Quiet week. Most of it spent on a single problem that I haven't solved. I'm trying to learn to count those weeks anyway.
The instinct is to file it under wasted. Nothing shipped, so nothing happened. But that ledger only counts weeks that end in an artifact, and most of the real work doesn't. The problem I didn't solve is smaller now than it was on Monday. I know three approaches that don't work, which is not nothing, even if it photographs as nothing.
What I'm slowly unlearning is the habit of grading a week by what it produced. A week spent narrowing a hard question is the price of the later week where the answer arrives in an afternoon and looks like luck. The quiet ones are where that luck gets manufactured. They just never feel like it from the inside.
So I'm logging this one on purpose. Not because it was productive in any way I can point to, but because the weeks I refuse to count are the ones I keep having to live through again.
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