Spring cleaning

Cal Newport has a useful framing for knowledge work: every active project carries administrative overhead. A project includes the work itself, but also the emails, bugs, customer questions, alerts, and old decisions that create ongoing work and context shifts. As the number of active projects grows, the fixed overhead starts to crowd out the real work. I have been feeling that overhead in my own projects. When I started Contraption Company, I imagined a small studio building many calm, dependable software products. Over time, I launched Postcard, Booklet, FRCTNL, and a handful of stranger experiments. With AI, that old product-studio vision suddenly became more plausible. I could build faster, maintain more, and revive ideas that would have previously stayed in a notebook. That period of exploration was useful. But lately, I have been moving from exploration to focus. Software is shifting from something you buy from others to something you build for yourself. But the consequence of…