What Kept Organised Is For

There's 28 years in digital design behind this, most of it contracting, which meant thinking hard, for other people, about how systems should work with how people actually behave, which is a lot messier than most specs account for. Then the working day would end and expenses got logged into a spreadsheet updated properly maybe twice a year, missing something every time, the kind of thing we'd have pointed out in a client's process within five minutes. Windfall came from finally admitting the same problem existed at home. It's built around the moment a receipt actually happens, at the till, rather than the January deadline spent squinting at a blurry photo trying to remember what it was for.

The screenshots came from the same place, just took longer to recognise. For example, a genuinely good piece of advice on handling a difficult conversation got screenshotted with every intention of using it properly one day. It mostly stayed exactly where it was instead. There were over a thousand of them by the time anyone actually counted. Sorting them into tighter categories felt like progress for a long stretch. The real question was what to actually do with any of it. Once that became the focus instead of the sorting, the number started going down for the first time, and the advice started getting used instead of saved.

Both of these looked like ordinary disorganisation for years, until each became something small and specific, built to fix it. Most of what's here started that way.