The Cat Meows Every Day at 11am. That's a Feature, Not a Bug
Some constraints choose you. The best ones make you live sustainably.
It’s 11am. I’m deep in something: a feature, a thread, a rabbit hole that felt important 20 minutes ago and probably still does. Then I hear it. The cat is meowing.
Not because of an emergency. Not because anything is wrong. He just wants to eat, and he doesn’t care what I’m in the middle of. Every day, at the same time, it’s a non-negotiable.
Left to my own devices, I could keep going all day. I know this about myself. The AI-assisted coding sessions that stretch late into the evening, the Instagram scroll that somehow becomes 45 minutes, I can’t always naturally stop. I optimize for momentum and call it productivity.
The cat is the most physical one, but he’s not the only thing pulling me out of loops I wouldn’t leave on my own.
In Europe, Instagram gives you a choice: share your data for personalized ads and doom scroll forever, or share less and get a forced unskippable break every few minutes. It’s clearly designed to make the second option feel like a punishment. I picked it anyway.
The break was supposed to be the friction. Instead it became the thing that snaps me out of a 20-minute scroll I didn’t realize I was in.
Claude Code does something similar. When you’re in a momentum streak, executing on a task and then suddenly you hit that rate limit. Usage resets in 2 hours. It stops you cold. But that forced pause causes me to do something else rather than continue staring at a coding editor all day.
And twice a week, at 5:30pm, I have Portuguese class. In person. I close the laptop and walk out the door whether I feel like it or not. I’m late more than I’d like to admit. I’m always glad I went.
Sometimes the constraint isn’t an interruption, it’s losing something you didn’t realize had its grip on you. My Apple Watch broke about two weeks ago. I went to get it fixed and was told it would take a month because there are no official Apple stores in Portugal.
My first instinct was to just buy a new one, and I actually did. I ordered it the same day and then I cancelled it before it even arrived. I decided to try to wait it out.
And even when I got the alert that the fix was ready, I had a genuine moment of: do I even need it back?
Some constraints are just the reality of decisions I’ve made around how I’ve chosen to live and what I’m interested in.
I’m not in Barbados full time. Cari is built for micro-businesses there, the vendors and small operators running everything out of a notebook and a WhatsApp thread. Initially that distance felt insurmountable. But it’s started me down the road of recognizing I don’t need to do everything myself. That’s a longer story for another post but this combination of constraints drove me towards adapting a different approach.
The same thing happens when you’re building.
Cari runs on WhatsApp. One of the most natural ways for a vendor to log something quickly is a voice note, you record a few seconds and you’re done, move on. It should be an obvious feature but I don’t have it yet and I considered that a limitation I had to address.
But nobody has actually asked for it, at least not yet, so I focused instead on what they were actually asking for, like an ability to record not just expenses but sales to customers. I was treating a missing feature as a constraint when the real constraint was the story I was telling myself about it.
Each one of these triggered something. A pause, a redirect, a better question, a person I wouldn’t have found otherwise. None of them felt good at the moment, but I guess that’s kind of the point?
I used to think sustainability was about discipline. Building the willpower to stop, to step away. And maybe for some people it is. But I can’t always naturally stop and I’m starting to make peace with that.
What I’ve gotten better at is noticing which constraints are worth keeping, even when I could remove them. The Apple Watch is back on my wrist but it feels different now. I could change the Instagram setting. I could push through the rate limit with a different tool. These boundaries are quietly doing valuable work I’d miss if they were gone. They work with the person I naturally am.