The PEP Post

I have a line I've been using for about a year, long enough that I've started to hear it come out of my mouth in conversations where nobody asked: rest is a play call. It sounds good. It fits on a card. And then in the middle of September I went quiet for a month — travelled, slept, stopped opening the laptop, stopped answering the kinds of emails that make you feel like you're behind on something — and found out whether I believed it, which is a different question entirely.

I should be accurate about one thing, because the easy version of this story isn't true. I didn't burn out. I know what that feels like — I did it more times than I can count across eight years at Tesla, enough to recognise the approach. What happened in September is that I saw it coming. The old tells arrived in their usual order: sleep went first, then the depressive thinking, then food turning on me and the fatigue that follows. Plus one I hadn't had before — tension headaches, with a strange burning along the top of my spine.

None of it was mysterious. I'd taken on more consulting hours and, at the same time, gone headfirst into building PEP Playbook™ — a sixteen-week season designed, from its first line, to prevent exactly what was now happening to me. Two months on the app itself. The years are in the journals and the paper playbooks behind it.

And here's the awkward, useful part: it worked. The consulting scope crept and the symptoms crept with it, and I held it together for months longer than I would have before, because I was running the thing I was building. Then it stopped being manageable — and the playbook had an answer for that too, which was to stop. So I stopped. And then I spent the first week of the month I'd called for myself braced for a bill.