THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH

Hi Friend,

Lately, I've had an influx of admin work as I'm shifting platforms. And I noticed over the last few days that all my unrelated work has felt harder, as my brain keeps shifting back to the admin tasks I suddenly find on my plate.

Put simply, my mode shifting has been broken. I can't seem to leave the last thing when I go to the next thing. I realized that because I've been doing too much, I've not been using my handoff ritual.

We talk a lot about how hard it is to start the next thing. The blank page, the cold engine, the resistance. I've come to think that's the wrong worry.

The hard part isn't the next thing. It's the last thing. Your brain wants to keep chewing on the project you just walked away from, and it will happily do that while you're supposed to be doing something else.

The fix that works for me is small. Almost too small to believe. It's called interstitial journaling, and all it means is writing a few sentences in the gap between two pieces of work.

Here's how it looks for me. I finish something. Before I open the next thing, I open Day One or my paper journal and write a few lines. What I just did. Any loose ends I want to remember. What I'm turning to next. Then I close it and move on.

That's the whole ritual.

Something about writing it down lets me set it down. The open loops stop circling because they're now sitting in a note instead of in my head. By the time I get to the next task, I'm actually thinking about the next task. Not the last one.

The entries themselves are nothing special. Five sentences some days, one sentence on others. I'm not writing for a future version of me to admire. I've got thousands of these entries, and I almost never read them again. They aren't a record. They're a tool I use to get through the day, and their whole value happens in the ninety seconds it takes to write one.

If you want to try it, don't build a system around it. Pick one handoff tomorrow. Finish a task, and before you jump to the next one, write four or five sentences about what you just closed and what's coming. See if the next thing feels a little clearer. This is particularly useful when you're mode shifting from something hard or new.

I still catch myself skipping it when I'm in a hurry. And I always regret it, because the hurry is exactly when my head is most crowded with the thing I just left. The pause is the point.

Your pal,
David
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This Week in the MacSparky-Verse

A quick look at everything that went up on MacSparky.com this week, in case you missed something.

• ​On Pain and Happiness grew out of a reader's email. He'd hit a line in the introduction to Meditations that seemed to say Stoicism can't make you happy, and I wrote back with how I actually read Marcus Aurelius and why I think the ancients point toward happiness after all.
• On Intentional AI 3, Chris Bailey and I get into the idea sitting under all the AI noise. The model you pick matters less than the context you feed it. I also bring a Show and Tell on my 4 a.m. Daily Dispatch.
• ​Mac Power Users 855 is an hour and a half of Shortcuts talk with Federico Viticci, which means I walked away with six new project ideas and zero free time.

In the MacSparky Labs, it was a busy transition week, with a lot of members settling into our new Circle home. A few of the things members got this week:

• The June Jam Session recording, where we worked through home network setup and keeping the smart-home gear walled off on its own network
• A walkthrough of building your own Safari extension in plain language on iOS and macOS 27, no App Store required
• This week's Lab Report, my run through the Apple news and rumors that actually mattered

That was a single week, and the Labs run like this every week. If that sounds like your kind of place, come join us.

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