Andrewjericho | Thoughts & Commentary

The Tuesday Morning Test

There’s this moment every Tuesday morning around 9:47 AM when I’m halfway through my second cup of coffee and staring at my project list. It’s become my accidental litmus test for whether work feels like work or something else entirely. This year, I noticed the difference more sharply than usual. Some projects made me reach for my headphones and settle in like I was about to binge a good show. Others made me suddenly remember I needed to reorganize my desk drawers.

The projects that passed the Tuesday test weren’t the ones that looked impressive on paper or paid the most. They were the ones where I lost track of time, where I found myself explaining the details to friends who definitely didn’t ask, where I’d catch myself thinking about solutions while doing dishes.

The Archive That Nobody Asked For

In March, I started digitizing old customer service recordings for a client who was moving offices. What should have been mindless data entry turned into something unexpectedly fascinating. These weren’t just complaint calls from the 1990s. They were time capsules of how people talked, what they worried about, how they solved problems before Google existed.

I found myself creating a secondary document tracking recurring themes, not because anyone requested it, but because patterns kept jumping out at me. The way people in 1997 described computer problems versus 2003. The shift in expectations around response times. The woman who called seventeen times about the same billing issue and somehow made the rep laugh every single time.

The final deliverable was supposed to be a clean digital archive. What I handed over was that plus a twenty-page analysis of communication patterns that probably nobody will read but felt important to document. Sometimes the projects you care about are the ones where you do more than what’s asked because the work itself demands it.

Teaching Someone Else’s Kid

My neighbor asked if I could help her fifteen-year-old son with a school presentation about local businesses. Simple enough request. An hour tops, maybe two. Four weeks later, we’d turned it into a full documentary project about the barbershop that’s been on our corner since 1963.

The kid had never interviewed anyone before, so we started with basic questions. But watching him discover that the barber had stories about three generations of the same family, that he’d witnessed neighborhood changes through the lens of who sat in his chair, that he still used tools from the shop’s original owner, that was the hook for both of us.

We spent afternoons learning how to edit video on software I hadn’t touched in years. I watched him figure out how to structure a story, how to ask follow-up questions, how to sit with silence until someone decides to share something real. His final grade was good, but what mattered was how he started paying attention differently. He’d point out details about other businesses we’d walk past, connecting dots I’d never noticed.

The Website That Broke My Rules

I have strict boundaries about taking on web design projects. Too many variables, too many opinions, too much scope creep. But when the local poetry reading series asked for help with their site, I said yes before my practical brain could object. They meet in a coffee shop basement once a month and somehow manage to pack the place.

Building their website meant figuring out how to capture something that only exists in person. The way first-time readers shake their hands before starting. The sound of twenty people leaning forward when someone hits a particularly good line. The community that forms around shared attention to words.

I spent more time than made financial sense trying to get the typography right, finding ways to make the schedule feel inviting rather than informational, creating space for the kind of spontaneous submissions that happen when someone discovers they have something to say. The site launched in September, and their attendance doubled within two months. Correlation isn’t causation, but it felt good to contribute to something that was already working.

What Made the Difference

Looking back, the projects that mattered weren’t the ones with the clearest briefs or the biggest budgets. They were the ones where I could see the people affected by the work, where the outcome felt connected to something larger than the task itself. The archive project preserved voices that would have otherwise disappeared. The documentary taught a teenager how to be curious about his own neighborhood. The poetry website helped more people find a room where their words mattered.

None of these projects solved major problems or changed any worlds. But they all involved paying closer attention to something that was already happening, then finding ways to amplify or preserve or connect it to other people. Maybe that’s what made them feel worth caring about.

I’m curious about your own Tuesday morning test. What makes you want to show up to work versus just get through it? What projects have surprised you by mattering more than you expected?

When Amazon Made Everyone Pick Sides

Remember when the biggest workplace debate was whether to put pineapple on the office pizza? Those were simpler times. Now we’re living through what historians will probably call the Great Return-to-Office Wars of 2026, and honestly, I never thought I’d find myself switching sides mid-battle.

It all started when Amazon dropped their nuclear option in January, dragging all 1.5 million of their global employees back to the office full-time. No more hybrid schedules, no more “collaboration Tuesdays,” just five days a week of mandatory desk warming. The internet exploded, LinkedIn became a battlefield, and suddenly everyone had to pick a team: Team Remote Forever or Team Office Always.

I was firmly planted in Camp Remote, thank you very much. I had my home office set up just right, my coffee routine perfected, and zero patience for open-floor-plan small talk. The commute was a distant memory I wasn’t eager to resurrect. But then something weird happened. The more I watched this whole drama unfold, the more I started questioning my own certainties.

The Numbers Started Talking

The data coming out this year has been fascinating in the most uncomfortable way possible. That Gallup remote work preferences poll from February showed that 42% of remote workers would straight-up quit if forced back to the office full-time. That’s not just resistance, that’s a revolution brewing in HR departments everywhere.

But here’s where it gets interesting. While everyone was picking sides, researchers at Stanford were quietly studying hybrid workers, and their findings threw a wrench into my remote-work evangelism. The Stanford hybrid productivity study found that people splitting their time between home and office were actually 23% more productive than their fully remote or fully in-office counterparts.

Twenty-three percent. That’s not a rounding error, that’s a real difference. It made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, I’d been thinking about this all wrong. Maybe the answer wasn’t choosing between remote and office work, but finding some sweet spot in between.

The Ghost Towns Downtown

You know what really got to me though? Walking through downtown last month and seeing all those empty office buildings. Commercial real estate vacancy rates hit nearly 20% in major cities during the first quarter, the highest since anyone started keeping track. These aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet, they’re entire city blocks that feel like movie sets after the crew went home.

There’s something deeply unsettling about seeing your city slowly hollow out. The lunch spots that used to buzz with office workers are closing one by one. The dry cleaner on the corner has been “temporarily closed” for six months. These weren’t just business casualties, they were the connective tissue that made neighborhoods feel alive.

I started thinking about the unintended consequences of my remote-work absolutism. Sure, I was saving time and money on commuting, but what was I losing in the process? What was the city losing? It’s not that I suddenly developed a nostalgic attachment to corporate real estate, but I realized that workplaces are woven into the fabric of communities in ways I hadn’t fully considered.

The Surveillance State of Productivity

Here’s where things get really dystopian. Companies responded to the remote work debate by basically turning into surveillance operations. Productivity tracking software usage among Fortune 500 companies jumped 267% last year. Think about that for a second. We’re not just talking about basic time tracking anymore. We’re talking about keystroke monitoring, screen recording, and AI that analyzes your work patterns.

This development made me realize that my binary thinking about remote versus office work was missing the bigger picture. The real issue isn’t where we work, it’s how we work and whether we trust each other to do it well. When companies resort to digital surveillance, it suggests a fundamental breakdown in the employer-employee relationship that goes way deeper than location preferences.

The irony is thick here. We fought for remote work to gain autonomy and trust, only to end up with more monitoring than ever before. It’s like we won the battle for location independence but lost the war for actual independence. Maybe the hybrid model offers a way out of this surveillance spiral by rebuilding some of that face-to-face trust while maintaining flexibility.

Finding My Way to Team Hybrid (Sort Of)

So here I am, reluctantly admitting that my all-or-nothing approach to remote work might have been shortsighted. The hybrid model isn’t perfect, and it definitely isn’t the magic solution that corporate consultants want to sell us. But it might be the least problematic option in a world full of imperfect choices.

What changed my mind wasn’t the productivity statistics, though they certainly helped. It was realizing that work is fundamentally social, even for introverts like me who prefer email to elevator conversations. There’s value in spontaneous hallway encounters, in reading body language during meetings, in the subtle ways that physical presence creates connections.

But I’m still “sort of” Team Hybrid because I think most companies are doing it wrong. True hybrid work isn’t about arbitrary days in the office or mandatory face time. It’s about being intentional with in-person time and protecting focused work time. It’s about designing office spaces for collaboration rather than surveillance. It’s about measuring results rather than hours logged.

The Great Return-to-Office Wars of 2026 taught me something important about changing my mind. It’s not about admitting defeat or abandoning principles. It’s about staying curious enough to question your own assumptions when new information comes along. Sometimes the best position isn’t the most ideologically pure one, but the one that acknowledges complexity and embraces nuance.

What’s your take on all this? Have you found yourself switching sides in the great workplace wars, or are you still firmly planted in your original camp? I’m genuinely curious about how other people are navigating this mess.

The Bookstore That Smelled Like Rain

I was standing in Powell’s City of Books in Portland last month, three floors deep in the poetry section, when it hit me. Not some profound literary revelation, but the smell. Old paper mixed with that Pacific Northwest dampness that clings to everything, even indoors. My shoulders dropped in a way they hadn’t in weeks of travel. I’d never lived in Portland, had only visited twice before, but something about that particular corner felt like coming home.

It’s weird how home can show up in places you’ve never belonged to. This year I’ve been keeping track of these moments, not on purpose at first, but they started piling up like loose change in my jacket pocket. Places that made me exhale without realizing I’d been holding my breath.

The Diner Counter at 2 AM

In July, driving back from a friend’s wedding in upstate New York, we stopped at one of those 24-hour diners that exists solely to catch people between destinations. Fluorescent lights buzzing over cracked vinyl booths, the kind of place where the coffee tastes like it was brewed during the Clinton administration. I slid onto a red stool at the counter and watched the night shift waitress refill sugar dispensers with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d done this dance a thousand times.

The radio was playing something low and forgotten. A trucker two stools down was reading a paperback western, occasionally turning pages with fingers stained by motor oil. Nobody was talking, but it wasn’t awkward silence. It was the comfortable quiet of people who understood that sometimes you just need to exist in a space without explanation. I ordered pie I didn’t want and sat there for an hour, feeling more settled than I had in my actual apartment.

There’s something about spaces that operate outside normal time. They exist in their own pocket dimension where the rules are different, where you can be anonymous and known at the same time. The waitress didn’t ask why we were there at 2 AM, just kept the coffee coming.

The Hardware Store Philosophy

My friend Jake owns a small hardware store in Vermont, the kind with wooden floors that creak in all the right places and shelves that reach toward a tin ceiling. I helped him inventory screws for three hours in September, sorting tiny metal bits into compartments while he told stories about customers who’d become regulars over the decades. Mrs. Patterson, who buys a single lightbulb every Tuesday because she likes having an excuse to check in. The contractor who pays for everything in exact change and never speaks above a whisper.

What struck me wasn’t the quaintness of it all, but how Jake had created something that mattered beyond commerce. People didn’t just buy things there; they belonged to something. The store worked as an informal community center, a place where you could ask about someone’s surgery recovery while picking up WD-40. Jake knew every customer’s project history, could remember what gauge wire they’d bought six months ago for their basement renovation.

The Train Platform in Between

October found me waiting for delayed Amtrak in Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. I’d been visiting my grandmother, one of those trips that feel necessary and draining in equal measure. The platform stretched out under that cathedral ceiling, filled with people in various states of transit. A woman in a rumpled business suit was asleep sitting up, her briefcase clutched like a shield. College students shared earbuds, heads bobbing to music I couldn’t hear.

I love train stations for their honest transience. Nobody pretends they want to be there permanently, but there’s an odd intimacy in shared waiting. The businessman buying overpriced coffee, the family with too much luggage, the elderly couple consulting printed schedules they probably didn’t need. We were all temporarily homeless together, suspended between wherever we’d come from and wherever we thought we were going.

When my train finally arrived, I almost didn’t want to board. The platform had become its own destination, a place where the journey mattered more than arrival.

The Question of Staying

I’ve been thinking about what these places share beyond their ability to make me feel unexpectedly at home. They’re all spaces where people move through each other’s lives with gentle intention. Where there’s room for both solitude and connection, often at the same time. Where you can be yourself without performance, where the lighting is forgiving and the pace allows for actual breathing.

Maybe home isn’t about addresses or mortgages or places where you keep your winter coats. Maybe it’s about finding spaces that work with your particular way of being human, where you can exist without explanation or apology. The bookstore corner that smells like rain, the diner counter at 2 AM, the hardware store where everyone knows the unspoken rules.

I’m curious about your own strange geography of belonging. What places have caught you off guard with their unexpected familiarity? Where do you find yourself exhaling without meaning to?

I spent twenty minutes yesterday trying to tune my ukulele using a phone app, getting increasingly frustrated as the little green bar refused to center on anything resembling the right note. My neighbor’s dog started howling. Even he knew I was doing it wrong. This got me thinking about all the things I’m currently learning badly, and how there’s something weirdly liberating about sucking at stuff on purpose.

Most advice about learning new skills focuses on efficiency, optimization, the fastest path to competence. But what if that’s missing something important? What if learning badly teaches us things that learning well never could?

The Ukulele Experiment

I bought the ukulele specifically because I wanted to learn an instrument badly. Not “badly” as in poorly, but badly as in desperately, urgently. After years of telling myself I’d learn guitar “someday,” I realized someday was a lie I told myself to avoid the awkward beginner phase where everything sounds like a dying cat.

So I picked the most unthreatening instrument I could find. Four strings instead of six. Small enough that it doesn’t intimidate my tiny apartment. The kind of thing that makes people smile instead of wince when you mention you’re learning it. Three months in, I can play exactly one and a half songs, and both sound questionable. But here’s the thing: I play them every day.

Learning badly means I’m not precious about it. I don’t wait for perfect conditions or uninterrupted practice time. I play while dinner cooks, during work calls on mute, in the ten minutes before bed. The ukulele lives on my coffee table, not in a case, because putting it away would create friction I can’t afford. Convenience beats technique when you’re learning badly, and somehow that works.

Cooking Without Recipes

My cooking education happened backwards. Instead of starting with knife skills and basic techniques, I jumped straight into improvisation. Wednesday night finds me standing in my kitchen with random vegetables and half a memory of something I saw on a cooking show, making it up as I go. The results are inconsistent, occasionally inedible, and sometimes surprisingly good.

Last week I made what I generously called “Mediterranean-inspired pasta” using whatever was dying in my vegetable drawer. Zucchini, cherry tomatoes, some questionable feta, and a handful of herbs I couldn’t identify but smelled promising. No recipe, no plan, just heat and hope. It was either going to be dinner or compost.

It turned out decent, but that’s not the point. The point is I’m learning to trust my instincts, to taste as I go, to understand that cooking is more conversation than recitation. Following recipes teaches you to follow recipes. Cooking badly teaches you to cook. There’s a difference, and I’m starting to think the messy way might be more valuable.

Speaking Spanish to My Phone

Duolingo keeps sending me passive-aggressive notifications about my “streak,” which died somewhere around day twelve when I remembered I was supposed to be learning Spanish. The app wants me to conjugate verbs and translate sentences about owls wearing hats. Instead, I’ve been talking to my phone in broken Spanish during my morning walks.

I narrate what I see, make up stories about strangers, practice ordering coffee I’ll never drink in countries I may never visit. “El perro es muy pequeño pero camina como un león,” I tell Siri, who responds with complete bewilderment. The dog is very small but walks like a lion. It’s probably grammatically wrong, but it’s mine.

Learning badly means I skip the scaffolding and jump straight into using the language, even when I don’t know what I’m doing. My Spanish sounds like a child with a head injury, but I’m learning to think in another language instead of just translating English thoughts. The mistakes feel less important when you’re not keeping score.

Drawing What I See

I carry a pocket sketchbook and draw everything poorly. The coffee cup on my desk that looks more like a wonky cylinder. My cat, who appears to have been drawn by someone wearing oven mitts. Trees that look like green explosions. People in the park who somehow end up with too many limbs or not enough.

Every drawing is objectively terrible, but they’re getting terrible in different ways. The coffee cup from last month was terrible because I couldn’t draw circles. This month’s coffee cup is terrible because I can’t figure out shadows. Progress, in its way.

Art classes would teach me proper technique, shading, perspective, all the rules that would make my drawings recognizable. But learning badly means I notice things differently. I pay attention to how light falls on ordinary objects, how people hold their shoulders when they’re thinking, the way buildings lean into each other on old streets. The bad drawings are just evidence of looking closely.

The Permission to Be Amateur

There’s something radical about learning badly in a world obsessed with expertise and optimization. Every skill has been systematized, gamified, turned into a course or app or methodology. We’re supposed to learn efficiently, track our progress, optimize our practice time. But maybe that misses the point entirely.

Learning badly gives you permission to be amateur in the truest sense, someone who does something for love rather than mastery. It removes the pressure to justify the time spent, to have something to show for it, to become good enough to matter. Instead, you can just be someone who plays ukulele badly, cooks without recipes, speaks broken Spanish to their phone, and draws terrible pictures of their cat.

Maybe the things we learn badly teach us more about ourselves than the things we learn well. Maybe the goal isn’t to get better quickly, but to stay curious long enough to discover what we actually care about. What if learning badly is just another way of paying attention?

The Question I Wasn’t Ready For

I was buying groceries at the Safeway on Pine Street when the cashier, maybe nineteen with bleached hair and chipped black nail polish, looked at the surgical scars on my forearm and asked, “Did that hurt?” Not in a mean way. Just curious, the way you might ask about a tattoo. I stammered something about surgery and changed the subject, but her directness stuck with me for months.

Most people either stare and say nothing or work very hard to not look at all. She just asked. There was something refreshing about it, even though I felt completely unprepared. I realized I’d spent so much energy anticipating judgment that I’d never considered someone might just be genuinely interested.

The Uber Driver’s Philosophy

Three months later, I was in an Uber at 2 AM coming back from the airport when the driver started talking about how he used to be a philosophy professor in Tehran. “People think driving is simple,” he said, watching a drunk guy stumble across the street. “But every day I make split-second decisions that could change someone’s life. Philosophy prepared me for this more than any driving course.”

He told me about teaching Sartre to undergraduates who thought existentialism was just an excuse to be depressed. How he came to Seattle five years ago and discovered that driving strangers around the city was its own kind of classroom. “Everyone gets in my car with a story,” he said. “Most don’t tell it, but it’s there.”

I thought about that conversation for weeks. How we assume certain jobs need certain kinds of intelligence, when really they just need different applications of the same human curiosity.

What My Neighbor Said About Time

Mrs. Chen from upstairs caught me checking my phone while walking my dog in September. She was watering her tomatoes on the fire escape and called down, “You know, when I was your age in Shanghai, we had to be very present. No choice.” She climbed down with her watering can and stood next to me while Bruno sniffed around the tree.

“Not because we were more enlightened,” she continued. “Because there was nothing else to pay attention to. Now you have infinite distractions, so being present becomes a skill. Much harder.” She paused and watched Bruno investigate a particularly interesting smell. “But also more valuable, I think.”

I put my phone in my pocket. We stood there for a few minutes watching the neighborhood wake up. She was right about it being harder now, but also about it meaning something different. Choosing to pay attention when you don’t have to feels like a small rebellion.

The Text That Changed How I Think About Friendship

In October, my friend Sarah sent me a text that just said “thinking about you” with no context, no follow-up question, nothing that needed a response. I was having a particularly rough week with work stuff and family drama, none of which she knew about. The timing felt almost supernatural.

When I texted back asking how she knew, she said she didn’t. She’d just been making coffee and remembered something funny I’d said weeks earlier, which made her wonder how I was doing. “I used to think reaching out needed a reason,” she wrote. “But sometimes the reason is just that someone crossed your mind.”

It made me realize how often I talk myself out of small gestures because they feel insufficient or random. But there’s something powerful about letting people know they exist in your thoughts without expecting anything back. I’ve started doing it more, and it’s changed how I think about staying connected.

The Barista Who Remembered

The guy at the coffee shop on Madison remembered my order after three visits. Not just that I get an oat milk latte, but that I always ask for an extra shot on Mondays and never get foam art because I drink it too fast. “You’re very consistent,” he said, handing me my cup with a smile that suggested this was somehow admirable rather than boring.

Later, when I mentioned it to a friend, she said, “That’s just good customer service.” But it felt like more than that. In a city where most interactions are transactional and forgettable, someone had noticed a pattern in my behavior and found it worth remembering. It was a small reminder that we’re all more observable than we think.

These conversations keep surfacing when I’m doing dishes or walking to work. Not because they had profound wisdom, but because they happened at moments when I wasn’t looking for insight. The cashier’s directness, the driver’s perspective on ordinary philosophy, Mrs. Chen’s thoughts on chosen attention, Sarah’s spontaneous kindness, the barista’s noticing. Each one shifted something small but persistent in how I move through the world.

The Five-Minute Coffee Theater

Every morning at 6:47 AM, I perform the same small theater. Water in the kettle, beans in the grinder, filter in the dripper. The ritual takes exactly five minutes from start to finish, which I know because I’ve timed it approximately 400 times. Not because I’m obsessed with efficiency, but because those five minutes have become the most reliable part of my day.

This isn’t about the coffee itself, though it’s decent coffee. It’s about the sequence. The sound of beans hitting the grinder. The smell that fills the kitchen before anyone else is awake. The way the hot water blooms the grounds into something that looks like a tiny brown volcano. These details matter more than they should, which is exactly why they work.

If you’re someone whose mornings feel like controlled chaos, or if you find yourself scrolling your phone before your feet hit the floor, this kind of deliberate routine might be worth trying. It doesn’t have to be coffee. It just has to be yours.

The Tuesday Night Reset

Tuesday evening, after dinner, I clean my desk completely. Not because Tuesday is special, but because Wednesday is when my week usually goes sideways. I learned this about myself after tracking my stress patterns for a month and realizing that Wednesday mornings consistently felt overwhelming.

The desk reset takes maybe ten minutes. Everything goes back to its designated spot. Papers get sorted into three piles: urgent, eventually, and recycling. I wipe down the surface with a damp cloth and adjust my lamp so the light hits just right for tomorrow’s work. Then I set out my notebook, open to a fresh page, with a pen placed horizontally across the top.

This ritual works because it’s preemptive rather than reactive. Instead of starting Wednesday already behind, I begin from a place of intentional order. If you’re someone who feels like you’re always playing catch-up, consider what day of your week typically derails things, then build a small ritual the evening before.

The Three-Item Gratitude Inventory

Right before I turn off my bedside lamp, I think of three specific things from that day that I’m grateful for. Not “family” or “health” or other generic categories, but precise moments. The way the afternoon light hit the kitchen counter while I was washing dishes. My neighbor’s dog who somehow always knows to be outside when I need a two-second interaction with another living being. The fact that the grocery store had good avocados today.

The specificity is crucial here. It forces me to actually review my day instead of just checking a mindfulness box. Some nights this takes thirty seconds. Other nights I lie there for several minutes, mining the day for small goodness. Both outcomes feel worthwhile.

This practice works best for people who tend toward rumination or who find their minds spinning when they try to sleep. The gratitude inventory gives your brain something concrete to focus on instead of tomorrow’s worries or today’s regrets.

The Phone Sabbath Pocket

Every Sunday at 6 PM, my phone goes into a small wooden bowl on the kitchen counter. It stays there until Monday morning. This started as an experiment in digital detox but evolved into something more practical: a weekly reminder that most things can wait 14 hours.

The first few Sundays felt twitchy. I kept reaching for my pocket, phantom notifications buzzing in my brain. But by week four, something shifted. Sunday evenings became longer, quieter, more present. I started noticing things I usually miss. The way the light changes during dinner. How conversations meander differently when no one is half-distracted by their device.

This ritual is particularly valuable for anyone who works in a field where being “always on” feels mandatory, or for people who find their Sunday nights hijacked by work anxiety. The physical separation matters more than just turning on do-not-disturb. Something about the bowl makes it feel intentional rather than punitive.

The Two-Minute Midday Check-In

Around 2 PM, usually when my energy starts flagging, I step outside for exactly two minutes. Not to get fresh air or because someone told me I should take breaks, but to perform a quick internal status check. How am I feeling? What does my body need? What’s been working today, and what hasn’t?

Sometimes the answer is that I need water. Sometimes it’s that I’ve been holding tension in my shoulders for three hours without realizing it. Sometimes it’s that I’ve been avoiding a particular task and should just do it already. The two-minute timer keeps this from becoming a lengthy meditation session or an excuse to avoid work.

This works especially well for people who get so absorbed in tasks that they forget to check in with themselves until they’re running on empty. The key is making it brief enough that you’ll actually do it, and external enough that it creates a real break from whatever you’re focused on.

Why These Work (And How to Find Yours)

None of these rituals are revolutionary. They’re small, specific, and slightly arbitrary. But that’s exactly why they function as anchors. They create pockets of predictability in otherwise unpredictable days.

The best rituals feel slightly private, even selfish. They’re not about productivity or optimization or becoming a better version of yourself. They’re about creating small islands of intention in the middle of everything else. If you’re looking to build your own, start with something that takes less than five minutes and is only for you. Notice what you’re already doing that feels centering, then make it more deliberate.

The goal isn’t to collect rituals like productivity hacks. It’s to find the few small practices that help you feel like yourself, even on days when everything else feels unfamiliar.

The Graveyard in My Desk Drawer

I opened my desk drawer this morning looking for a decent pen and found instead a small archaeological dig of creative ambition. Three half-filled notebooks with different handwriting experiments. A USB drive labeled “pottery videos” from when I was convinced I’d become a ceramicist. Seventeen sketches of the same houseplant from different angles, because apparently I thought the eighteenth would be the one that unlocked my hidden artistic genius.

There’s this weird shame that comes with creative false starts, isn’t there? Like each abandoned project is evidence of some character flaw, proof that we’re the kind of people who can’t see things through. But sitting there with my drawer archaeology spread across the desk, I started wondering if maybe we’ve got this all wrong. Maybe the graveyard isn’t the problem. Maybe it’s the whole point.

The pottery thing lasted exactly four YouTube videos and one disastrous attempt to center clay on a wheel I’d optimistically ordered online. The wheel now works as an excellent plant stand, which feels like a metaphor for something, though I’m not sure what. The notebooks are filled with story beginnings, fragments of ideas, and one surprisingly detailed plan for reorganizing my spice cabinet that I never implemented but somehow still reference when I’m cooking.

The Mythology of Finishing

We tell ourselves stories about successful people that just aren’t true. We imagine they’re the ones who always finish what they start, who have some magical ability to push through the messy middle of every creative endeavor. But the more I pay attention, the more I notice that most interesting people have their own version of my desk drawer. They just don’t talk about it at dinner parties.

My friend Sarah mentioned last week that she has seventeen unfinished quilting projects in various stages of completion. Seventeen. She said it like she was confessing to a crime, but when she described each one, her eyes lit up. The experimental color combinations she tried. The new techniques she learned on the third project that she applied to the seventh. The way she figured out her own style by working through what didn’t feel right.

I started thinking about how we learn to ride bikes. Nobody expects you to nail it on the first try. Wobbling is part of the process. Training wheels aren’t considered failure, they’re considered smart. But somewhere along the way, we develop this idea that creative work should be different, that starting something new means committing to some predetermined finish line.

The Laboratory Mindset

What if we treated creative experiments more like actual experiments? In science, negative results are still results. A hypothesis that doesn’t pan out isn’t a failed experiment, it’s data. It tells you something useful about the world, even if it’s not what you expected to learn.

I tried this mindset with my latest creative detour, a project involving learning to use my camera’s manual settings. Instead of setting out to become a photographer, I decided I was just going to figure out what aperture actually does. No pressure to produce anything meaningful, just curiosity about the mechanics. Turns out, when you remove the expectation of creating art, you accidentally create some interesting images. Or at least, you create images that teach you something about light.

The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to take good photos and started trying to take intentionally bad ones. I spent an afternoon deliberately overexposing everything, creating these washed-out, ethereal mistakes that somehow captured the feeling of that particular Tuesday better than any technically correct image could have. It wasn’t what I set out to learn, but it was definitely what I needed to learn.

Now I keep a section in my notebook labeled “experiments in progress” instead of “projects.” It’s a small semantic shift that somehow makes everything feel more possible. Experiments can be abandoned without shame. They can evolve into something completely different from what you started with. They can fail spectacularly and still teach you something valuable.

The Unexpected Connections

Here’s what nobody tells you about creative false starts: they’re not actually false. They’re just starts. And starts have a way of connecting to each other in ways you don’t see coming.

Those pottery videos I never finished watching? They taught me about centering and balance in ways that somehow improved my writing. The plant sketches that never turned into proper drawings helped me notice how light moves through my living room at different times of day, which led to rearranging my furniture in a way that makes the whole space feel more alive. The abandoned story fragments have become a library of characters and situations I pull from when I’m stuck on other writing projects.

My spice cabinet reorganization plan, the one I never implemented but still reference, has somehow become the template for how I approach any organizational challenge. I didn’t follow through on the original project, but the thinking I did while planning it changed how I think about systems and efficiency in general.

This is the thing about creative work that nobody mentions in the productivity blogs: it’s all connected. Every experiment, even the ones that fizzle out after three days, adds something to your internal creative database. You’re not starting from scratch each time. You’re building on all the previous experiments, even the ones that didn’t go anywhere obvious.

Embracing the Incomplete

I’m learning to see my desk drawer graveyard differently now. Instead of evidence of my inability to commit, it’s proof that I’m willing to try things. Each abandoned project represents a moment when curiosity overcame fear, when I chose to start something new instead of staying safe in familiar territory.

Maybe the goal isn’t to become the kind of person who finishes everything. Maybe the goal is to become the kind of person who starts interesting things, who follows curiosity down unexpected paths, who treats creative work like play instead of performance. Maybe the measure of a creative life isn’t how many projects you complete, but how many times you’re willing to begin.

I’m curious about your own creative archaeology. What’s lurking in your equivalent of my desk drawer? What experiments are you carrying around that feel like failures but might actually be foundation stones for something you haven’t imagined yet? I have a feeling we’re all more alike in this than we admit, and there’s something comforting about that shared landscape of beautiful, unfinished things.