SHAPE THE PROJECT

I captured everything because I was afraid to decide."
Seven jobs in seven years. A wedding shoot that paid $1,800 and cost a month. Five hundred thirty photographs nobody had decided to take, edited one frame at a time because no one had ever decided what done looked like. Corporate contracts at Nike, Apple, Williams Sonoma, and Bose, where the systems were broken in the same way the folder was: everything open, nothing closed, everyone busy.
SHAPE THE PROJECT is a memoir about the difference between ending things and closing them. A project can be delivered, paid, and archived and still sit open in you for years, because ending is a fact about files and closing is a fact about structure.
Told entirely from a dated personal archive, the book moves through four parts:
THE PROBLEM — one wedding, told from the record: the pricing philosophy with no price, the 530-photo folder, the "sad end" note written at 3:15 in the morning.
THE MACHINES — inside corporate open loops: the scramble as business model, tools that fed each other and closed nothing, contractors trained to be present instead of masterful, and the rare hardware jobs where done was simply visible — the button worked or it did not.
THE METHOD — what finally changed it: the six-week cycle from the book Shape Up, adapted for a solo creative worker; three rooms for three kinds of thinking; and a way to put AI to work on the routine so the person can do the choosing.
THE PRACTICE — the proof, kept: the same workflow, run against a twelve-day deadline, on this book.
Every quotation is from the archive, dated and source-anchored. Company names are real. The names of colleagues and private clients have been changed.
If you have a folder that will not close, this book is about why. And about the deciding.