In 2020 I co-founded a startup: quick design advice from a real architect, over chat. It never got big. But building it, and killing two ideas before it, taught me how I actually work. Here is what I kept.

I started by trying to organise a messy job search. I ended up building a system for deciding which opportunities were actually worth pursuing.

I turned the criteria I was already using in my head into a map. The surprise wasn't the score. It was seeing my own trade-offs before I became invested in the answer.

A role can look right on paper and still be wrong for you. I built a map around four things that need to hold at once: energy, evidence, market value and what you can actually sustain.