The same desk chair felt perfect for editing and useless for writing

Mara used to keep one long to-do list. Some mornings she'd open it and stare, unable to tell why a task that took twenty minutes yesterday suddenly felt impossible today. She'd force herself to draft a proposal at two in the afternoon, get nowhere, and decide she just wasn't a very disciplined person.

David Kadavy went through the same confusion while writing his first book, until he noticed something odd: some of his sessions produced pages effortlessly, and others, doing what looked like the exact same task, produced nothing but pain. Eventually he realized he wasn't actually doing the same task each time. Writing a first messy draft, editing a finished draft, and looking things up all felt completely different, and each one needed a different mental state to go well.

He eventually named seven of these states, which he remembers with the phrase PER Golf, PAR. There's Prioritize, the big-picture planning he did looking out over Chicago from the ninety-fifth floor of a skyscraper. There's Explore, open-ended and curious, like his nighttime research sessions surrounded by sticky notes, with no goal beyond soaking in the material. There's Research, which looks similar but is actually narrower, hunting for a specific answer to a specific question. There's Generate, the actual production of new work. There's Polish, tightening what's already been generated. There's Administrate, the unglamorous logistics, invoices, permissions, groceries. And there's Recharge, deliberately doing nothing useful at all, because creative energy has to be replenished before it can be spent again.

Kadavy's core claim is that switching between these states rapidly is exhausting in a way that switching between projects is not. Trying to research, write, and edit all in the same fifteen minutes leaves you scattered and an easy target for distraction, because your brain hasn't settled into any one mode long enough to get traction. Once he started tagging his tasks by which of the seven states they needed, rather than which project they belonged to, he could look at his current mood and immediately find something that fit it, instead of forcing himself through a mismatch and calling it discipline.

Go through your current to-do list and, next to each item, note the kind of mental energy it actually needs: broad planning, open curiosity, a specific answer, fresh production, tightening, logistics, or genuine rest. Before you pick your next task, check in with your own state honestly, and choose something that matches it rather than whatever feels most urgent on paper. If you're deep in generating new work and a fact-check or a formatting question tempts you to switch gears, leave yourself a quick placeholder and keep going instead of breaking your focus. Build real rest into the plan on purpose, since it's doing quiet work of its own.