Lately, I’ve had an influx of admin work as I’m shifting platforms. And I noticed over the last few days that all my unrelated work has felt harder, as my brain keeps shifting back to the admin tasks I suddenly find on my plate.

Put simply, my mode shifting has been broken. I can’t seem to leave the last thing when I go to the next thing. I realized that because I’ve been doing too much, I’ve not been using my handoff ritual.

We talk a lot about how hard it is to start the next thing. The blank page, the cold engine, the resistance. I’ve come to think that’s the wrong worry.

The hard part isn’t the next thing. It’s the last thing. Your brain wants to keep chewing on the project you just walked away from, and it will happily do that while you’re supposed to be doing something else.

The fix that works for me is small. Almost too small to believe. It’s called interstitial journaling, and all it means is writing a few sentences in the gap between two pieces of work.

Here’s how it looks for me. I finish something. Before I open the next thing, I open Day One or my paper journal and write a few lines. What I just did. Any loose ends I want to remember. What I’m turning to next. Then I close it and move on.

That’s the whole ritual.

Something about writing it down lets me set it down. The open loops stop circling because they’re now sitting in a note instead of in my head. By the time I get to the next task, I’m actually thinking about the next task. Not the last one.

The entries themselves are nothing special. Five sentences some days, one sentence on others. I’m not writing for a future version of me to admire. I’ve got thousands of these entries, and I almost never read them again. They aren’t a record. They’re a tool I use to get through the day, and their whole value happens in the ninety seconds it takes to write one.

If you want to try it, don’t build a system around it. Pick one handoff tomorrow. Finish a task, and before you jump to the next one, write four or five sentences about what you just closed and what’s coming. See if the next thing feels a little clearer. This is particularly useful when you’re mode shifting from something hard or new.

I still catch myself skipping it when I’m in a hurry. And I always regret it, because the hurry is exactly when my head is most crowded with the thing I just left. The pause is the point.