After a break, the hard part is not getting back to work. It is finding the thread.
This morning, I was coming back from a few days off.
I wanted to get back to it. I had things to do. Ideas to move forward. Topics I knew were important.
But I no longer knew where to pick things up.
I tried to remember
So I did what we often do.
I tried to remember.
Which topics were still in progress? What had already been decided? What had I started digging into? What did I absolutely not want to forget?
I searched my own head. And I racked my brain.
A reflex many of us know
You open your notes. Your emails. Notion. Slack. Your conversations. You try to reconnect the pieces.
And these days, we also ask ChatGPT or Claude to help us find the thread again.
But an AI can only start from what you feed back into it. If the context is scattered, incomplete or already forgotten, you risk rebuilding your project out of fragments.
With fragments, you restart on the wrong footing
You can forget that an idea has already been tested.
Forget why a decision was made.
Forget an important piece of customer feedback.
Or redo work you had already done a few weeks earlier.
Then I remembered Verbasil
I opened it to see what was still in progress.
Within seconds, I found several interesting topics I had already started digging into. I saw what really needed my attention. I did not have to mentally rebuild the state of my project before I could work.
And it opened my eyes.
What that morning taught me
The hard part after a break is not starting to work again.
It is recovering the logic of what you were doing before.
A break should give you distance. It should not erase the context of your own project.
After a break, is your project waiting for you, or do you have to rebuild it?