therapy might help.

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Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Lately, there’s a couple of words that keep tumbling around in my mind, refining how I think about purpose, living well, and becoming ourselves. They’ve become especially insistent the last few months, as I keep sensing this low-grade anxiety humming beneath contemporary life right now. Not panic exactly, but something more pervasive and persistent. We sense the ground shifting beneath our feet, and nobody quite knows where to step. Yet rather than sitting with that uncertainty, we are bombarded with takes. Sometimes, we’re the ones bombarding everyone else with takes. Every platform, every pundit, every algorithm has a confident explanation for what’s happening and what comes next, each one more bold, more loud, and more certain than the last.

Most of us are just wondering: WHAT is going on?1

The In-Between

This uncertainty isn’t accidental. In almost every area of life, the structures and stories that got us here are revealing their limits, their brittleness and insufficiency to handle the very change they made possible. The promise of connection without the substance of it. Institutions that look solid until they don’t. Leaders who appear strong but foment chaos. A realization that the old maps no longer match the territory. The pace of change outruns our ability to process it, to make sense of what we see and experience.

There’s a word for this kind of transitional moment: liminal. From the Latin limen — threshold. It describes the disorienting in-between space when what was is clearly ending, and what comes next hasn’t taken shape yet. It’s not crisis exactly, though it can feel like one. It’s more like standing in a doorway, unable to go back, unable to see clearly forward.

Transitional experiences all follow the same three stages: a separation and an ending; disorientation and the liminal; and, re-formation into new identities and structures. We’ve been experiencing the ending of a lot of things, and we’re trying to find an answer to the question that last stage raises: who or what are we becoming? With all the voices shouting ideas into the mic, so to speak, no one’s ideas are truly leading (or rather, the worst ones are).

Because there’s no clear, coherent, compelling vision, we’re traveling this liminal ground in desperation, following some back toward the known past, and others toward the unknown future. But in both cases, we’re in a posture of resistance: we do not like it here, we do not want it, and we cannot be done with it soon enough. We miss both what we’ve lost and what isn’t yet real or true. We miss what felt like control over our lives, a control we owe to the familiar, the routine, the predictable. When that routine becomes irreparably disrupted, we experience confusion, frustration, impatience. Especially, we experience grief.

The bigger the change, the greater the loss.

Normally, something absorbs some of the shock: a community, a tradition, a trusted voice that helps pace what we’re experiencing. But right now, those buffers are either gone or disintegrating. We’re absorbing the loss in real time, making sense of it alone, and trying to envision a way forward without much guidance. That’s an enormous amount to carry.

Living without closure or resolution starts to feel without purpose. We want out.

This is where we are right now, personally and collectively. And it raises the question: what does it take to navigate a moment like this well?

Most of the answers are just more of what got us here: faster tools, louder voices, more boldly asserted takes. But I think this moment is inviting us to something quieter and more demanding.

We’re being invited to discernment.

About the First Word

We use the word “discernment” a lot, but rarely in its fullest sense. It’s come to be a sophisticated synonym for choosing well, a kind of careful, unbiased decision-making available to anyone willing and able to think clearly enough. We use it to describe the ability to see people, situations, or problems without distortion, to cut through the noise and arrive at the right answer through careful reasoning.

But that’s not quite it.

Discernment isn’t primarily about decision-making. It isn’t grounded first in logical analysis or rational discussion, and it doesn’t assume that we have the capacity to understand and solve every problem if we just think carefully enough. That version of discernment is really just optimized thinking. And optimized thinking falls prey to the same limits, blindspots, and noise that got us confused in the first place.

When we feel uncertain, we instinctively want to meet ambiguity with a decision, A Plan. We rush to convert the discomfort of not knowing into the relief of clear outcomes and concrete actions. The desire for control isn’t wrong. But here’s the thing: a plan for outcomes assumes we already know what we’re dealing with. In a liminal moment, that’s precisely what we don’t know. Much of the noise we’re hearing is really the sound of that frantic attempt to resolve uncertainty through confidence, control, and motion.

The last few months of my life have been a slow reckoning with such frantic attempts. I recently wrote about how my own productivity systems broke open just how tightly I clung to the illusion of control: control over process, control over outcome. The more I wanted a specific result, the more I tried to engineer every aspect of my day and effort to gain it. The same pattern kept showing up in every area of my life: lock it up, lock it down. If that doesn’t work, try harder.

Over time, without realizing it, I’d become someone I didn’t recognize. Someone whose every action arose out of anxiety and fear, for whom the idea of genuine rest sent me into a spiral of panic. I could not trust that I was trustworthy if I wasn’t proving it to myself every minute of every day. Eventually my body began to break down in ways I couldn’t ignore or engineer my way out of. There was no try left.

Noise and Signal

I heard artist Scott Erickson say on a podcast that whenever he’s in a dark period, he asks of himself and of God: “What’s the only thing I can learn by being here?”

I’ve come to think that this is the question we’ve all been avoiding, that we must begin to grapple with if we’re going to make any real changes in life, in society, in the world.

Because this question invites me to listen to what my life is telling me, to notice what God is calling me to pay attention to. Old things have passed away; new things are coming. But the dying and the arriving are incomplete and not yet, and here feels like a boggy swamp. The question doesn’t get me out of the swamp any faster. But it reorients me toward something other than my frantic efforts at control.

The word “discernment” itself points somewhere different. Discernment comes from the Latin discernere — to separate, to distinguish. In the Christian tradition, it has a long history in the spiritual life of both communities and individuals. The goal of discernment is, first and foremost, to learn to see the work of the divine in the world, to separate the signal of God’s movement from the noise of human activity.

Discernment implies hiddenness, something undisclosed or yet to be revealed. It hints at insights we can uncover, names we can bestow or receive. These days, we experience what can only be called an “information surplus,” and bemoan what feels like an insufficient quantity of attention to adequately filter and select what we need. But attention is not a quantity; it’s not a resource we can spend or save. Attention is meeting, it is revelation, it is an encounter with the reality before us. Attention is the prelude to discernment.

What discernment requires, before anything else, is not better thinking. It’s deeper listening. Attending. Noticing.

Noticing requires a name, because to name something is to enter into relationship with it. Naming, like noticing, is not a one-time act but a sustained one, a repeated return, because to use a name requires memory, connection, attention over time. We find it hard to love what we cannot name. And what we do not love, we will not tend.

About the Second Word

Befriending enacts what naming requires: curiosity and care unfolding over time. But it also suggests something about posture: a turning away from aggression and toward relationship. For a long time, I have treated my body as a problem to be solved, an enemy to be vanquished. As it started breaking down faster, all I knew to do was try harder, which just made everything worse. Befriending became the only alternative left to me. Not fixing, not forcing, but learning to listen to, to notice what my body was actually telling me. Befriending invites me to actually inhabit my body.

To inhabit is to be where you are, to be nowhere, nowhen else but here. Inhabiting my body means recognizing that I can only meet the world through my limits, my finitude. Finitude isn’t a problem to overcome; it’s the shape of a human life. Befriending finitude means learning to work with those limits rather than against them, to let them tell you something true about who you are and what you’re for. Befriending is the recognition that many things in life don’t need try. They need rest.

Tending the Signal

God knows the world feels more chaotic and uncertain all the time. Every day comes with a demand to notice, to care, to act on what’s happening out there. And of course, to observe is to feel a reflexive compassion for another human being’s plight, a desire to do something that helps.

But we inhabit here.

To befriend, to tend, to care within our limits means to take responsibility for our part in the relationship of what we have noticed and named. As Sarah Hinlicky Wilson so beautifully states: “everything real and everything that heals is personal and local.”

If we cannot or will not be in relationship with what we have noticed, we are free to turn our attention to what we can name and befriend. We gain this freedom through discernment. Discernment is more than a practice of self-knowledge or choosing well. To discern is to notice where God is already at work — in the world, in others, in the texture of our own lives. It’s coming awake to the persons we are, and to who we’re designed to become. Befriending our limits, our finitude isn’t resignation, but rather, preparation. We tend what we love. We participate in what we name. And we can only name when we’ve learned to be still enough, present enough, to notice.

And only then, we act.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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This essay is in conversation with the following:

• Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation by Cindy S. Lee

• How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season by Susan Beaumont

• Note to Self: Creating Your Guide to a More Spiritual Life by Charles LaFond

• The Enneagram of Discernment: The Way of Wisdom, Vocation, and Practice by Drew Moser

• Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation by Lanta Davis

• Worth Doing: Fallenness, Finitude, and Work in the Real World by W. Davis Buschart and Ryan Tafilowski

• “If Your Attention Isn’t a Resource, What is It?“ by P.J. Anderson

• “When Attention is the Coin of the Realm,” by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson.

→ This song kept me company: Sound and Color by Alabama Shakes.

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In this sprint, we explored the phenomenon of zombie projects: the things that never quite finish, never fully die, just keep shambling forward consuming mental energy without ever releasing us. They’re not dead. But they’re not really alive either.

The deeper question turned out to be about us, not our to-do lists. We’re being asked to become zombies ourselves—perpetually available, endlessly productive, with no off-switch. But we’re not machines. We have seasons of capacity and seasons of depletion. We can’t maintain the same energy output regardless of circumstances, because that’s not how creatures work.

We started with our SloDo “Mostly Dead Means Slightly Alive,” an invitation to inventory responsibilities, obligations, and relationships—noticing what feels urgent versus important, what brings joy versus dread, and asking “What feels alive here?”

We then took a Deep Dive into “When Your To-Do List Becomes a Zombie Horde.” Built around Rachel’s coaching session—a working mom navigating 200 minutes of daily driving, unpredictable sports schedules, and the dread of hitting December unprepared—we identified “zombie projects.” We took a look at the cultural expectation that we become “undead workers”—perpetually available, never saying “enough,” also realizing the proactive paradox: we can only plan ahead when we have capacity before chaos hits. We then revisited how purpose serves as a filter: helping us choose between equally good options based on who we’re becoming, as well as providing us with a call to honest assessment of creaturely limits rather than optimization.

We followed up with Focal Things, with tactics for getting ready “Before the Horde Arrives: The Project Brief.” This is a pre-commitment tool that I adapted from the idea of creative briefs and Tara McMullin’s goal-setting work. It offers a practical way to identify three projects for your next major milestone—not ten, just three—and either complete them or shoot them in the head. Use the project brief to think through each one clearly—outcome, stages, resources, troubleshooting—then give yourself permission to let everything else wait.

Columbus from Zombieland served as our Character Reference: “Cardio, Double Tap, and Evening Prep” He modeled this for us surprisingly well: pre-decisions made when you can think clearly, simple rules that evolve as circumstances change, all rooted in knowing what you’re actually trying to protect or accomplish.

I don’t know about you, but the idea of being able to knock zombie projects off the board feels incredibly freeing. It gives us space to sit with the question “Who are you designed and called to become?” Let your answer guide what deserves your attention—and what needs to be left in the rearview mirror.

Recommendation

If you found the idea of a project brief interesting, and you’d like to dig into the book that inspired me, check out Tara McMullin’s What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting. She goes into the systemic factors that shape how we typically understand goals, while also offering practical solutions at the personal level.

I’ll be digging into more into this idea of challenging the language and practice of goals here in the near future, so stay tuned!

And finally…

It’s tacofredag!!

It’s not a taco in the traditional sense, but it does involve a tortilla. Grab a large tortilla (I like Mission Gluten-Free), heat some oil in a skillet, throw your favorite sliced meats, cheeses, and condiments in there, and make yourself a dang quesadilla.1 Simple but effective.

And if you’re curious about how to create sustainable systems in your purpose-focused life (or you want to get away from zombies), book a free Curiosity Call with me! We’ll take a look at what’s broken, missing, or confused in your processes, tools, or practices, and then see how I can help.

Just Book It!

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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People Watching explores what it looks like to be a flourishing human through the relationships that shape us. I share conversations from real folks about the role models they’ve found in their everyday lives, and “character references” from historical, fictional, and contemporary folks who shed light on what it looks like to live with purpose in any age.

I couldn’t resist this week’s Character Reference: Columbus from Zombieland. This dude and his rules, I tell you.

In a world overrun by zombies, Columbus survives through a deceptively simple system: pre-decisions. His famous list of rules—‘Cardio,’ ‘Double Tap,’ ‘Beware of Bathrooms’—aren’t about being perfect. They’re about knowing exactly what to do when chaos hits.

What makes Columbus’s approach sustainable? Three things:

1. Pre-decisions: He decides his responses before the crisis, when he can think clearly.

2. Simplicity: The rules are memorable and actionable, not elaborate.

3. Evolution: Rules #1-31 eventually make room for new realities (like Rule #32: Enjoy the little things and Rule #17: from “Don’t be a hero” to “Be a hero”).

One more thing about Columbus’ list: it’s rooted in a clear purpose—to find his parents. Every rule makes sense when you realize that Columbus wants to survive to reunite with his family. And when that purpose expands to include his found family, the rules adapt in response.

This is what tactics like evening prep and project briefs do for our human-sized lives. They’re not about controlling everything—they’re about having clear responses ready when the zombie horde of September arrives. And like Columbus, we can adjust our rules as we learn what actually works.

Who models this for you?

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Sustainable Systems provides purpose-focused humans with deliberately designed processes, tools, and practices that are sustainable, meaningful, and beautiful.

A Tested Template for Life’s Actual Complexity

“My concern is we’re going to hit December and I’m going to hate myself again.”

Rachel said this in August, looking ahead at three months of overlapping soccer schedules, cross country meets, birthdays, and holidays. She could see it coming—the moment when she’d need gifts and plans and mental space but wouldn’t have any capacity left to create them.

She’d been here before. We all have.

The question isn’t whether chaos arrives. It’s whether we planned for it when we still had the bandwidth to think.

Curious about working with me to become a zombie project master? Check out Systems Therapy: single-session productivity consulting that honors how you’re designed, not how machines work.

Get Some Zombie Zen

The Problem with Most Planning Systems

Here’s what typically happens: We identify something that needs doing. We add it to a list. We work on it when we have time. It stays on the list. We work on it more. Months pass. It’s still on the list. We feel vaguely guilty about it but also aren’t sure if it needs doing anymore. We keep working on it occasionally. It never quite finishes.

Welcome to zombie project management.

These undead projects consume mental energy without ever releasing you. They make you the person everyone asks about dinner plans or curriculum schedules or birthday logistics. They create decision fatigue at exactly the wrong moments—when you’re already maxed out and can’t think clearly.

Most planning systems fail because they assume consistent capacity. They give you elaborate workflows for ongoing project management. But if you’re reading this, you probably don’t need help managing projects—you need help deciding which projects to kill and which to actually finish.

You need a way to think through a project once, clearly, before you commit to it. And you need a way to recognize when a project has become a zombie so you can shoot it in the head and move on.

The Project Brief: Your Pre-Commitment Tool

I adapted this idea from professional creative briefs and Tara McMullin’s approach to goal-setting in What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting. It’s designed for one reason only: forcing the “can I actually do this?” conversation before you add another thing to your plate.

This isn’t project management. It’s project evaluation. You’re not maintaining this brief throughout the project—you’re using it to decide if the project deserves space in your life right now.

I’ve developed various versions of this template with clients like Rachel, and today I’d love to share it with you.

G-Docs Project Brief Template

Part One: What and Why

Before anything else, get clear on the outcome and the why.

The Outcome: What does complete look like? Not “work on Sunday school curriculum” but “Have 12 weeks of curriculum planned, with discussion questions and activities ready to go.” Not “think about Christmas gifts” but “Purchase and wrap gifts for immediate family by December 15th.”

If you can’t articulate a concrete completion point, you’re creating a zombie project.

The Why: How does this connect to your actual commitments? Not your aspirational commitments—your real ones. The things you’ve already said yes to, the people you’re already responsible for, the work you’re already doing.

Some projects are just administrative reality: you have kids in soccer, so soccer logistics must be managed. That’s fine. Name it clearly.

Other projects need stronger justification: Why this curriculum approach? Why these specific birthday plans? What makes this worth your finite energy?

If you can’t answer the why convincingly, pause. Maybe it shouldn’t be a project.

What Makes it Complete: How will you know when you’re done? What does finished look like?

Sometimes it’s binary: “Birthday party happened.” Sometimes it’s qualitative: “Kids engaged meaningfully with the material.” Name your success criteria before you start so you know when to stop.

Part Two: Stages and Tasks

Break the project into phases. Not every task—just the major stages.

This is one example taken from Rachel’s Sunday school planning:

• Stage 1: Research and reading (due: two weeks before teaching starts)

• Stage 2: Map out 12-week arc (due: one week before teaching starts)

• Stage 3: Weekly prep (30 minutes per week during teaching season)

Notice the due dates. You’re thinking ahead to when you’ll actually have capacity to do this work. If Rachel tried to plan curriculum in September when she’s driving 200 minutes a day, it wouldn’t happen. August is the window.

Within each stage, list the key tasks. Not everything—just enough to know what you’re committing to.

You can do this digitally or on paper. Don’t overthink it: we often make this too complicated.

Part Three: Resources

What do you need to complete this project?

• Financial: Do you need to buy books, supplies, tools, software? What’s the budget?

  • For Christmas gifts, name the actual amount you can spend. For meal planning, what ingredients need purchasing? Get specific.

• Time: How much time will each stage require? When do you actually have that time available?

  • Here’s where honest assessment matters. If you know September is chaos, don’t plan projects requiring deep focus for September. Slot them in August or October instead.

• People: Do you need input from others? Do tasks depend on someone else’s availability? Name those dependencies now.

• Tools: Do you need specific software, equipment, or materials? List them here so you’re not scrambling mid-project.

Part Four: Troubleshooting

There’s an old proverb about war strategy: no plan survives contact with the enemy. In this case, we are often our own worst enemy. But since we know this, we can also prepare ourselves for the low moments when fatigue, fear, and frustration hit.

Ask yourself:

• Where might I self-sabotage?

• What assumptions am I making that might not be true?

• What happens if my circumstances change mid-project?

• What’s the minimum viable version if I run out of capacity?

Rachel’s example: “What if my son gets invited to cross country the week I planned to work on this? What’s the smallest thing I can do then?”

Having a fallback plan means the project doesn’t become a zombie when life gets complicated. You just shift to Plan B instead of abandoning it halfway through and feeling guilty.

Part Five: Budget (if applicable)

For projects involving purchases, get specific about money.

Not “buy Christmas gifts” but:

• Four kids: $X per child

• Extended family: $X total

• Teachers/coaches: $X total

• Total budget: $X

• Purchase deadline: December 15th

When December arrives and you’re tired, you’re not also trying to figure out what you can afford. You’re just executing a plan you made when you could think clearly.

Part Six: Check-In Schedule

This isn’t daily project management. It’s periodic reality-checking.

Set 2-3 check-in dates between now and the project deadline. At each check-in, ask:

• Am I making actual progress?

• Is this project still necessary?

• Have my circumstances changed in ways that affect this project?

• Is this project too complex? Can I simplify?

• Should I shoot this zombie in the head and be done with it?

That last question is critical. Sometimes the best project management is recognizing a project should die.

Here’s a clip from a live coaching session with Rachel where I explain the project brief and zombie projects.

Your Three Projects

Here’s your implementation challenge:

Look ahead to your next big milestone–the event that you know will reroute your life for a time. Now, identify three projects that need doing.

Not ten. Not everything. Just three things that, if left unplanned, will make you hate yourself when that milestone arrives.

For each project:

1. Create a project brief from the template and fill it out

2. Schedule your stages based on actual capacity windows

3. Set your check-in dates in your calendar

4. Put the brief somewhere you’ll actually look at it during your check-ins

Then let everything else wait. These three projects get completed. Everything else either becomes a project next quarter or gets shot in the head as a zombie.

What This Honors

This system doesn’t assume you have consistent energy or predictable schedules. It assumes you’re human—with seasons of capacity and seasons of depletion.

It doesn’t demand daily project management. It asks for one clear thinking session per project, then simple evening or periodic check-ins.

It doesn’t optimize for doing more. It optimizes for finishing well.

And it gives you permission to shoot zombies instead of maintaining them indefinitely.

Let me know how it goes for you.

Think back to this month’s SloDo, where you reflected on the stories you tell about your capacity, energy, and organization. Think also about anything that resonated for you in reading this month’s Deep Dive. Use this worksheet to take notes!1

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Reflection worksheet!

Worksheet R21

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Human Be(com)ing explores how to desire better, decide wisely, and act differently in an often overwhelming and bewildering age.

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Rachel laughed when she told me about her Monday. Not the delighted kind of laugh—the slightly unhinged kind that happens when you’ve spent 200 minutes in a car, juggled four different schedules, and realized you still haven’t planned your son’s birthday party that’s happening in two weeks.

“Every week is different,” she explained. “And I don’t know if my son will get invited to cross country meets until the week of. So I have to be somewhere at 8 AM on Saturday, but I won’t know until Thursday.”

She paused. “Soccer never really stops. There are maybe six weeks of the year we don’t play soccer.”

Six weeks.

I asked what she wanted to leave our coaching session with.1 Her answer: “I need a plan for the things that are going to need executing this fall. My concern is we’re going to hit December and I’m going to hate myself again.”

Why Your Projects Keep Coming Back from the Dead

Want More Brainsss…

Rachel’s situation isn’t unique. The specifics differ—maybe your version involves aging parents instead of soccer schedules, or work travel instead of cross country meets—but the pattern holds.2

We have events, schedules, and plans that we know are coming up, but somehow, the tyranny of the urgent keeps us feeling like we’re running on a treadmill. We even know what would help: making a plan and a schedule so that we can do both the urgent and the important. Yet somehow that plan never materializes and the treadmill keeps on humming.

I’ve started calling these “zombie projects.” They never die, never finish, just keep shambling forward demanding our attention at exactly the wrong moments. The Sunday school curriculum that needs planning. The birthday gifts for December. The meal planning everyone depends on. The organizational systems we know would help but can’t seem to maintain.

They’re not dead. But they’re not really alive either. They’re just…there. Consuming energy. Creating decision fatigue. Giving us a good jump-scare right when we least expect it.

Zombies suck.

When Worlds Collide

During our session, Rachel shared that she’d been trying to work from home all summer with kids constantly interrupting. “Mom, can you drive me here? Can you pick this person up? I have weight lifting.” She was attempting to maintain work focus while managing a household in constant motion, working from coffee shops between kid activities, trying to squeeze in evening work time that disappeared once school started and she was commuting everywhere.

“My energy is more focused when everything’s not meshing together,” she realized. But contemporary life specializes in making everything mesh together—work and home, planning and executing, thinking and doing. We’re supposed to context-switch seamlessly, maintain focus despite interruptions, and somehow also be present to the relational moments that actually matter.

As wonderful as it can be to work from home,3 it’s hard to keep responsibilities clear when the boundaries are this porous. Everything bleeds together.

Maybe projects aren’t the only zombies here.

Maybe we’re being asked to become zombies ourselves: undead workers who never tire, never need rest, never say “enough.” We’re supposed to stay switched-on 24/7—perpetually available for work emails and kid questions and household decisions, endlessly productive across all domains, with no off-switch.

The cultural assumption runs deep: find the perfect system, implement it consistently, watch your life run smoothly. When it doesn’t work—when August looks nothing like November, when your kid’s cross country schedule throws everything off, when you abandon your helpful evening prep because you’re too tired—you assume you’ve failed.

But what if the system failed us first?

What if it was never designed for actual human life? For bodies that tire. For minds that need rest. For people with seasons of capacity and seasons of depletion. For creatures who can’t maintain the same energy output regardless of circumstances—because we’re not machines. Or zombies.

Planning for the Jump-Scare

Don’t Fight Alone

There’s a moment in Rachel’s story that keeps returning to me. She’s describing her ideal scenario for family meal planning: “A shared document. ‘This is where this information is. Don’t ask me.’ Or if they do ask me, I at least don’t have to think about it. I can just pull this up and be like, ‘Here.’”

She’s not asking to escape family life. She’s asking to not be the single point of failure for every household decision while also managing her own work and commitments.

Christian scriptures speak often about bearing one another’s burdens.4 But somewhere along the way, particularly for women in family systems, “bearing burdens” morphed into “being the brain for everyone else’s life while also living your own.”

This isn’t sustainable.

But the answer isn’t to eliminate all planning or responsibility. Rachel’s evening prep genuinely helps when she does it. Her spreadsheet for Sunday school curriculum two years ago made the entire teaching season more sustainable. The physical tools she’s collected for attending soccer games (the giant Stanley water bottle, the wagon for chairs) have made those hours more manageable.

It’s not that systems don’t work. It’s that we implement them when we have capacity, then abandon them precisely when we need them most. So then we never quite finish the projects those systems were meant to sustain, and we get zombies—shambolic undead consuming our mental energy without ever releasing us.

The Proactive Paradox

“I want to be more proactive rather than reactive,” Rachel said in our first session.

But here’s the paradox: we can only be proactive when we have a small window of capacity before the reactive season hits. Once we’re in it—once school starts and you’re driving 200 minutes a day, once the holidays arrive and you haven’t bought gifts, once the crisis is in full swing...it’s too late.

It’s straight-up survival now—the zombie horde is upon us.

This is why December keeps arriving and we keep hating ourselves. We knew it was coming. We knew we’d need gifts and plans and mental space. But we were busy being reactive to September and October, and we never grabbed the August moment to think ahead.

Some religious traditions observe a liturgical calendar: seasons, rhythms, and rituals that have a specific focus and purpose. In the Christian tradition, Advent prepares us for Christmas. Lent for Easter. The wisdom isn’t just spiritual—it’s deeply practical. It’s hard to be present to the holy moment if we’re frantically scrambling to prepare for it.

The same holds true for our human-sized lives.

You cannot be present to your kid’s conversation in the car if you’re mentally scrambling to figure out dinner. You can’t enjoy teaching Sunday school if you’re planning the lesson the night before. You can’t enter the holidays with peace if you’re shopping on December 23rd.

This kind of intentional preparation isn’t just logistics; it’s purpose in action. Purpose gives us something to move toward, a vision of who we’re becoming that puts our current circumstances into context. Rachel isn’t just trying to survive December. She’s trying to become the kind of person who can be present to her family during Advent, rather than frantically managing gift deliveries and last-minute shopping trips.

Purpose helps us notice the difference between managing tasks and stewarding a life.

Being proactive requires a countercultural, purposeful reframe: accepting that our capacity is limited and planning accordingly. It means looking at the calendar and saying, “I will have approximately zero mental space between September and November. What needs to happen in August?”

It means recognizing that some seasons are for planting and some are for harvesting. We can’t do both simultaneously, no matter how much productivity culture insists we should.

Escaping the Zombie Project

A Different Way Forward

What if the goal isn’t doing more but living well?

Here’s where purpose becomes essential—not as optimistic aspiration, but as practical filter. If purpose gives us a destination and helps us measure our choices, it also helps us make hard decisions between equally good options.

Rachel faces this constantly: soccer or cross country? Evening work or family dinner? Sunday school curriculum planning or career development? These aren’t choices between good and bad—they’re choices between good and good. Without a clear purpose against which to evaluate them, every choice feels equally urgent.

So purpose acts as a filter. It lets us ask: Which option better enables me to move toward who I’m designed to become? Which honors my creaturely limits while still investing in what matters? Which problems are actually worth solving right now?

What if instead of managing ten ongoing projects poorly, we clearly defined three that align with our actual purpose, gave them end dates, and actually completed them?

What if we built systems in seasons of capacity specifically to support ourselves in seasons of depletion—not randomly, but guided by clear conviction about who we’re becoming?

What Makes Us Human

There’s a moment late in our conversation where Rachel brainstorms about a possible solution: “I could buy a binder and sleeves and print out recipes and grocery lists and tab them. That’s not hard. That would not be hard to do.”

She sounds almost surprised. Like she’d been making it too complicated.

We often mistake complexity for sophistication. We think good systems must be elaborate—multiple apps, intricate workflows, perfect optimization.5 But Rachel’s best solutions were remarkably simple: evening prep with highlighters. A physical binder everyone can access. A spreadsheet made once and referenced all season.

Wisdom involves understanding what the moment requires and responding appropriately. But doing so requires a clear sense of purpose strong enough to filter the overwhelming array of choices modern life offers. We have access to infinite options—projects, commitments, opportunities, good causes. The internet gives us 24/7 access to every need, every idea, every possibility.

Without purpose as a filter, we drown in options. With it, we can evaluate: Does this move me toward who I’m designed to become, or does it just look important because everyone else is doing it?

Purpose provides a standard by which to evaluate our choices. It lets us ask whether our present actions—our zombie projects, our evening prep practices, our decisions about what to finish and what to kill—align with our deeper convictions about who we’re designed and called to become.

Not over-engineering. Not under-preparing. Just wise attention to what’s actually needed.

Rachel’s situation reveals a hard truth about what it means to be human in the 21st century. We’re navigating genuine complexity—multiple kids with overlapping schedules, work that matters, relationships that need tending, bodies that tire, households that require management. This isn’t manufactured difficulty. It’s real life.

And real life requires something beyond optimization: it requires honest assessment of our creaturely limits and strategic choices about where to invest our finite energy.

When Rachel said, “I think when I’m stressed, I don’t like being the person that gets come to,” she’s naming something deeply human. We all have capacity limits. Under stress, those limits contract further. This isn’t failure—it’s design. We are not meant to be infinitely available, endlessly capable, constantly “on.”

But we live in a culture that treats human limits as problems to overcome rather than realities to honor. So we keep trying to do more, be more, manage more. And our projects become zombies because we never actually finish them—we just keep them barely alive while starting new ones.

Staying Present (Without Being Undead)

Purposeful Presence

So how do we stay present to what matters when the logistics threaten to drown us?

Again, we return to our purpose: as destination, standard, and filter.

• As destination: Purpose reminds us we’re moving toward becoming people who can be present—not perfectly organized, but purposefully oriented, even in September’s chaos.

• As standard: Purpose gives us a measure for evaluating whether shooting that zombie project in the head aligns with who we’re designed to become. Sometimes killing a project isn’t failure—it’s wisdom.

• As filter: Purpose helps us choose which projects deserve our finite capacity right now, and which equally good options need to wait for a different season.

Rachel’s evening prep practice isn’t just time management. It’s a daily act of aligning her choices with her purpose: becoming someone who can shepherd her family well, teach Sunday school with presence, and do meaningful work—all at a human scale, all within her creaturely limits.

An Invitation

Take a look at your own life. What projects have become zombies—neither dead nor fully alive, just consuming energy without resolution?

What would it mean to shoot one in the head? To actually finish it or deliberately abandon it, freeing that mental space for what matters now?

And what’s your version of evening prep—the simple practice that genuinely helps when you do it, that your brain tries to convince you isn’t necessary?

Maybe this is your August moment. The small window before the chaos hits when you can think ahead rather than just survive.

What needs planning now so you can be present later?

And underneath it all: What’s your purpose—your actual destination, not your aspirational one? Who are you designed and called to become? Let that answer guide which projects deserve your August attention.

Let me know how it goes for you.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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2

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Has it been a crazy week? Feeling a bit overwhelmed and discombobulated?

Here, have a SloDo.1

SloDos are an invitation to mindful communication, an opportunity to open channels of awareness within ourselves, between each other, and with the divine. Grab your favorite note-taking tools, pop in some background music (or not!), and take a few minutes to turn aside from all the busy noise and listen for the clear signal. Here’s this week’s prompt.2

Make a list of the responsibilities, obligations, relationships that comprise your schedule. Notice what feels urgent and what feels important—and what consistently gets delayed.

• Pause to acknowledge all that you are carrying.

• Notice how you’re showing up to what’s going on in your life.

• Acknowledge what brings joy and pleasure to your life, and what brings dread or resentment.

• Ask yourself, “What feels alive here? What feels like it’s barely hanging on?”

What did you find most helpful in this reflection? Most challenging?

Let this prompt invite you to notice how much you’re doing and carrying in your daily life, and to also express what that makes you think and feel. These are signals to track, nothing more or less.

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Happy End of the First Month!!

When I conceived this sprint theme, I originally thought of writing a more traditional “year in review,” which just didn’t feel interesting or “on-brand,” as the kids say.1 But I also wanted to revisit the essay that started it all, as a way to explore what exactly changed in the past year. As I wrote, I discovered that my external system of processes, tools, and practices had come to function more as a Rorschach test of my own internal preoccupations than anything else. The journey of “fixing” a broken system mirrors the purpose-focused journey that I’ve been on for most of 2025.

Which is why, over the past month or so, we’ve been exploring what happens when we (and by “we,” I mean “me”) build productivity systems that exhaust rather than serve us—and what it looks like to practice systems that honor our actual design instead of trying to transcend it.

We started with a SloDo “The Systems We Keep,” raising our awareness around how we talk about our systems—the apologizing, the overselling, the comparing. What does your relationship with productivity reveal about how you view your limitations?

Next, we took a Deep Dive into “When Your Productivity System Breaks You.” I shared my system breakdown story, and the turning point that came when I realized I’d become a curator of other people’s ideas instead of generating my own insights. I was treating my limitations as technical problems to solve when the real challenge was adaptive—learning to trust how God designed me instead of engineering control.

We then shifted to doing something with what we learned by turning to Focal Things, and “Building a System That Fits a Human Life.” I shared the actual tools and rhythms I use now, but more importantly, I shared the questions that keep me honest and help distinguish between solving real problems versus avoiding uncomfortable work. We looked at three specific struggles—system cycling, tool overwhelm, and perfectionism—with concrete guidance for each. The through-line: building systems that work on your worst Wednesday, not just your best Monday.

We wrapped up with a Character Reference from “Dr. J. Dwight Pentecost and the Power of Destroying Your Notes.” We met Dr. P, who taught without notes and destroyed his sermon notes after preaching to avoid being drawn back to old insights and prevented from receiving new ones. His practice reflects profound trust in his capacity to engage with Scripture, his experience, and his relationships. In my own life, I realized that in hoarding highlights and perfecting workflows, I was keeping myself focused on who I was instead of who I’m becoming.

I hope you’ll check out anything that you missed, and that you find something inspiring, challenging, or otherwise worth incorporating into your days.

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Recommendation

I have two!

I came across this lovely post and found myself encouraged that what I’ve discovered for myself isn’t unique to me, but is something that others have, and do, work out in their own lives and systems. Check out Notes by Allie for gentle and human-scale systems ideas.

notes by allie

Building systems that work on bad days

Productivity advice often assumes we’re operating at our best: well-rested, energised, motivated, emotionally steady. But most of us don’t live in that version of ourselves very often, especially during busy seasons, stressful weeks, or months when life feels heavier than usual…

Read more

5 months ago · 1158 likes · 30 comments · Allie Dunin

I loved this post by Notion and systems designer Marie Poulin, reflecting on the common principles that underpin every productivity theory (including mine!). Marie offers so many great insights about systems, theories, and tools, based on her years of personal reflection and professional experience. I especially appreciated this one:

It’s normal for tasks to linger on our list longer than they should.
It’s normal to skip doing a weekly review because we’re too tired.
It’s normal for things to feel messy, or information to feel chaotic.

It doesn’t necessarily mean the system is broken; it just means you’re a human doing your best to stay organized in an increasingly complex landscape. Real systems are a little messy.

Given this month’s reflection, whew. Thank goodness someone else said it too.

And if you haven’t yet, you should check out my conversation with Marie on the People Watching podcast!

And finally…

It’s tacofredag!!

No tacos this month, but the next best thing: ham and Swiss cheese on King Hawaiian sweet rolls. Is there anything that doesn’t go with King Hawaiian rolls?

And if you’re curious about how to create sustainable systems in your purpose-focused life (or you just want to talk about simplifying your systems), book a Systems Therapy session! We’ll take a look at what’s broken, missing, or confused in your processes, tools, or practices, and then see how I can help.

Just Book It

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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1

People Watching explores what it looks like to be a flourishing human through the relationships that shape us. I share conversations from real folks about the role models they’ve found in their everyday lives, and “character references” from historical, fictional, and contemporary folks who shed light on what it looks like to live with purpose in any age.

Use this worksheet to take notes!

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As I was learning to let go of my elaborate systems and trust that I already knew what I needed to know, I kept thinking about Dr. J. Dwight Pentecost’s practice of destroying his notes.

In a previous era, I attended Dallas Theological Seminary. I spent three difficult, formative years there, but it was only after I left DTS that I learned more about Dr. J. Dwight Pentecost (a.k.a., Dr. P), professor, scholar, and theologian.1 I’ve been sorry ever since that I never had the pleasure of learning directly from him.

After he passed away in 2014, I learned about Dr. P’s “legendary practice of teaching without notes.” I’m familiar with the idea of preaching without notes, but Dr. P’s practice was a bit different: he would rest his open Bible on the lectern, and walk through the text in real time with his students. At some point in his life and ministry, he stopped marking or making notes in his Bible, and he destroyed his notes after each sermon he gave.

His reason?

To avoid being drawn back to the same insights and prevented from receiving new ones.

This has stayed with me ever since. While Dr. P could certainly claim a level of proficiency in his subject matter, I’m struck by his humility in assuming that he always had something new to learn, even after fifty-plus years. I’m also realizing that his practice of teaching without notes reflects his trust in his skillset and capacity to engage, reflect on, and learn from the text, his experience, and his relationships with others.

As I reflect on my personal evolution this year, I realized that, in hoarding all the highlights and perfecting my workflows, I actually was keeping myself focused on who I was, instead of who I wanted to become. It isn’t that what I learned before was bad or wrong—it’s just that who I’m becoming needs to learn different things. And I need to learn how to trust that I can indeed learn those new things.

Who models this kind of self-trust for you?

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Sustainable Systems provides purpose-focused humans with deliberately designed processes, tools, and practices that are sustainable, meaningful, and beautiful.

As I shared earlier this month, I spent years building elaborate productivity systems that eventually broke me. I learned the hard way that sophisticated tools can become sophisticated avoidance—a way of perfecting process while dodging the vulnerable work of actual output.

So this week, I want to share my Focal Things—the principles, processes, and practices I’m actually using now. Not because they’re “right,” but because they fit my real limits and values. They help me live a purpose-focused life in a sustainable, human-scale way.

This isn’t a minimalist manifesto or a rebellion against complexity. It’s about listening to constraints that foster clarity—of purpose and practice.

Lemme say it for the back seats: You totally should not do what I do.

Your limits, energy rhythms, and season of life are different. My setup only matters as an example of what it looks like when someone stops chasing the perfect system and starts working with their actual life.

The goal isn’t to have an impressive or “special” system. It’s to have one that helps you work with who you are, not one that forces you to become someone else.

Still, the questions and principles that helped me find my way might help you find yours. So I’m sharing my current setup not as a template to copy, but as an example of what it looks like when we stop chasing the perfect system and start working with our actual lives.

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Think back to this month’s SloDo, where you reflected on the stories you tell about your capacity, energy, and organization. Think also about anything that resonated for you in reading “When Your Productivity System Breaks You.” Use this worksheet to take notes!

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Common Productivity Pitfalls

Over the years, I’ve seen three main traps that keep people stuck: cycling through systems, drowning in tools, and chasing perfection. Each one looks different on the surface, but they all grow from the same root—avoidance.

Tool-Hopping: Mistaking Movement for Progress

You know the pattern: a new app promises to fix everything. You spend hours setting it up, migrate all your data, learn every feature. It works—for about three weeks. Then it doesn’t. So you start researching the next one.

I did this for years. Eventually I had to admit: the system wasn’t the problem. Researching tools at 11 p.m. instead of doing the work? That’s avoidance. Watching YouTube tutorials about productivity instead of producing? (Sing it with me.) Avoidance.

Ask yourself: What am I actually avoiding by switching systems?

For me, it was the vulnerability of sharing creative work that might be ordinary. For you, it might be something else—failure, success, the discomfort of not knowing.

So I made a simple commitment: no system changes for six months.

Not because this setup is perfect, but because stability itself is the practice. Learning to work with what I already have teaches me something no perfect system ever could.

Tool Overload: When the System Becomes the Work

Maybe you don’t switch tools—you just keep adding them. One app for tasks, another for notes, a third for highlights, a fourth to connect them all. Each one made sense at the time, but now you spend more energy managing the tools than doing the work.

Start by asking: What am I actually trying to do?

Not “what do productive people do?” or “what might I someday need?” What’s right in front of me?

Then ask: What’s the simplest tool that lets me do that?

For most of us, it’s simpler than we think: a notebook, a phone app, a list. The sophistication you need will grow naturally from the work itself. You don’t need to anticipate every scenario. You just need to start.

Yes, you’ll lose things—saved articles, elaborate setups. Let them go. What’s truly needed will come back when you need it. I promise.

Perfectionism: Waiting for the System That Never Arrives

Nothing ever feels quite right. You tweak, adjust, tinker. You tell yourself that once the system is perfect, then you’ll do your best work. Hi, it me. 👋

Here’s the truth: there is no perfect system. There’s only the one that works on a Wednesday after three hours of sleep.

I have insomnia, and at 46, it hits harder than it used to. One morning I woke up at 3 a.m. and knew my plans for the day were shot. In my old setup, that day would’ve crumbled. With my new approach, I looked at my list, decided which tasks I wasn’t willing to give up, and deleted the rest. The work still got done. The sky didn’t fall.1

Good enough means the system works on your worst day, not just your best. It’s the one you can maintain at seventy percent capacity. Build your system for that person—the one who gets tired, distracted, human.

This isn’t settling. It’s accepting that human-scale lives require human-scale solutions.

Principles and Questions That Keep Me Grounded

When I dismantled my old, over-engineered setup, I realized I needed a few guiding principles—not rules, but checkpoints2—to keep me from sliding back into old habits.

Focus on Process Over Outcome

All I can control is showing up. Measuring success by outputs—views, likes, revenue—pulls me away from faithfulness to the practice itself.

Ask yourself: What would showing up faithfully look like in your life, regardless of results?

If you’re a parent, maybe it’s reading to your kids even if they don’t listen. If you’re a creative, it’s putting marks on the page whether they’re brilliant or not.

Create Rhythms That Reduce Decision Fatigue

Decision fatigue drains energy faster than hard work. So I’ve built rhythms that make showing up automatic.

For me: designated days for client work, one weekly review, one creative block. For you, maybe a morning routine, a recurring check-in, or a fixed workspace.

Ask: Where am I making the same decision over and over? What rhythm could remove it?

Pay Yourself First

If I wait to “earn” creative time by finishing everything else, it never comes. So I start most mornings with research or writing—the work that matters most but is easiest to postpone.

Ask: What’s the work I keep saying matters but never make time for?

Practice Presence Over Hoarding

It’s okay to appreciate what others have created, then let it go. I don’t need to save everything. I used to collect articles, quotes, screenshots—just in case. Eventually, the archive became a graveyard for good ideas.

Now I save only what’s relevant to current work. When I trust myself to remember what matters, I notice more.

Ask: What am I afraid will happen if I don’t save this?

These four principles keep my system human. They remind me that the goal isn’t optimization—it’s formation.

Friction as Formation

Most productivity tools promise ease: automate everything, capture everything, connect everything. The result? A digital museum of things you might use someday.

That’s why I love Milanote now.

For years, I hated it—no automation, no clever imports, no integrations. But that limitation became its strength. Milanote forces me to add things manually, one at a time. That friction makes me ask, Is this actually relevant to what I’m working on right now?

Here’s how it works for me:

• My home screen shows active writing projects, using emojis by stage—researching, incubating, publishing.

• I update them intuitively, not by rule: when a project feels like it’s sprouting, I move it forward.

• I do the same with books—some I’m dipping into slowly, some actively engaging, some finished but still resonating.

This creates a “heat map” of my creative life. When too many projects pile up in the “sprouting” phase, I pause and ask: Am I still curious about this? If not, I close it or let it lie fallow.

What stays is what’s shaping me now. What falls away doesn’t matter anymore.

We live in a culture that treats people like machines—optimize everything, automate everything, scale everything. But sometimes the friction is the formation.

Friction slows you down enough to choose.

Friction reminds you what matters right now.

Friction teaches discernment.

Milanote isn’t for everyone, and it’s not trying to be. But for me, that friction restored a human pace. Check out my video where I give a quick walk-through.

My Simple System of Human-Scale Tools and Rhythms

After years of complexity, I’ve reduced everything to a few rhythms and tools that serve clarity instead of control.

Rhythms: Working With Energy, Not Against It

• Monday–Thursday: client work, admin, email, reading—split into two-hour blocks with rest in between.

• Friday: transition and review day. I clear inboxes, reflect, and reset for the week ahead.

• Saturday: exploration—no structured work, just life, walks, tacos.

• Sunday: deep creative flow—long writing sessions, incubating ideas.

These rhythms accept that I don’t have consistent energy. Working with that truth has made me far more consistent than pretending I’m a machine.

Tools: Removing Barriers

• One inbox for everything—tasks, ideas, notes. It gets messy mid-week, then cleared Friday.

• One calendar showing both appointments and committed tasks so I can see true capacity before saying yes.

• Temporary space for references that self-delete monthly.

• An archive for finished work—not a daily playground.

• A single writing space for current projects only.

• A physical notebook for weekly plans and questions.

These tools aren’t optimized; they’re sustainable. Each earns its place by reducing friction, not adding features. Your specific tools3 might look completely different.

Reviews: Cultivating Awareness, Not Metrics

Every Friday morning, I spend thirty minutes reviewing the week. Three columns: Plus (what worked), Minus (what didn’t), Next (what’s coming). Once a month, I reflect more deeply:

• Where did I notice God at work?

• Where was I most alive?

• Where did I work with my design versus against it?

That’s it. Awareness over achievement.

Learning to Trust Simplicity

Some weeks this system hums; some weeks it barely holds together. Both tell me something about capacity, not failure.

I still wrestle with transitions—from intake to output, from saving to creating. I still forget that pain, fatigue, and limits are non-negotiable. But I’m learning: my limitations aren’t defects. They’re conditions for becoming.

So I keep asking: Is this helping me work sustainably, or am I trying to engineer my way out of my limits?

Here’s what I’ve stopped doing:

• I don’t track time unless a client needs it.

• I don’t auto-save highlights or collect quotes “just in case.”

• I don’t build automations to make my system clever.

• I don’t use entertainment apps on my phone—it’s a tool now, not a companion.

Each “no” protects a more important “yes.”

And here’s the practice that changes everything: showing up with what I have, even when it’s messy.

Because the point isn’t the system. It’s becoming who you’re designed to be. That happens through imperfect, faithful presence—trusting you already have enough to do the work that’s yours right now.

So ask yourself:

• What systems are you maintaining that you don’t actually trust?

• Where are you over-engineering instead of accepting?

• What would it look like to work with your design instead of trying to fix it?

Maybe simplicity isn’t a downgrade. Maybe it’s how we learn to live as humans again.

If the idea of setting a match to all your systems sounds like fun, maybe we should talk. Just click the button to learn more.

I Need Systems Therapy

Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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Human Be(com)ing explores how to desire better, decide wisely, and act differently in an often overwhelming and bewildering age.

Greetings, exhausted elves!

Let’s jump into it, shall we?

The moment I knew something had to change came this past summer. I found myself feeding my weekly reflections into an LLM because I couldn’t stand the thought of making sense of what I’d collected for a monthly review.

I smacked myself and asked: What is this for?

If reflection is helpful practice, I don’t need AI to summarize it. And if I need AI to make sense of my own thoughts, something has gone very wrong.

Looking back over 2024 and into 2025, I’ve been sitting with a question: What if modern productivity culture encourages us to optimize our way out of our human limitations rather than learn to live well within them? This creates exhaustion, measuring our worth by how effectively we perform, not by who we’re becoming. It encourages us to treat our constraints as failures to fix, not features to work with.

But what if limitations aren’t bugs to fix but invitations? What if the very things I’ve been trying to engineer my way out of are actually invitations to trust—in God, in my own wisdom, in the relationships and communities around me?

This week I want to explore systems design as a formative practice—learning to make choices that honor who we actually are instead of who we think we “should be.” By offering patient, non-judgmental attention to our design, we can cultivate rhythms that expect limitation rather than try to transcend it. We can appreciate the slow formation of practicing over producing, becoming over achieving.

So here’s a little story about what I learned when my oh-so-carefully engineered system finally broke me, and what I’m learning about trust these days.

If you’re sick and tired of holiday eggnog, iced sugar cookies, and angry elves at this point,1 and ready to curl up in your jim-jams and ignore the world… Perfect. Because that sense of exhaustion—the kind that comes from running hard and hitting your limits—is exactly where this story begins.2

How I Got Here

At the end of 2024, I wrote an essay about how systems and tools help us become ourselves. I shared my elaborate setup—the process maps, the decision trees, the borrowed and cobbled-together frameworks. It was thorough. Comprehensive. Maybe even impressive.

Friends, that was…a lot. A whole lot of a lot.

To understand how I ended up with multiple time-tracking systems and an automation pipeline for my highlights, let me rewind to 2019.

I’d just finished a master’s degree while working full-time. Beyond the usual post-goal slump, I felt genuinely at loose ends. The anticipated abundance of opportunities hadn’t materialized—or at least, that’s how it felt. I had a lifetime of ideas and dreams that felt consistently unfulfilled, and a growing sense that while I wasn’t incapable, I also wasn’t effective at the things that mattered most to me.

Then I discovered Notion.

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When I realized its potential for custom-building tools that worked for me—not templates designed for someone else’s brain—I went a little nuts. My friends and family can tell you about my evangelistic fervor.3 I spent hours binge-watching YouTube videos, duplicating templates, reverse-engineering other people’s setups, learning to build my own from scratch. I loved it.

When I couldn’t get the results I wanted, I learned to “ask better questions” by figuring out which properties, relationships, and processes would actually get me where I wanted to go. I externalized my emotions, physical health, and work patterns in ways I’d never been able to before. I learned to see systems—in the world and in myself—in completely new ways.

Most importantly: I made progress on ideas and goals that had been stuck for years.

I wouldn’t trade this learning for anything. Those hours of tinkering taught me legitimate skills. The custom tools solved real problems. I covered real ground.

But the systems that helped me break through were also creating a pattern I didn’t recognize. Each success reinforced the belief that better systems would solve whatever came next. Each new tool promised to fill the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be.

The problem wasn’t the tools themselves. The problem was that I’d gone from “this helps me work with my limitations” to “if I just had the right system, I wouldn’t have limitations.” I went from working with myself to trying to engineer my way out of myself.

When Good Systems Go Bad

When I look back at those system maps now, I cringe. The hours spent process-mapping everything. The endless notes trying to anticipate future scenarios. The tools for tracking tools that captured highlights from tools. At one point I tracked my time in three places. I can’t even tell you why.

My setup for managing what I read and learned had become especially elaborate. I was using five different apps just to save and organize articles, highlights, and ideas.4 One tool fed another through automations. Every tool felt necessary. Vital. A bulwark against my scattered brain and an undefined future.

I’d become a museum curator of other people’s ideas instead of generating my own insights. I highlighted every resonant sentence, feverishly organized my collections, told myself I’d use them “later.” I saved cool things “just in case.”

Later never came. And “just in case” felt like a hiker’s backpack growing heavier with every mile.

I used to have my own insights. I wrote a thesis with basically a pen, a notebook, and MS Word. Where had that person gone?

None of these tools were necessary to do the work I actually wanted to do. But somehow I’d become convinced that simple and easy were no longer sufficient. I kept feeling like there was a problem in my system that I was failing to solve. If I could just find the One Rin…Tool5 to bring everything together, I’d finally be able to think clearly, create freely, become who I was meant to be.

I kept trying to fix a technical problem (which tool?) when the real challenge was adaptive. Ronald Heifetz writes about this, observing how technical challenges have clear solutions that don’t require much change from us. Adaptive challenges, on the other hand, require “changes in values, beliefs, roles, relationships, and approaches to work.”

The real problem wasn’t my tools. It was that I’d stopped trusting my own capacity to know, to remember, to discern what mattered. I was outsourcing trust to my systems instead of learning to trust the skills and insights I already had.

Uff-da, as a friend would say.

The Pattern Behind the System

Over the last few months, I’ve been sitting with a question: How are my limitations an invitation to trust—in God, in my own wisdom, in others? How might my limitations actually be the starting point for doing the work I want to do?

As someone with a reputation for competence, I’ve had a hard time recognizing my stranglehold on control. When you can perform to expectations, it’s painful to realize you’ve deluded yourself into thinking you’ve got it all handled.

Then this past summer, I had an insight about my Enneagram type that made everything click into terrible, clarifying sense.

For those unfamiliar: the Enneagram describes nine personality patterns, each with distinct motivations and fears. The Type 4—often called “The Individualist”—is driven by the desire to be unique and authentic, but struggles with a core wound of feeling fundamentally flawed or deficient.6

This :::waves hands::: was a classic Enneagram 47 pattern—perfecting my process while avoiding the vulnerable work of actual output. For a 4, sophisticated systems can become part of one’s unique identity. Not just “I’m a writer,” but “I’m someone with this deep, nuanced approach to knowledge that others don’t understand and couldn’t possibly replicate.” The elaborate setup becomes a way of saying, “My mind works in complex, interesting ways that require special tools.”

My productivity system obsession was a sophisticated form of creative avoidance. Building systems provided the identity of “someone with interesting creative processes” without the vulnerability of actually sharing creative work. I could perfect my process while avoiding output. Ouch.

The 4’s core wound of feeling fundamentally flawed creates paralysis around creative expression. If the work isn’t ready (and when is it ever ready?), if it might be ordinary, if people might not care what I have to say… Better to tinker with the system than risk finding out.

That’s why the identity threat of simplification cut deep: going back to notebooks and letting ideas go felt like becoming ordinary. Just another person who writes without special methodology. For a 4, this can feel a bit like losing one’s self.

But truly… My authentic voice comes from my actual thinking, not from information management. All of these fantastic systems were covering up my natural creative uniqueness with borrowed “productivity culture” identity.

And underneath all of it? A fundamental insight about trust. I’d been conflating trust in my own experience and wisdom with trust in my ability to control everything.

Building elaborate systems felt like trusting myself—look how capable I am! But I was actually trusting my ability to engineer control, not my capacity to navigate uncertainty. Not my capacity to trust that God has already prepared me for what I needed to do.

Permission to Let Go

This realization about control and trust opened something in me, or maybe it just made space to hear what was already there.

Over the summer, I encountered Joan Westenberg’s essay “I Deleted My Second Brain.” Westenberg writes about throwing everything into the trash and living in the sudden silence that followed.

I was enamored.

My archive, the tools, the processes—they had become a Sisyphean rock I’d been pushing uphill for years, convinced that just a little more optimization would get me to the top. Could I just…let go? Stop pushing? Be done with it?

It felt like permission. It felt like relief. It felt like the start of something real.

Maria Bowler writes: “When you don’t trust the tools sitting in your belt, you’ll scramble for more and different. It keeps you consuming illusions of certainty, and very busy.”8

That was it exactly. I didn’t trust my own knowing—my capacity to see patterns and make sense without capturing everything first. So I kept looking for more tools, more systems, more certainty. More insurance against an uncertain future I couldn’t control anyway.

But what if I could trust differently? What if instead of trusting my systems to save me from limitation, I could trust that my limitations were themselves a gift? An invitation to depend on God, to receive from others, to work with myself rather than constantly trying to “make up” what I think is lacking?

The Experiments

I started simple:

• Unsubscribed from 60+ sources

• Deleted my reading app archives

• Deleted 90% of my resource collections

• Disconnected automatic highlight syncing

• Stopped saving everything indiscriminately

It felt strange. The sudden silence was disorienting. But also—relieving. Like I’d been telling myself “you can’t trust anything if you haven’t tracked it,” and now I was testing whether that was actually true.

Then I tried something wild: I loaded a year’s worth of reviews, experiments, and reflections into an LLM alongside my stated values and principles. I asked it to show me what patterns it saw.

I literally read myself telling me about myself.9 The same insights, the same struggles, the same wisdom appearing over and over. Not because I’d captured the right highlights, but because I’d been paying attention all along.

I already knew what I needed to know. I just hadn’t…trusted it.

What Actually Changed

I’m not going to pretend I’ve “made it.” This self-trust thing feels weird. But here’s what shifted:

• I went from five apps for reading and notes to three simple tools. From elaborate process maps to a single weekly review framework. From tracking everything to trusting I’d remember what mattered.

• The specifics matter less than the principle: I stopped asking “What tool will fix this?” and started asking “What am I actually trying to do?”

• My tools now fit in one sentence: Apple’s built-in apps for tasks and calendar, a notebook for reviews, and one writing space. That’s it.

• My rhythms honor how my energy actually moves instead of how I wish it moved: structured work Monday through Thursday, transition time Friday and Saturday, creative flow on Sundays.

• My reflection practices are stupid simple: a weekly Plus-Minus-Next review on Friday mornings, a monthly reflection using personal prompts, and trusting that pen and paper are enough.

The structure isn’t fancy. But it honors a truth I’d been avoiding: I have limits, and those limits aren’t problems to solve. They’re the shape of my particular life, and working within them rather than against them is itself a spiritual practice.

You’re probably thinking, “Okay, but how does this actually work? What does this look like day-to-day? How does this help me figure out my own version?”

Next week, I’m popping the hood so you can see everything. I’ll show you the actual tools, the specific rhythms, the questions I ask to keep myself honest. Not because you should copy my setup—you absolutely shouldn’t—but because seeing how someone else works with their limitations might help you work with yours.

We’ll look at how to build a system that anticipates your limitations instead of trying to ignore them. How to know when you’re solving real problems versus avoiding uncomfortable work. How to find “good enough” for your actual life, not the life you think you should have.

If you’ve been cycling through systems hoping the next one will finally fix you, or if you’re drowning in tools that promised to help, but now just add weight—next week is for you.

What I’m Still Learning

I still struggle with trusting the transition from capture to creative output. My body still signals stress through recurring pain and fatigue that I’d rather manage around than honor. I still catch myself wanting to build a new system when the real issue is doing the uncomfortable work with the system I have.

But I’m learning to ask different questions:

• What if my constant system-cycling was actually giving sparkler-energy, not bottle rocket-energy?

• What if sophistication in systems was preventing sophistication in thought?

• What if accepting my limitations is actually the path to doing my best work, not the obstacle preventing it?

• What would it mean to find my creative identity in the work itself rather than the system?

Moving Forward

I’ll be honest—over the last couple of years both my family and I have faced a lot of changes. Changes that feel like loss, that I’m only just now realizing I haven’t fully processed or grieved. In some ways, I think my efforts at system “optimization” masked my attempts to avoid being present to these changes. “If I can just fix and make this thing perfect, then that’ll make everything else fine.”

But part of growing and learning is accepting that these changes will unfold in your life, and allowing them to be the messy, hard, sad, transformative things that they are. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever fully learn this, or if I’ll always be surprised when life asks me to trust again. Life provides a lot of opportunities for practice.

So in that spirit, I’m committing to three practices for the next season:

Practice self-compassion. My body signals through pain and exhaustion when I’m pushing too hard. Health deserves the same attention I give to business development. Trust means listening to these signals, not managing around them.

Expect God to do more than I can imagine. My biggest breakthrough came after I released control. Setting boundaries, then letting go of outcomes. Trusting that what I need will be there when I need it.

Simplify to encourage creative truth. System-cycling is procrastination disguised as optimization. I’m committing to my current setup for six months minimum—no more system changes. Trust means staying put long enough to actually see what works.

The discipline here, for me, is learning to accept “good enough” as actually good. Not settling for mediocrity, but recognizing that human-scale lives require human-scale solutions. That working within our design rather than trying to transcend it is itself an opportunity for grace.

Systems and tools will only replicate our underlying anxiety, fear, or dysfunction. The question isn’t “Which tool?” but “What am I trying to avoid by constantly switching tools?” No amount of tool hopping will ever address the deeper question of whether we trust how we’re designed.

Maybe you’re facing something similar—not the exact same systems, but the same pattern of optimization-as-avoidance, of treating your limitations as problems instead of starting points. The same question about whether you can trust your own wisdom, your own design, the way God has already prepared you.

What would change if you trusted how you’re already designed?

If you found this helpful, and you’re curious about Systems Therapy, learn more here and book a Curiosity Call!

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Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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What else?

• Have a question? Ask me anything.

A Note on AI

• I use LLMs at the END of my writing process, to help me edit the work, zoom out to find patterns I’ve missed, and generate social media posts, title ideas, and other related tasks that make me want to shrivel up in a corner and die. The blood, sweat, and tears are wholly my own.

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