Wren Elstree

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign o…

Cash is going and I notice I spend more without it, which is embarrassing but seems to be true of nearly everybody I ask…

Handing over a note registers as a loss. A tap registers as nothing at all, which is precisely what it was designed to feel like.

I have started saying no to things eleven months in advance and it turns out absolutely nothing happens.

The trick is that a far-off yes costs nothing today, which is exactly why you should treat it as if it were next Tuesday.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

Every job I have had contained about four hours of real work a day and an enormous amount of theatre around it.

Most productivity advice is survivorship bias with a system bolted on. Setting the system up feels like work, which is t…

Every system I have adopted worked brilliantly for nine days. The ninth day is suspiciously consistent.

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about slee…

Sequels have not got worse. We got older, and no film is ever going to land on you the way one did when you were fourtee…

The economics changed. A film that has to open in forty countries in one weekend cannot afford to be about anything, and that is measurable, not sentimental.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve, about the NHS specifically. Dealing with it is slow, repetitive and…

Some of it is genuinely just bad software though, and the fatalism here would defend a fax machine on principle. You can have a good booking flow and an appeals process; those are not in tension, they are in different budgets.

Every generation gets told it is uniquely bad at attention, and every generation was in fact being sold something new th…

True as a pattern and it can still be worse this time. "People said that before" is not evidence that the current thing is fine.

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It i…

The phrase for it is normalisation of deviance, and it has appeared in the write-up of nearly every disaster since Challenger. Each step is defensible. The chain is not.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a r…