The Middle Way Method

Last week we explored why restarting a planning system is often much harder than stopping in the first place in Why Stopping Is Easy, Restarting Is Hard. Interruptions are a normal part of life, but every interruption creates distance between where we were and where we are now. While our...

Last week in Systems Don’t Fail, They Stop Getting Used, we looked at an important reality of personal systems: most systems do not fail because they are poorly designed. Often, they simply stop being used. A system can remain completely intact while sitting unused. A planner can still contain your...

Most planning systems are not complicated to build. The harder part is keeping them alive over time. Any system that relies on consistent use will eventually run into gaps—days, weeks, sometimes months where it is simply not touched. The assumption is usually that something has gone wrong. That the system...

In the previous article, the focus was on limiting how many things can exist in motion at the same time. That idea centered on the problem of overload—what happens when too many valid commitments are treated as simultaneously active. Work doesn’t break because it is unimportant, but because it exceeds...

In the previous article, we focused on protecting the “rocks”—the work that actually matters most when everything competes for attention. That idea centered on safeguarding priority work from noise, distraction, and constant re-evaluation. Once the important work is identified, the next problem becomes unavoidable: too many things still try to...