My coffee went cold again.
Eight posts, two longform articles and nine images, scheduled across six days, out of one conversation in one sitting. One person, a dog at their feet and a mug they forgot about. Eighteen months ago that would have needed a strategist, a copywriter, a designer and someone who knew how the CMS worked.
The word I keep coming back to is exoskeleton. A runner’s blade doesn’t give you new legs; it changes how the legs you’ve got meet the ground. That’s roughly what this feels like. Claude doesn’t think for me, but it lets me think out loud without losing the thread, and brand strategy, images, scheduling and the longform writing all happen in the same conversation without the context breaking. And it’s there, patiently, every time I come back, which surprised me more than anything it made (a strange thing to say about software, I know).
The walk
Every morning I walk Fimme and Sien through the fields outside Oberbarnim. The light changes, the path doesn’t. Somewhere between the third and the fourth tree - I’ve started calling them the committee - my head loosens up, and that’s where the ideas turn up. Hardly ever at the desk.
The gap between an idea on the walk and a thing that exists used to be huge, and it was full of logins, formatting and switching between tools; the boring part that eats the good part. Now I come home, open a conversation, say here’s what I’m thinking, and we build it. The images get made, the posts get written, the schedule gets set, and the coffee goes cold.
What it takes
A few weeks of that and I noticed the other half.
The machine doesn’t get tired or lose the thread, but I do, and if something lets me work at three times my old speed, what I’m really doing is squeezing three days of thinking into one, and I don’t think I’m wired for that. I’m learning it the slow way.
So I went and read about it. Stephen and Rachel Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory, from 1989, splits attention in two. Directed attention is the effortful kind you use at a screen - filtering, focusing, pushing distractions away - and it runs out. Soft fascination is what happens when you watch a branch move or a dog sniff a patch of grass, and it fills back up.
Marc Berman tested that at the University of Michigan in 2008. People did a demanding memory task and then went for a 50-minute walk, half of them through an arboretum and half through downtown Ann Arbor. The ones who walked among trees did roughly 20% better on the memory task afterwards; the ones who walked through town didn’t improve. They didn’t have to enjoy the walk for it to work, either.
A study of about 20,000 people in England found that those who spent at least two hours a week in nature were more likely to report good health and wellbeing. It’s a survey, not a brain test.
There’s also some work suggesting a walk outside nudges the brain towards the default mode network, the state linked to mind-wandering and memory consolidation. I’m out of my depth on the neuroscience, but it matches what I see. The connections I can’t force at the desk arrive on their own on the path. I suspect what the committee gives me is room for my head to finish work it can’t do while I’m staring at it.
When the ceiling on my output was how fast I could type, work and rest were roughly in balance. Now I can’t see the ceiling, and what stands between me and burning out is whether I remember to go outside.
Fimme and Sien couldn’t care less that I can build a quarter’s worth of automations before breakfast. They want to smell one specific tree, and Fimme will try to eat something questionable. Honestly that’s the most useful feedback I get all day.
Still walking
It’s thrilling and it’s disorienting, and most days I can’t tell the two apart. The dogs say the walk isn’t optional, and as far as I can tell the research agrees with them.
Tomorrow morning, same path. The committee will still be there, and somewhere between the third and the fourth tree something will land. Time will tell whether I keep remembering to go…
🌈