Welcome Back to The Insight Letter!
Volume One: Thirteenth Edition
This week’s idea is simple… “Restart.”
This builds on last week’s idea of “The Real Progress Metric,” where I started thinking about return speed more than consistency itself. I would probably read last week’s letter first for context, since this continues from it.
Over time, I started noticing something a bit simpler. It is not really about staying consistent. It is about how quickly you come back when you are not.
I have also been thinking about this through the film 12th Fail, based on a true story. Not recently, but it is one of those films that just stayed in the background and comes up again when I think about setbacks and progress.
“Restart”…
What stood out was not a “success story” in the way those are usually framed. It was just how many times things do not work out the first time. Or the second. Or after that.
And nothing really moves in a good way. It is more like things break, pause, restart, and slowly keep moving forward in between all of that, very similar to how real life actually works.
That idea of restarting has been sitting with me since then. I have been applying it more directly in how I work and move through things, not as a formal approach, just as a way of responding immediately when things fall off track.
That idea started to shift how I look at my own work.
Because progress in real life is never continuous. It is fragmented, full of pauses, resets, and uneven momentum. And once I started seeing that clearly, the question stopped being how to avoid interruptions, and became what actually happens in the moment I try to return to something I’ve already left.
I started noticing that those returns were not equal.
Sometimes I could re-enter work almost instantly, like nothing had been broken. Other times, even simple tasks felt strangely heavy, not because the work itself changed, but because restarting it felt like more effort than it should.
And that’s when I realised there are two things happening underneath that feeling.
The first is something cognitive science calls re-entry cost, the mental effort required to resume a task after you’ve stopped. Your brain doesn’t just continue where it left off; it has to rebuild context, reconstruct what you were doing, and reassemble the mental shape of the work before anything meaningful can happen again.
The second is what’s known as the Zeigarnik Effect, unfinished tasks don’t fully disappear from your mind. They stay mentally active in the background, which is why you still think about them even when you’re not working on them.
So you end up in this strange combination: the task is still mentally present, but the ability to act on it has to be rebuilt from scratch.
And once I noticed that, I stopped thinking of it as inconsistency or lack of discipline. It was just the cost of re-entry. Over time, I realised that cost wasn’t constant, it changed depending on how I re-entered the work.
That’s when I started noticing my “Restart”.
My “Restart”
When I started paying attention to how I restart, I realised it is not random. It actually follows a few steps I keep returning to, even if I never formally planned them since it somehow stabilised my thinking in the moment. I don’t think of it as a system…yet, it’s just what I do when I feel like I’ve drifted from something I care about.
1️⃣ Start smaller than resistance.
When I fall off, I don’t try to “get back on track” immediately. I reduce it to something almost frictionless, open the file, read the comments and code snippets, write one paragraph. The point is to break avoidance, not to finish anything yet.
2️⃣ Remove the “I’m behind” story.
The feeling of being behind is what usually delays restarting more than the actual gap. I’ve learned to treat it as irrelevant noise, there is no catching up, only the next action that exists right now.
3️⃣ Prioritise momentum over repair.
My instinct used to be fixing everything I missed before continuing. Now I do the opposite, I restart forward motion first, even if the work is messy or incomplete. Clarity only comes after I’m moving again.
4️⃣ Make the restart visible.
I always try to leave something behind that makes the next entry easier, one commit pushed back to the repo, a note, a half-finished draft, a single improvement. Restarting becomes easier when there’s a visible thread to pick up.
This is not something I follow perfectly every time.
But I’ve noticed that the faster I go through these steps, the less “falling off” actually matters in the long term.
A question I’m thinking about this week
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been noticing how quickly I actually restart after I fall out of rhythm, compared to how much time I spend thinking I should not have fallen off in the first place.
It has made me pay more attention to what happens after the pause, not just the pause itself.
If you want to try it too, here is what I’ve been reflecting on:
1️⃣ When I fall off track, how long does it actually take me to restart properly?
2️⃣ What actions or thoughts allow me to restart faster?
3️⃣ What makes the difference between a quick restart and a delayed one?
For me, this has shown up in small things like stopping work on something for a few days, or losing momentum on a project, and noticing how I come back into it.
Sometimes the restart is immediate. Sometimes it takes longer than it needs to.
The difference between the two has started to feel more important than whether I stayed consistent in the first place. If something feels like it has drifted, it is usually not the drift that matters. It is how quickly I return to it.
Wishing you a week of growth and momentum!
Kind Regards,
