Monday morning, January 12th. You're busy. Emails, meetings, tasks, deadlines. You finish one thing, immediately start the next. You feel productive—look at all this motion! End of the day, you're exhausted. End of the week, you look back: What actually changed? What actually improved? The uncomfortable truth: You've been confusing activity with progress. You've been moving fast in no particular direction. Here's what high performers understand: Momentum is not the same as velocity toward a goal. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop.

The Thesis

We treat momentum as inherently valuable. "Keep the ball rolling." "Don't break the streak." "Stay in motion." The underlying assumption: Moving is better than not moving. Activity beats stillness. Progress requires continuous forward motion.

This is wrong. Momentum is directionally agnostic. You can have tremendous momentum in the wrong direction. You can be incredibly busy accomplishing nothing important. You can maintain perfect velocity toward an outcome you don't actually want.

The controversial claim: Most people would accomplish more by doing less. Not working harder or moving faster, but stopping more often to check if they're moving toward anything that matters. The cult of momentum produces exhaustion without achievement, activity without impact, busy-ness that looks like productivity but generates no value.

The Momentum Trap

Momentum feels productive:

When you're in motion, you feel like you're making progress. Checking tasks off lists. Responding to emails. Attending meetings. Shipping features. The activity itself generates a sense of accomplishment.

This feeling is a lie. Activity and progress are orthogonal. You can have maximum activity with zero progress. Worse, activity often prevents progress by consuming the time and attention needed for actual strategic work.

Example domains:

Software development: The engineer who closes 50 small tickets feels productive. The engineer who spent a week refactoring a critical system has nothing to show in the ticket tracker. Who's making more progress? The second engineer—but momentum metrics reward the first.

Business: The startup that ships features constantly feels like it's moving fast. The startup that pauses to talk to users, understand the problem, and rebuild the core product looks slow. Which succeeds? Usually the second—but momentum culture punishes pausing.

Academia: The researcher who publishes frequently in mid-tier journals maintains momentum. The researcher who spends three years on a single hard problem looks unproductive. Who does better work? Often the second—but academic incentives reward publication velocity.

Personal life: The person who's always busy—gym, socializing, hobbies, side projects—feels accomplished. The person who spends Saturday doing nothing feels lazy. Who's more likely to burn out? Who's more likely to have clarity about what they actually want? Momentum culture says the first person is winning. Reality says otherwise.

What Momentum Actually Is

Momentum is inertia:

Once you're moving, you keep moving. This is useful if you're moving in the right direction. It's catastrophic if you're not.

The problem: Momentum makes it hard to change direction. The more velocity you have, the more energy required to turn. Organizations with high momentum can't pivot. People with packed schedules can't reprioritize. Projects with aggressive timelines can't change course when new information emerges.

This means: Momentum trades optionality for velocity. You move fast, but you lose the ability to steer. This is a good trade when you're confident in your direction. It's a terrible trade when you're not.

Momentum is local optimization:

You optimize for the thing you're measuring: tasks completed, emails answered, meetings attended, features shipped, miles run, books read.

But: Are these the right things? Are tasks the bottleneck, or is strategic clarity? Are features the problem, or is product-market fit? Are miles the goal, or is health? Are books the objective, or is understanding?

Local optimization without global strategy is just thrashing. You optimize subsystems while the overall system fails. You move fast while going nowhere.

Why We Optimize for Momentum

Momentum is measurable:

Tasks completed: Countable Strategic clarity: Not countable

Code shipped: Visible Technical debt reduced: Invisible

Meetings attended: On your calendar Deep thinking time: Looks like doing nothing

Organizations reward what they can measure. Momentum is measurable. Progress often isn't—at least not immediately. So people optimize for momentum and call it progress.

Momentum is legible:

The person who's always busy looks productive. The person who's thinking looks like they're doing nothing.

The team that ships constantly looks effective. The team that pauses to align on strategy looks slow.

Legibility bias again. Momentum is a legible signal of work. Progress is often illegible until much later. So momentum gets rewarded regardless of whether it produces progress.

Momentum avoids hard questions:

"What should I be working on?" is hard. "What's next on my list?" is easy.

"Is this the right direction?" is hard. "Am I moving fast enough?" is easy.

Momentum lets you avoid strategy. If you're always busy, you never have to ask if you're busy with the right things. The motion itself feels like justification.

This is comfortable. Strategic thinking is uncomfortable—you might realize you're wrong, you're wasting time, you're in the wrong job, you're pursuing the wrong goal. Momentum lets you avoid this discomfort. Just keep moving. Never stop long enough to question where you're going.

The Cost of Momentum Culture

You lose steering ability:

When your schedule is packed, you can't change direction. When your roadmap is aggressive, you can't pivot. When your backlog is full, you can't respond to new information.

Result: You execute the plan you made six months ago, regardless of whether it's still the right plan. Momentum prevents adaptation.

You mistake activity for impact:

Busy feels like productive. But busy is just an input. Impact is the output.

You can be incredibly busy with no impact:

  • Attending meetings that could be emails
  • Writing code for features nobody uses
  • Answering emails that don't matter
  • Optimizing processes that aren't bottlenecks

High momentum, zero impact. But it feels like work, so you keep doing it.

You lose strategic thinking time:

Strategy requires stillness. You need time to think, to observe, to integrate information. This looks like doing nothing. Momentum culture doesn't reward "doing nothing."

So strategic thinking gets crowded out. You're too busy executing to think about whether you're executing the right things. You optimize tactics while ignoring strategy.

Eventually, this catches up. You look back and realize you spent a year moving fast in the wrong direction. You executed flawlessly on the wrong plan. High momentum, terrible outcomes.

You burn out:

Constant motion is exhausting. There's no rest, no recovery, no space to breathe. You're always on, always moving, always producing.

This is unsustainable. Eventually you hit a wall. You can't maintain velocity indefinitely. The person optimizing for continuous momentum either burns out or learns to fake it (performative productivity while actually slowing down).

The Difference Between Momentum and Progress

Momentum is motion. Progress is motion toward a goal.

You can have momentum without progress (moving fast in the wrong direction). You can have progress without momentum (slow, deliberate movement toward the right goal).

The question isn't "Am I moving?" The question is "Am I moving toward something that matters?"

Example: Career decisions

Momentum approach:

  • Take every opportunity that comes up
  • Say yes to every project
  • Optimize for learning, growth, network
  • Keep moving, stay busy
  • Five years later: You've done a lot of things. You're not sure you're closer to what you want. You might not know what you want.

Progress approach:

  • Define what you're optimizing for (mastery, income, impact, autonomy, etc.)
  • Evaluate opportunities against that goal
  • Say no to things that don't move you toward it
  • Might look less busy, but you're moving with intention
  • Five years later: You've made real progress toward a clear goal. You know where you are and why.

Example: Product development

Momentum approach:

  • Ship features constantly
  • Maintain aggressive roadmap
  • High velocity, lots of activity
  • Looks productive
  • One year later: You shipped 50 features. Retention didn't improve. You still don't have product-market fit.

Progress approach:

  • Talk to users first
  • Understand the problem deeply
  • Might ship fewer features
  • Each feature is strategic
  • One year later: You shipped 10 features. Retention doubled. You found product-market fit.

Which team was more productive? Momentum metrics say the first. Reality says the second.

The Alternative: Strategic Stopping

The counterintuitive truth: Sometimes the fastest way to progress is to stop.

Stop executing. Stop moving. Stop being busy.

And ask: "Is this the right direction?"

This feels unproductive. It looks like doing nothing. But it's the most high-leverage thing you can do. One hour of strategic clarity can save hundreds of hours of execution in the wrong direction.

When to stop:

When you're not sure where you're going: If you can't articulate what success looks like, you're just wandering. Stop. Get clarity. Then move.

When new information suggests you're wrong: Don't ignore it because you have momentum. Stop. Reassess. Change direction if needed.

When you're exhausted: Pushing through exhaustion doesn't produce good work. It produces busy-work. Stop. Rest. Come back with clarity.

When everything feels urgent: If everything is urgent, nothing is actually urgent—you've lost prioritization. Stop. Identify what actually matters. Say no to the rest.

When you're executing someone else's plan: Maybe it was the right plan six months ago. Is it still right? Stop. Check. Make it your plan or change the plan.

How to Escape Momentum Culture

Audit your motion:

Write down everything you do for a week. For each activity, ask:

  • What is this accomplishing?
  • Does it move me toward a goal?
  • What goal?
  • Is that goal still the right goal?

You'll be shocked. Most people discover 40-60% of their activity is just momentum—continuation of things they started for reasons they no longer remember, toward goals they no longer endorse.

Practice strategic stopping:

Schedule time to do nothing. Literally nothing. No inputs, no tasks, no goals.

This feels uncomfortable. Do it anyway. Boredom is where insight lives. Stillness is where you notice you've been moving in the wrong direction.

Weekly: 30 minutes of nothing. Just sit. Think. No agenda. Monthly: Half a day. Go somewhere with no wifi. Walk, think, observe. Quarterly: A full day. Review the last three months. Is this working? Am I moving toward what matters?

Learn to say no:

Every yes is a no to something else. If you say yes to everything, you're saying no to strategy, rest, and intentional direction.

Practice: "That sounds interesting, but I'm currently focusing on X. If X changes, I'll reach out."

Protect unstructured time:

The best insights come from unstructured time. But momentum culture eliminates unstructured time. Every minute is scheduled, every gap is filled.

Resist this. Leave gaps. Protect empty space. This is where thinking happens, where direction changes, where progress begins.

Redefine productivity:

Stop measuring productivity as activity. Start measuring it as progress toward goals that matter.

Ask: "Did I get closer to something important?" Not: "Did I do a lot of things?"

This is harder to measure. Do it anyway. Impact beats activity.

Takeaways

Core insight: Momentum and progress are different. You can be incredibly busy while accomplishing nothing important. The person moving fastest is often the person least likely to reach their destination—they're too busy moving to check if they're going the right way.

What's actually true:

  1. Activity is not progress - Being busy doesn't mean you're moving toward anything that matters
  2. Momentum is directionally agnostic - You can have tremendous velocity in the wrong direction
  3. Stopping is often the highest-leverage action - One hour of strategic clarity beats a week of tactical execution on the wrong thing
  4. Momentum culture rewards motion over results - Organizations measure activity because progress is hard to measure, so people optimize for looking busy
  5. Strategic thinking requires stillness - You can't see where you're going if you never stop moving

What to do:

If you're constantly busy:

  • Audit your week: What percentage of your activity produces actual progress?
  • Ask: Am I moving fast, or am I moving toward something that matters?
  • Schedule deliberate stopping: Weekly reflection, monthly review, quarterly reset
  • Practice saying no to everything that doesn't move you toward your goals
  • If you don't have clear goals, stop everything until you do

If you manage others:

  • Stop rewarding activity, start rewarding outcomes
  • Create space for strategic thinking (don't fill every calendar gap)
  • Ask "Is this the right direction?" more often than "Are we moving fast enough?"
  • Reward people who stop bad projects, not just people who ship constantly
  • Measure progress toward goals, not tasks completed

If you're building something:

  • Define what success looks like before you start building
  • Build feedback loops that tell you if you're making progress (not just motion)
  • Schedule regular "should we pivot?" reviews
  • It's okay to move slowly if you're moving toward the right thing
  • Ship less, ship strategically

The uncomfortable reality:

Most of what you're doing doesn't matter. You're maintaining momentum because stopping feels unproductive, because momentum is culturally rewarded, because motion feels like progress.

But motion isn't progress. It's just motion. And motion without direction is just exhaustion with no destination.

The fastest way to your goal isn't to move faster. It's to stop long enough to make sure you're aimed at the goal. Then move deliberately. Less thrashing, more progress.

Optimize for direction, not velocity. You can always move faster once you know where you're going. But if you're going the wrong way, speed just makes the problem worse.

The hardest thing to do in momentum culture is to stop. Stop executing. Stop responding. Stop attending. Stop producing. Just stop.

And in that stillness, ask: "Where am I actually trying to go? Is what I'm doing getting me there?"

Most people never ask this. They stay in motion for years, even decades, toward destinations they don't actually want, executing plans they no longer endorse, because stopping feels like failure.

But stopping isn't failure. Stopping is the only way to check if you're succeeding at the wrong thing.

So stop. Even for a minute. Especially if you "don't have time" to stop—that's exactly when you need to.

Because if you're moving fast in the wrong direction, the best thing you can do is stop before you get there.

Today's Sketch

January 12, 2026