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Stories about people getting better at something, notes on what we have shipped, and the occasional thing we noticed and could not stop thinking about.
The alarm you have to answer
I said morning calls never survive contact with a real week. Then people kept booking them anyway, and it turns out I was wrong about which morning.
6 October 2026 · 8 min read
Story5What's new1Guide2Notes5
NotesFitnessNobody quits because the programme was wrongRoughly half of new gym members quit within six months, and health and fitness apps hold about 3% of users at day 30. The programmes are not the variable — most of them work. What separates the people who continue is something much less interesting than programming.22 September 2026 · 7 min readStoryInterviewsThe question every nursing interview asks, and nobody rehearsesEvery nurse gets asked about a near miss. Most have one. Almost none of them have ever said it out loud outside an incident report, and it shows in the first ten seconds.15 September 2026 · 3 min readNotesRelationshipsDating did not get harder. The meeting did.Around 79% of Gen Z report burnout from dating apps and roughly half have deleted them entirely. But the apps were never the hard part. They solved the introduction problem and left the harder one untouched: what happens when two strangers sit down.8 September 2026 · 7 min readNotesWork & CareersThe fastest-growing job in tech is mostly conversationPostings for forward-deployed engineers rose more than 1,000% between January and August 2026, with median advertised salaries around $188,000 against roughly $145,000 for traditional software engineering. The catch is that the job asks for something most engineering careers never trained anyone to do.3 September 2026 · 6 min readStorySpeaking & ConfidenceShe practised quitting her job five times before she did itDana had written the resignation email, deleted it, and rewritten it four times over three weeks. What finally worked was saying it out loud to something that argued back.4 August 2026 · 3 min readGuideProductWhere a voice assistant actually fits in a weekMost advice about incorporating AI into your life assumes you will find new time for it. You will not. These are the slots where talking to something already fits, drawn from when people actually schedule calls rather than when they say they will.28 July 2026 · 4 min readStorySalesThe rep who discounted before anyone askedThe buyer said the price was higher than expected, and then said nothing. What happened in the next four seconds was not a tactic or a strategy. It was a reflex, and it had been running unexamined for three years.14 July 2026 · 4 min readStorySpeaking & ConfidenceHe had not spoken out loud in two daysTom noticed the dating pool problem immediately when he went remote. What took him two years to notice was that his week had become entirely typed, and the first ten minutes of any conversation now sounded like an engine starting in the cold.30 June 2026 · 4 min readNotesSpeaking & ConfidenceIt is easier to be bad at something when nobody is watchingThe most common reason people do not practise a conversation is that practising requires another person, and being visibly bad in front of someone you know is worse than being unprepared. Removing the audience removes the objection.16 June 2026 · 4 min readNotesStudyingWhy saying it out loud changes what you knowThere is a reliable gap between what you recognise and what you can produce, and almost every study method quietly trains the first one. Here is what is actually going on when you say a thing out loud, and why it feels so much harder than reading.2 June 2026 · 4 min readWhat's newProductSetting up a call now takes one sentenceThe old flow made you choose a use case, then a sub-type, then a difficulty. Most people picked something close enough and adjusted mid-call. Now you write one sentence and Vera works it out.4 February 2026 · 1 min readStoryInterviewsThe four minutes before the interviewPriya had done everything the advice says — the STAR stories, the company research, the mock interview with a friend who was too kind to be useful. What changed the outcome was four minutes in a car park, saying one answer out loud for the fifth time.14 January 2026 · 6 min read