The system I actually use
The full inventory: every tool, template, and ritual I run my work through. Not the version on the conference talk — the version that survives a Tuesday.
- You already have a job that requires you to make things and ship them
- You're tired of reading systems posts that never tell you what the author actually does
You'll have the complete inventory of my working system — tools, templates, rituals — with the trade-offs I've made and what I've abandoned. You can copy the parts that fit, ignore the parts that don't, and skip the year of trial-and-error I spent.
This is the long version. Members get the full system — every tool, every template, every ritual, with the reasoning. The free dispatch version is the punchline; this one is the work.
The shape of the system
Before we get into specifics, the meta-shape: I run two parallel tracks every day. Track one is the ship track — the work that has a deliverable, a deadline, and a customer waiting. Track two is the write track — the writing, the dispatches, the long-form work that compounds over years instead of weeks. Both tracks have their own tools, their own rituals, and their own definition of "done."
The mistake I see most people make is trying to run one system for both tracks. Ship work is bursty, deadline-driven, and tolerant of mess. Write work is metronomic, internal, and intolerant of interruption. The same calendar block, the same task list, the same focus method does not serve both. I learned this the hard way over five years of "productivity systems" that worked for half of my life and broke the other half.
Track one: shipping work
Tools
[The full list of tools, with versions, configs, and the specific reasons I picked each over its alternatives goes here. You'd see why I switched away from Linear after eighteen months, why I run my own Postgres instead of Neon for the small projects, the specific Vercel configuration that lets the rollback rule work, and the four browser extensions I've kept for over three years.]
Templates
[Three templates I reuse for every project: the kickoff doc, the weekly check-in, the post-mortem. Each is two paragraphs of explanation plus the actual fillable template, with the prompts that make them produce useful output instead of theater.]
Rituals
[The morning hour. The Tuesday two-hour deep block. The Friday review. The monthly recurring tasks I never skip. The yearly reset.]
Track two: writing work
Tools
[The writing stack I use for Sage After Dark and everything else: Obsidian for capture, a custom MDX pipeline for publishing, the tools I use for proof-reading and the ones I tried and abandoned.]
Templates
[The post template I use for every essay, with the section-by-section breakdown of why each part exists and what it has to do for the post to work. The dispatch template for the short-form work. The annual template — including the prompts I use to surface the year's lessons.]
Rituals
[The dawn writing block. The publishing day routine. The cooling-off rule for hot takes. The "did anyone read it" review I do once a quarter and what I do with the answer.]
Track three: the connective tissue
The two tracks would be separate but they share a backbone — capture, review, retrieval — and that backbone is the thing nobody writes about because it isn't sexy.
[The capture system: voice memos, daily journal, weekly inbox sweep. The review cadence: weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, with the questions each one asks. The retrieval system: how I find anything I've ever written within ten seconds, and the specific tagging discipline that makes that work.]
The list of things I've abandoned
[A full inventory of the productivity tools and methods I tried and abandoned, with the failure mode for each. This is the most useful section, because it's the section nobody else writes — the savings of a year of trial and error.]
The yearly reset
Once a year, I rebuild this entire system from scratch. Not because it's broken — because the half-life of a system is shorter than I think, and forcing myself to rebuild surfaces the parts that have stopped earning their keep. The reset takes a weekend. The dividend is the next year of clarity.
[The full reset protocol, the questions I ask, and the example of last year's reset, including the three things I cut and the one thing I added.]
What I'd do differently if I were starting over
[The five-paragraph version, with the specific changes I'd make to my younger self's setup and the reasons each one would have saved me time.]
This is the system that survives a Tuesday. It is not the one on the conference talk. The conference talk version is cleaner, more linear, and dishonest about how messy this actually is in practice. The honest version is messier, takes more maintenance, and works.
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The half-life of a good tool
Three categories of tool exist in the working life of a professional: the tool you'll throw out in eighteen months, the tool you'll throw out in five years, and the tool that will, with mild adjustments, outlive you. Almost everyone confuses category one for category three.
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The fastest way to know if you understand a thing is to put it in front of a user and watch what they do. Tutorials are an inferior substitute for the embarrassment of releasing too early.
The half-life of a good tool
Three categories of tool exist in the working life of a professional: the tool you'll throw out in eighteen months, the tool you'll throw out in five years, and the tool that will, with mild adjustments, outlive you. Almost everyone confuses category one for category three.
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