The last real post I published here went up on April 22nd. That’s almost two and a half months ag! I could blame the travel, and there was plenty: South Korea and Puglia for pleasure, Madrid, New York, and Dublin for work. But that’s only half the truth. The other half is that I never found a way of producing these posts that fit the life I actually live.
A writing habit doesn’t break because you stop caring. It breaks because of friction. One too many steps between the idea and the page, and the whole thing quietly stalls.
The friction I didn’t notice
On paper my setup looked fine. I drafted in Obsidian, which I love, then handed the draft to Claude Code with a custom skill that polished my English and gave the piece a consistent shape. Clean posts came out the other end.
The problem hid in one word: Mac. That workflow tied me to my laptop. But ideas don’t show up at my desk. They show up on a plane, in a taxi, waiting for a coffee, with only my iPhone or iPad in hand. By the time I got back to the Mac, the spark was gone. So it was never a discipline problem. My process just assumed a device I wasn’t holding most of the time.
What I changed
Forcing the old habit harder never works for me: I’ve tried carrying the laptop everywhere, and real life always wins. Going fully manual on mobile wasn’t great either, because English isn’t my first language and the polishing step is what keeps these posts readable. Dropping it to gain mobility just swaps one problem for another.
The move that made sense was to take the polishing itself somewhere I can reach from any device. That’s why I built a new skill on Amazon Quick. The tool isn’t the point. The point is that I can run the same “take my rough draft, fix my English, give it a standard shape” step from a Mac or my phone, without depending on one machine in one place.
I can start a draft in Obsidian wherever I am, or dump a raw thought, and finish it later from whatever’s in my hand. It’s meant for two things: the less technical pieces I want to bring here, and drafts already parked in Obsidian that I want to turn into something publishable on the spot. And that second case is where my posts usually die, as half-finished notes I never revisit. Closing that gap removes the exact point where I lost them.
I won’t pretend it was all workflow, though. My father was in the hospital for over a week, which threw my routine into real disorder. They’re discharging him today, and the recovery ahead won’t be simple. I mention it because it’s honest: a system that only works when life is calm isn’t a system. Less friction is what lets writing survive the loud weeks.
Where this is going
The tech work I enjoy writing about here hasn’t stopped. Lately I’ve been building several Quick skills, not just this one. The one I’m most excited about is a smart method for taking notes while following courses. That’s the next post, and the draft is already sitting in my templates. This time the tooling to finish it travels with me.
So what did these two and a half months teach me? That a writing habit lives or dies on friction, and the fix wasn’t more discipline but a process I can run from anywhere.
A few things I’m taking forward:
- Build the workflow around the device you actually carry, not the one you wish you used.
- Keep the step that covers your weak spot, but make it portable instead of dropping it.
- Treat parked drafts as the real pipeline; finishing them is the win.
- Expect life to interrupt, and design the habit to survive it.
If your own habit has stalled, look for the one step that quietly needs the wrong place or the wrong device. That’s usually where it breaks. As for me, the next post is already drafted. Let’s see if it ships this time.