The Fencer's Advance and the Myth of the Single Kill

There is a piece of received wisdom in our circles that has achieved the status of sacred text: find your One Big Thing, your killer app, your singular workflow, and your productivity problems will be solved. The promise is of a final, elegant victory. A checkmate. We are told to seek the one perfect sword stroke that will dispatch the foe of distraction and leave us standing, victorious, in a field of vanquished tasks.

This is, to borrow from my latest reading on historical combat, the myth of the single kill. In fencing, the most celebrated image is the lunge—the dramatic, full-extension thrust aimed straight at the opponent’s heart. It’s clean, it’s decisive, and it makes for excellent cinema. But any fencer of merit will tell you that a match is rarely won by a single, isolated action. It is a conversation of steel. A match is won through a series of small, incremental advances, probing touches, subtle parries, and controlled retreats. The victory is not in the final lunge, but in the hundred small preparations that made that lunge possible and successful.

When we apply the "single kill" philosophy to our work, we set ourselves up for a peculiar kind of despair. We spend days, weeks, even years searching for the perfect software, the ultimate morning routine, the flawless note-taking system. We believe that once we find this elusive key, the doors to effortless productivity will swing open. But this search is its own form of procrastination. It mistakes the tool for the craft, the weapon for the skill of the warrior. The work itself—the actual writing, coding, building—gets perpetually postponed in favor of preparing for the work.

The Discipline of the Half-Inch Advance

I have found more truth in the fencer’s advance than in the fencer’s lunge. The advance is not glamorous. It is a small, deliberate step forward, maintaining balance, staying engaged. It doesn’t win the match on its own, but without it, the lunge is impossible. It is the simple, repeatable unit of progress.

Applied to my own desk, this looks like forgoing the search for a perfect, all-encompassing project management suite in favor of a plain text file for today’s three most important tasks. It means accepting that my filing system is a living, slightly messy thing that I tidy as I go, rather than attempting a grand, weekend-consuming reorganization that will be obsolete in a month. It is the discipline of the half-inch advance: writing one paragraph, cleaning one shelf, making one phone call. It is the accumulation of这些小动作, not the quest for a silver bullet, that builds a body of work.

The pressure to find the One Big Thing creates a brittle workflow. When the chosen app is discontinued, or the guru’s method fails you on a bad day, the entire system collapses into crisis. But a practice built on small, consistent advances is resilient. If one tool fails, you replace it with another and continue your advance. The focus shifts from finding the perfect weapon to honing your own movement. The goal ceases to be a mythical, final victory over your to-do list and becomes, instead, the simple, satisfying act of moving forward, one grounded step at a time.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: