Hey – Jamie here.
I think I'm nearly there.
This week's story is a reflection on what I've realised after re-entering the world of writing in public. It turns out, my model for life has changed, which was a surprise to me.
There are two sorts of writers: plotters and explorers.
A plotter figures out all the beats of what they're going to write before they get started. That's not me. I'm an explorer: I start writing and what I want to say reveals itself to me in the moment.
The revelation at the end of this week's writing finally helped me pinpoint why I've started to move differently through life. I'm more content, less fragile, and laugh more.
As for this week's article, I've redefined my relationship with my phone to make it more of a tool than a distraction. Quite a few friends have started to copy my new habit, so I thought I'd share it with you.
The trick is well-known: turn your phone screen black and white. Though after much tinkering and drawing on my conclusions from how to be disciplined by design, I've come up with a workflow that makes the habit sustainable, flexible (for when you need colour), and useful.
It's actually been so useful at bolstering my focus that I've started to experiment with turning my MacBook black and white, too.
More on that another day.
For now, please enjoy Snakes and Ladders and How to Escape Your Phone's Gravity: Part 2.
Both pieces live up to the promise of sharing my hindsight to guide your foresight. I suggest drinking 'em fresh with a few cubes of ice.
Table of Contents
- Making your own luck
- Articles & Guides
- Stories & Reflections
- Favourite Finds
Making your own luck
The undercurrent curling through this week's story is an equation I like to think about:
Luck = Preparation + Opportunity
It's a simple recipe for making your life more serendipitous, and I think the headline of the first quarter of 2026 has been The Winter of Preparation.
I've been in a deep hole, and digging myself out has meant rebuilding the foundations properly, so if the earth shakes again, things won't collapse in the same way.
What's exciting is that I'm basically there – touch wood – so now I can refocus on the opportunity side of things for the next three months.
I've been in the dark for what feels like an age. It's a relief, finally, maybe, to feel the sunshine again. Hopefully I'll see you there, too.
Feel free to reply to this message. You can also share your questions, requests, and favourite finds here.
Jamie | @JamoeMills
🌸 From a blossoming London
Find a better way to solve problems that matter.
P.S. I think I photographed a very pretty piegon this week. Find her featured in this week's collection. What do you think?
Articles & Guides
Escaping Your Phone’s Gravity: Part 2
At a glance
- Based on the reader question: I keep getting lost on my phone every time I pick it up. Is there a simple way to stop?
- Your phone is designed to hold your attention. That's the business model. Turning the screen black and white removes the visual bait that drags you into a newsfeed
- The research is sobering: compulsive consumption of negative content is linked to existential anxiety and vicarious trauma, and a smartphone sat face-down on your desk still quietly reduces your ability to focus
- You don't need to go cold turkey. A Vegan, But Bacon approach works fine: greyscale most of the time, colour when you actually need it
- There are three ways to toggle greyscale, each with a different amount of friction. Start with the most and work your way down as the habit takes hold
Introduction
A few of my friends saw my new habit and followed suit, so I thought you'd also enjoy my trick for being less of a doomscrolling phone-zombie.
The trick is well-known: turn your phone screen black and white. But how I do it is different.
If going black and white on your phone sounds unrealistic, I've designed in some flexibility to make transitioning more manageable, as sometimes you just need colour.
In fact, being a Vegan, But Bacon person myself, even I don't stay in the world of greyscale all the time. Though I have found I need colour much less often than I would have wagered.
Stories & Reflections
Snakes and Ladders
Reflecting on Q1 2026: The Winter of Preparation
Total words wrriten: 25,804
At the start of the year, my main ambition was to not fall apart.
After what grief did to me when Mum passed, I knew better than to rush into chaining myself to a strict writing schedule in 2025. I wrote and worked, but it was flexible and forgiving. I took things one day at a time and retreated back to being a sobbing mess whenever I got stuck in a grief spiral.
The temptation with grief is to treat it like a backlog. Head down, push through, catch up, and return to normal as quickly as possible. But I knew how that would play out. I would poke my head up from the trenches, declare "I'm back!", and emotionally soil myself within a few weeks. Apparently, some things just take as long as they take. I can't bully them into being over because my calendar says it would be convenient.
Still, at the start of the year I made myself a promise: I would write in public again. At least two pieces every two weeks, something I was proud of, something with a twinkle behind its eyes.
It's just over twelve weeks since I made that promise, and I've written six newsletters, six articles, six stories, and the tally of public displays of emotional incontinence stands at zero, which is frankly better than I expected.
So. What's changed?
I have a theory. I'm not entirely sure it's right, but it seems to be the closest thing to truth I have right now. I think my fundamental understanding of how life works has changed.
Favourite finds
An assortment of all the things I felt were worth passing on this week. Do you have a favourite find? Share it here.
Saturday Night Live UK (comedy)
SNL UK is still going strong and has since launched a dedicated YouTube channel.
Two highlights from the Jamie Dornan episode: the Hostage scene, which I won't spoil, and the Pub Song, a perfectly observed skewering of British tourists abroad.
Extend your MacBook's battery life (tech tip)
Apple sneaked in an update that lets you cap your laptop's maximum charge. Lithium batteries degrade faster when they sit at 100%, so keeping it at 80% extends the long-term life of the battery.
I've been experimenting with it since I run my laptop off power whenever I'm at my desk. You'll find the setting under System Settings → Battery.
Alligatoah - Willst Du (music)
Welcome to the song I've been writing to this week. It's in German, which I don't speak, but the melody has been retexturing my energy with a playful flow. A quick translation did reveal it's about taking drugs. Go figure. Probably worth saying, I’m recommending the sound rather than the subject matter.
Tethering Presence – Richard Harris (photography book)
I stumbled across this one in a café and got pulled in. Harris spent years photographing ordinary life on the Tube, in backstreets, and in cafés across London, and noticed something in almost every frame: a phone.
The book subtly asks what we lose when we experience life through a screen rather than with our eyes.
The foreword sets the tone:
What does a smartphone do? Like all technologies, they amplify our reach into the world. I can't push nails into wood with my thumb, but with a hammer my strength is multiplied. Gripped in my hand, it offers a force beyond that which is 'natural'.
But, at the same time, the hammer reaches back through my arm into the heart. It doesn't just offer greater external power, it asks urgent interior questions: what do I want to do with this new strength? Build a fine piece of furniture, or smash a window?
Cradled in our palms, fingers wrapped around, smartphones similarly offer us extraordinary amplification. We can send messages around the world in an instant... we have immediate access to knowledge of untold things... we can mediate our presence across thousands of miles... and – as philosophers of technology have pointed out – these powers are analogous with those that we have, through history, projected onto angels.
But the amplification goes both ways. The greater power to reach out into the world is matched by deeper questions reaching back into the depths of our being.
When we project our identities into social timelines, who are we trying to be? Searching the deepest cavities of our hearts, what hidden desires will these tools find?
They know each pore and contour of our face, read our fingerprints and know each step we take. Their powers are super-natural but have they elevated us to new heights, or weighed down the human dress?
This beautiful series of photographs and words are a rich seam to help us understand these questions. Intimate and unguarded, Harris' lens here asks us to look again, to reconsider the relationship between our tools, our inner lives and the sites of our attention, and Purnell's curation turns this into a means of meditation – not one about judging the actions of others, but of seeing our habits and anxieties reflected back to us.
Should we give up this power, downgrade to bricks and wash our hands clean? No. But should we think more carefully about the place of these pseudo-angelic technologies in our lives? These images are a gift of encouragement to do just that, to lift our heads again, to find ourselves in moments, not external to them, and wonder how we might flourish within.
You can check out Harris' work on Instagram. There’s also a NY edition.
