Order Out of (Chapter 2)
Time Space Warp #70
Hey—It’s Toffer.
The advice was: “Always start in the middle of the action.”
Perfect for movies. A trap on a Tuesday.
Estimated read time: 3 minutes
I woke up clear, calm, almost proud of myself. Then I made one wrong opening move. I grabbed my phone. One notification. Then another. By the time I looked up, my mind was already running errands for other people. I hadn’t even stood up yet.
So I checked my email. Replied to a client. Updated an Airtable field. Checked a dashboard that didn’t need checking. Threw a thumbs-up at a message no one was waiting for. It felt “productive.”
Then I drank coffee after a stressful call. Instead of clarity, my brain snapped into paranoia… typing long messages I thankfully deleted before sending.
I tried planning the week next. Naturally, I catastrophized.
I avoided a conversation I should’ve had at 9 AM… and finally had it at 4 PM when I was already annoyed. Same topic… just the leftover version of me.
Later, I tried to create something. I opened a draft and sounded worse than ChatGPT. My voice drowned under everyone else’s echo.
Other days weren’t different. I kept calling it overwhelm. But the culprit was sequence.
A day can have the same tasks and feel completely different depending on what I did first. If I start with noise, the day stays noisy. If I start with clarity, the day stays clear.
The smallest action can switch the whole tone:
A message checked at the wrong moment.
A meeting dropped into the only hour I can think of.
A decision postponed until I’m tired.
Small things. But the day builds on them.
The mind loves momentum. It also loves distraction. Whichever one I feed first usually wins. I think I failed because I didn’t finish the important thing, but really I never gave it a runway. I landed other planes first.
Sequences compound. Good ones make things feel easy. Bad ones make simple things feel impossible. I can work a whole day and accomplish nothing. And usually because the low-value tasks stole the morning slot.
Phones make it worse. Everything arrives in the same format. Urgent or trivial, it all looks identical, so the brain treats it that way.
I blame my to-do list, but the problem is sequence. My day was out of order. One mistimed interruption can tilt the entire day. A well-timed hour can solve a week. A badly timed one can ruin a day.
My mind doesn’t operate as one thing. It cycles through modes. One wants action. One wants safety. One wants certainty. One wants silence.
If the wrong one shows up first, I get stuck. If the right one shows up at the wrong time, I waste it.
Most “inconsistency” is just mistimed handoffs between these modes. I feel pulled in different directions because I am. Different parts of me want different things at different times.
There’s a pattern. And when I ignore it, the thing that becomes out of order… is me.
It makes me wonder: Who inside me is choosing the order?
That’s Chapter 3.
Your Friend in Time,
Toffer