The card catalogue

Private notes from the library.

Ideas on productivity, behaviour, burnout, and the nervous system, filed as index cards. Pull any card to read the note behind it.

Systems Thinking · 9 min read

Feedback Loops: Why Your Biggest Problems Keep Coming Back

There is a particular frustration that most practitioners, leaders, and educators will recognise. The problem gets solved. The intervention works. And then, three months later, the problem is back, sometimes in exactly the same form, sometimes…

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Productivity · 9 min read

The Morning Routine Myth: Why Your Body Doesn't Care What Time You Wake Up

The 5am club has a lot to answer for. Not because early rising is wrong, for some people, it is genuinely the best time to work. But because the productivity industry has turned a chronotype preference into a moral position. Wake early, the…

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Behaviour & Education · 9 min read

What Happens in Year 9: The Behaviour Data Nobody Is Talking About

If you work in a secondary school in England, you already know this. Year 9 is different. The suspensions peak there. The disengagement concentrates there. The students who were manageable in Year 7, who showed enough promise to sustain hope in Year…

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Burnout & Recovery · 9 min read

The Body Keeps the Score, And So Does the Workplace

Most conversations about burnout happen in the language of the mind. Exhaustion. Cynicism. Reduced efficacy. These are the three dimensions identified in the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and they are real, but they are not the whole picture. By the…

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Nervous System · 9 min read

Why You Can't Think Your Way Out of a Nervous System State

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from knowing exactly what you should do and being completely unable to do it. You know the email is not that important. You know the presentation will be fine. And yet the heart rate is elevated,…

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Writing & Creativity · 9 min read

Who Are You Writing For? The Question That Changes Everything

Every writing decision I have ever made, every structural choice, every tonal shift, every decision about what to include and what to cut, has been shaped by one prior question. Who is the specific person I am writing for? Not a demographic. Not a…

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Systems Thinking · 9 min read

The Map Is Not the Territory: Why Your Mental Model of the Problem Is the Problem

Every decision you make, every plan you design, every intervention you implement, is based on a model of how the world works. Not the world itself. A model. The model lives in your head. It is built from experience, education, culture, and the…

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Productivity · 9 min read

Deep Work Is Not a Strategy. It's a Nervous System State.

Cal Newport's concept of deep work, cognitively demanding, distraction-free, sustained focus on tasks that push your abilities, is one of the most useful reframes the productivity conversation has produced in the past decade. What the deep work…

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Behaviour & Education · 9 min read

The Classroom Is a Nervous System: Designing Environments That Make Good Behaviour More Likely

Walk into two different classrooms in the same school, with the same year group, and the behaviour in those two rooms is often strikingly different. Same students. Same school culture. Same policy. Different room, different teacher, different…

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Burnout & Recovery · 9 min read

The Shame Spiral: Why High Achievers Are the Last to Ask for Help

There is a particular internal logic that operates in high-functioning burnout. You are capable. You have managed harder things than this. Other people are dealing with significantly worse. Therefore your struggle is not legitimate. Therefore…

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Nervous System · 9 min read

The Vagus Nerve: What It Is, What It Does, and Why It Matters for Everything

The vagus nerve is having a cultural moment, and like most cultural moments, the signal-to-noise ratio is not ideal. On one end, legitimate neuroscience. On the other, dubious wellness claims about ice baths and humming your way to peak performance.…

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Writing & Creativity · 9 min read

Structure Is Not the Enemy of Creativity. It Is the Condition for It.

There is a persistent idea in creative culture that structure and creativity are in tension, that imposing form on creative work constrains it, that the most original thinking happens in the unstructured space. I do not believe this. Not because…

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Systems Thinking · 9 min read

Leverage Points: Where Small Changes Produce Big Results

Donella Meadows identified twelve leverage points, places in a system where a small shift in one thing can produce large changes in everything else. She ranked them from least to most powerful. The least powerful: changing numbers, adjusting…

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Productivity · 9 min read

Stop Optimising Your To-Do List. Start Regulating Your Energy.

Time management is a category error. Not entirely, there is genuine value in understanding how you spend your hours and in designing the structure of your day deliberately. But the productivity conversation has been so thoroughly dominated by time…

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Behaviour & Education · 9 min read

Parenting Without a Diagnosis: Navigating the System When the System Has No Answer

The average wait time for an autism assessment in England is currently 26 months. For ADHD, it is 29 months. In that gap, between the point at which a parent or school flags a concern and the point at which a formal diagnostic process produces an…

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Burnout & Recovery · 9 min read

Burnout Is Not About Working Too Hard. It's About Working Wrong.

The framing most commonly applied to burnout is workload. Too much work, too long hours, too many demands. The solution implied: reduction. This framing is not wrong. Excessive workload is a real contributor to burnout, and many people are genuinely…

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Nervous System · 9 min read

Neuroception: The Process Running Underneath Everything You Think You're Deciding

You are in a meeting. Intellectually, you know it is routine. The agenda is familiar, the people are colleagues, there is nothing objectively threatening about the room. And yet something in your body is braced. Your attention is slightly narrowed.…

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Writing & Creativity · 9 min read

Writing What You Know Is Bad Advice. Here's What Actually Works.

'Write what you know' is the most common piece of writing advice and, in the form it is usually given, one of the least useful. The problem is not the underlying intuition, that proximity to experience produces authenticity. The problem is the way…

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Systems Thinking · 9 min read

Emergent Behaviour: Why the System Produces What Nobody Intended

No teacher sets out to create a classroom culture in which students learn to perform compliance rather than develop genuine understanding. No organisation designs itself to suppress the information that would allow it to improve. And yet these…

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Productivity · 9 min read

Productive Avoidance: The Most Sophisticated Form of Not Doing the Work

The inbox is at zero. The desk has never been tidier. The weekly review has been completed with unusual thoroughness. By every observable metric, something productive has happened today. And yet the thing that actually needed doing, the proposal,…

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Behaviour & Education · 9 min read

Restorative Practice Is Not a Soft Option. It Is a Structural Upgrade.

The criticism of restorative approaches in schools usually sounds like this: it is too soft. It lets students get away with things. It does not send the clear message that behaviour has consequences. I want to push back on this, not by arguing that…

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Burnout & Recovery · 9 min read

Recovery as Redesign: Why You Can't Go Back to the Person Who Burned Out

There is a version of burnout recovery that nobody tells you about, because it is not the version the recovery industry sells. It is not rest and return. It is not the sabbatical that ends with a fresh start back in the same configuration. The…

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Nervous System · 9 min read

The Window of Tolerance: Understanding Your Nervous System's Working Range

The window of tolerance is one of the most practically useful concepts in the nervous system literature, and one of the least known outside clinical contexts. Developed by Dan Siegel and built upon in somatic therapy work, it describes the zone of…

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Writing & Creativity · 9 min read

The Book Nobody Else Will Write: On Finding Your Unique Contribution

Every book exists in a market. The writer who ignores this, who believes that quality alone will find its audience, is working significantly harder than necessary and producing unnecessarily uncertain outcomes. But every book worth writing also…

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