March: Fixed Sleep, Fewer Tabs, More Focus

New month. Different energy than February.

February felt dense—lots of ideas, lots of output, slightly scattered. March is going to feel tighter.

What I’m Carrying Forward

The writing streak hits fifty-seven days today. I didn’t start this expecting it to reach March. Here we are.

The no-tech Sundays stay. Two months of data says they’re worth it. The benefit to family time is obvious. The benefit to my own clarity is subtler but real.

The client work stays focused. The Fabric migration is at a critical phase—data validation, performance tuning, stakeholder sign-off. Not the time to scatter attention.

What I’m Changing

Fixed Sleep Schedule

This was the commitment I kept failing. Starting tonight: 10:30 PM to bed, phone in the drawer, alarm at 7 AM.

Not flexible on weekdays. Not “just one more thing to finish” on Sunday nights.

The research on sleep and cognitive performance is unambiguous. I know this. I’ve known it for years. Knowing isn’t the hard part.

The hard part is treating sleep like a meeting I can’t reschedule—rather than a buffer I can compress when work expands.

Email as a Scheduled Task

First check at 9 AM. Second check at 1 PM. After that, nothing until the next morning.

I’ve tried versions of this before and slid back. The difference this time: I’m treating the slide-back as expected, not as failure. Miss a day, reset the next morning.

Side Project: Finish the Minimum Version

My small data quality tool has been “almost done” for three months. That’s a sign I’ve let the scope creep.

March goal: ship the thing I actually built, not the thing I wish I’d built.

Done and imperfect beats not-done and theoretically perfect. Every time.

What March Is About

Finishing what matters. Not adding more.

February surfaced ideas I want to explore, posts I want to write, patterns I want to build. That’s February’s job—generating material. March’s job is narrowing.

One client project, done well. One side project, shipped. Family time, protected. Sleep, consistent.

That’s the whole list.

The Longer Game

I’ve been thinking about what I want the rest of 2026 to look like.

More work that combines technical depth with helping teams—not just one or the other. More writing. At some point, a talk or workshop that synthesizes what I’ve been building in my Fabric and AI work.

Less context-switching. Fewer commitments that sound good but scatter focus.

This is directional, not a plan. March is the test case.

One More Thing

Fifty-seven days of daily writing means I’ve been publishing a post since January 2. That’s long enough to no longer be a streak and short enough to not yet be a practice.

Somewhere in the next few months it tips to practice.

I’ll keep going until it does.

Here’s to March.