June 7, 2026

Each weekend, I like to pause, reflect, and look back on the past week. This isn't meant to be a deep dive or sweeping life philosophy—just a collection of things that caught my attention, made me think, brought me joy, or stayed with me in some way.

What I Noticed

I am trying to do a lot.

Probably too much, but that’s a problem for future me. Look at me, procrastinating with purpose! Go me!

In truth, I do often think I need to trim some things. But reading this triggered an insight. Clarity and focus need to come first. It would be fairly easy to just start chopping things, cutting activities, freeing up more time.

But what would I do with that time? If I don’t already have clarity, more time won’t help. So, I’ve started asking myself this question every day. In the morning, part of my daily note, I ask myself that question: what one thing, done today, will move the needle?

It has been powerful: I now have an extremely reasonable task list, and I have set a priority for myself that day of what needs and deserves my attention.

Busyness is seductive. It makes us feel productive and important. But it doesn’t matter if our actions aren’t actually moving the needle. Thirty minutes (or less) of meaningful work that progresses our goals matters more than a full day of busywork.

What Helped

I’ve been very willing to harshly adjust my systems, particularly the newer ones. I’ve been holding them loosely, so when I need to make changes, it isn’t painful or difficult.

That flexibility has been powerful. I know what I want my systems to do for me, so the moment they aren’t performing the way I want them to, I feel free to adjust. Nothing is too precious for me to take a few swings at it.

At the same time, I have become more certain that the key is the purpose. The systems need to exist—we are messy humans who need them—but we need to remember they exist only for the purposes we gave them.

More on that coming soon.

What I’m Enjoying

Evergrey hasn’t made a bad album. And since they’ve been around and releasing music since 1998, that is pretty impressive. Of course, some albums are better than others. But every one is a powerful slab of melodic, progressive, melancholy music. Architects of a New Weave is not different. I haven’t had enough time to really know where it lands among their entire oeuvre, but it is always welcome to have new music from these talented Swedes.

The crawl is done. At least for now. I finally pushed through and finished A Parade of Horribles, Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8. I am glad I did. Both because I was ready for a break from the world of DCC, and also to see the setup for the finale. It is evident from the way this one ends that the series is wrapping up. It is bleak. It is grim. But there is still heart and soul to it, and I will most certainly be ready for book 9 when we get it. Still, I welcome the break.

What I’m Practicing

I know there will be those who hate what I am about to say. And I see and hear you.

I just don’t agree completely.

The current AI tools are impressively powerful. They can also be grossly misused. I fully agree that we shouldn’t have them doing creative work for us: that strips out the humanity. I don’t let these tools write a single word for me.

But they are powerful at assisting in certain areas.

If you haven’t, I’d ask you to go look at the main homepage for Imperfect Practice. Over the last two weeks, I did a complete redesign of the site, and I am pretty happy with how it turned out. But I don’t have the skills (or time to gain them) to code all of that. And most certainly not over about 5-6 sessions of deep work in that time.

But Claude (and the others as well, Claude is just the one I used) certainly does.

I made all the creative decisions. I “designed” the entire thing. I just didn’t write the code to make it happen. Some people could argue I could have/should have paid someone to do it for me. True. I could have.

I wasn’t going to.

I was going to stick with the default main page of the theme I chose in the Ghost admin console. That was as far as it was going to go.

But now, I have a page I am much happier with. One that will, hopefully, help people find the site and join the ride. And I was only able to do this with the help of a tool. A tool that is becoming more integral (often inappropriately so) to our daily lives.

And I think I have a duty to understand these tools, see where they can fit to empower people, not replace human creativity. It’s a balance I am practicing, and one that is increasingly important.

One Thing to Improve

I have started to reintegrate fasting into my weekly practice. I don’t believe a lot of the almost pseudo-magical things people say about fasting. But I am trying to improve my sense of self-control, and fasting feels like a logical fit.

Still working on it, though.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, I'm making some changes to the site and other parts of the newsletter. I hope it works and makes this more meaningful for those who have subscribed and read.

What have you been practicing? What systems are you using? I’d love to hear from people, to learn, and to discover new things to try. Feel free to check out the share page on the site and let others know what you are up to.