The 14th-century Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi wrote that the human being is a 'barzakh' — a threshold creature, existing at the intersection of two worlds simultaneously. He meant it metaphysically, but organizational psychologist Karl Weick observed something structurally similar in how high-reliability teams actually function: their best performers maintained what he called 'chronic unease,' a productive tension between the world as it is and the world as it could be, without collapsing into either complacency or anxiety. The insight these two thinkers share — separated by six centuries — is that clarity doesn't come from settling into one fixed state. It comes from learning to inhabit the in-between well. Practically: your most useful organizing and planning sessions probably happen not when you're deeply immersed in work, nor when you're fully resting, but in the liminal moments — the transition between tasks, the first ten minutes of morning before the day's noise arrives. Protect those thresholds. That's where good judgment actually forms.

What do you typically do with the two minutes between finishing one task and starting the next — and what might you be losing by filling that gap immediately?

Drawing from Sufi Mysticism combined with Organizational Psychology — Ibn Arabi (Fusus al-Hikam, c. 1230) and Karl Weick (Managing the Unexpected, 2001)