Empty house

Saturday at 1:30pm, our house was empty.

My mother called thirty minutes earlier. She was on her way and wanted to take the kids out for a couple of hours. My wife was in another city for the weekend at a cheese festival with her friend. And there I was on Saturday, with three unplanned hours that didn't exist when I woke up earlier that day.

I had no plan.

They just appeared.

I could have read. I could have gone for a walk. I could have done nothing, which is the exact thing I keep telling other people they should do more of.

But.

Claude Design had launched the night before. Everyone was already talking about it on LinkedIn, so what I did is I opened the laptop.

"Just ten minutes," I told myself.

"Just to see what it can do."

In two hours, I redesigned the Home by 3pm newsletter page and added the archive function I'd been putting off for weeks. Then I spent another hour tweaking it. Adjusting spacing. Pushing it live. Making small things slightly smaller.

The kids walked back through the door right as I was closing the tab, and I had that specific feeling you get when you've used up a gift on something that wasn't worth it.

Here's the part I've been sitting with.

The first two hours, I can almost defend. The work was real. The page needed it. The archive should have shipped weeks ago. Fine.

The third hour is the one. The work was done and I kept going. Not because anything required it, but because the laptop was already open and stopping felt harder than continuing.

That's the muscle memory. That's the thing nobody talks about.

The old problem was: the work is too big to finish, so you're always behind. That problem is mostly gone now. The tools got good enough that the pile stopped piling.

The new problem is the opposite: The work is small enough that finishing isn't the moment you stop. You finish in two hours and then you stay because there's no friction telling you not to.

This weekend, tools didn't give me my afternoon back. They gave me a new way to lose it.

Here's what I'm trying now:

A 48-hour rule for new tools. I will ignore anything that launches on a weekend until Monday.

Not "just to look." Not "just ten minutes." Monday.

The reason it has to be a hard rule and not a guideline: the hype around any new tool peaks in the first 48 hours. If I can check it after 48 hours, I can do so with a normal brain instead of a Christmas-morning brain.

I broke the rule last Saturday because I didn't have this rule yet. Now I do.

The work used to be too big to finish.Now it's too small to stop.

That's all for this week. See you next Thursday.

Hit reply and tell me: have you caught yourself working on time you didn't ask for? I'm collecting stories.

— Michal

P.S. The archive is at homeby3pm.com/newsletter. All past issues.

Built in hours I should have spent doing nothing.