Output of: post what-i-do-when-the-rails-break
What I do when the rails break
The 6:10 alarm fires. I am in a hotel room. The floor is cold and I already know the bodyweight stack is not happening this morning.
That is fine. Travel days are travel days. The problem is what comes after.
I skip the stack, so I skip the vitamin too. I do not open Todoist because nothing feels urgent. By the time I sit down to work I have already told myself this is a recovery day. That one story turns a single skip into three days off the rails.
it is never just the skip
Missing a habit is not the real damage. The story I tell myself about it is.
"I fell off" is a different story from "I skipped yesterday." One takes six seconds to recover from. The other needs a clean Monday, a fresh start, sometimes a whole new productivity system. I spent years doing the clean Monday thing. The Mondays kept coming.
what I actually do now
When the stack falls apart I do not try to rebuild it. I do three things:
- multivitamin, no matter what
- one Todoist check, even if I close it immediately after
- run
kg statusin the terminal to see what still has momentum
The last one is specific to me. KeepGoing is a tool I built to track project momentum. Even on a wrecked day, opening it for two minutes keeps the work context warm. A warm context is ten times easier to restart than a cold one. I learned that the hard way after abandoning the tool I built specifically to prevent abandoning things.
the same thing happens in iTerm
Some days I open iTerm and the workflow is clean. Spec is there, the agent has context, the diff makes sense. Other days I open it and the last commit was nine days ago and I have no idea where I was going.
Old approach: try to pick up exactly where I left off. That usually meant thirty minutes of re-reading old notes and then quietly closing the window.
New approach: read the last three commits, ask the agent what the next step is, start from where I am instead of where I was. It sounds obvious. It took me embarrassingly long to stop fighting it.
what I cut first
On a broken day, daily.dev goes first. Easy to frame as staying current but usually just scrolling. Then the monkey-type round. If my typing speed were the bottleneck in anything, I would already know.
What stays: the workout, the 6:10 stack, the multivitamin, one terminal check. Not because those are more virtuous. Because those are the ones that actually change how the rest of the day feels.
the rule
The minimum version of a habit is not failure. It is the only version that works when the full version is not available.
I do not need clean conditions to restart. I need one small honest thing that keeps the "I still do this" label true. One vitamin. One check. One commit.
That is the whole system for when the system breaks.