Topic

Focus and Self-Discipline

Essays on procrastination, distraction and the slow work of finishing things, written by someone who has lost whole nights to open tabs and AI tools and keeps finding his way back to the page.

All posts in Focus and Self-Discipline

Header image for Just One More Hit, I'll Stop After the Next Command
Focus and Self-Discipline

Just One More Hit, I'll Stop After the Next Prompt

Building with AI has become the most potent cognitive drug available to founders, and if you run a neurodiverse brain—ADHD, dyslexic, autistic, any brain wired on a different dopamine economy—the compulsion is not metaphorical but pharmacological. AI tools deliver instant feedback, variable reward, and scalable challenge in an endless loop, exploiting the same reward-sensitivity that makes hyperfocus feel like flow but function like addiction. The rotation starts innocently: Manus for data, Lovable for builds, Claude for copy and design, GPT for research. Five tools, five parallel streams, no natural pauses. It looks like extraordinary productivity at 2 am, but the quality of decisions made under that cognitive load tells a different story. This is a piece about the loop, the crash signal that arrives days later, and why stopping has turned out to be harder than writing any prompt.

April 24, 202618 min read
Read
Header image for The book I was not writing
Focus and Self-Discipline

The book I was not writing

The book I was not writingR asked me how the book was coming.We were on his balcony, the third bottle open, the city doing that thing Bombay does at midnight where it almost quiets down and then decid...

August 07, 20257 min read
Read
Header image for The Access To A Powerful Life : How Integrity Shapes Unshakeable Confidence
Focus and Self-Discipline

Why You Can't Focus: The Real Cost of Context Switching

The twelve open tabs P stopped inviting me to coffee about six months ago. I noticed it the way you notice something that has quietly stopped happening, not a door slamming but a door that used to ope...

May 30, 20248 min read
Read
Header image for The question
Focus and Self-Discipline

The question

It's the question that drives us. And when you lose your drive, maybe you can ask yourself the question. What question, you ask? Maybe one of these. Or you could come up with your own questions. One of the questions I love asking is what do you dream about? What do you want to do… ...

April 04, 20102 min read
Read
Header image for Going With The Flow
Focus and Self-Discipline

How to Get Into a Flow State

If you are familiar with the flow concept – you might also have been through a flow experience yourself, then you will recognise the symptoms of being in the flow – when time doesn't matter, distractions are absent and everything happens automatically – when excellence is within your grasp and things happen as they should.… ...

November 03, 20083 min read
Read