There is a week at the end of every summer when the light turns gold at four in the afternoon and the studio suddenly needs a sweater. That week is now.

I always make a list at this time of year. Not resolutions, just things I would like to learn before the days get short.

This year's list

• How to bind a book properly, with thread and not glue.
• The names of the trees on my street.
• Enough Italian to read the letters in that borrowed notebook.

What is on yours? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, usually on a Sunday, usually with a second coffee.

This letter now has a shape, and so does my Sunday. I wake up early, make coffee, and write for two forty-minute blocks. Then I read your replies, slowly, with a second coffee.

What surprised me is how much the writing has changed the rest of the week. I notice more, because I know I will need something to write about. Attention, it turns out, is a habit you can build by giving it somewhere to go.

Thank you for reading, and especially to those of you who write back. You are the reason this is a letter and not a broadcast.

My train was late last Tuesday, and my phone was dead. For forty minutes I had nothing to do but look at the platform.

By the time the train arrived I had sketched, in my head, the entire structure of a new typeface. Not because the platform was inspiring. It was very much not. But because nothing else was asking for my attention, my mind went looking for something to do.

We have engineered boredom out of our lives almost completely. I am starting to think we have engineered out a lot of good ideas along with it.

Two weeks ago I asked you to describe a good morning. Fourteen of you wrote back, and not one of the answers involved an app.

• Opening the window before turning on any light.
• Walking the long way to the bakery.
• Ten minutes of drawing before email, "no matter how bad the drawing."
• Reading one poem, only one, and not looking up who wrote it.
• Making the bed, "because it is the only thing I will definitely finish today."

What strikes me is how small these are. A good morning, it seems, is not a routine. It is one protected moment that belongs to you before the day starts asking for things.

The notebook is small, bound in green cloth, and full of alphabets. Some pages hold the same capital R drawn forty times, each one a little less clumsy than the last.

What moves me is not the good letters. It is the bad ones he kept. He never tore out a page. The mistakes stayed next to the corrections, so you can watch him learning in real time.

A practice worth stealing

I have started keeping my own failed drawings in a separate folder called "almost." It is already the most useful folder on my computer. When I get stuck, I do not look at my best work. I look at the almosts, and I can see exactly where I turned around.

For years I told myself I would start a newsletter "when I had something to say." It turns out that is the wrong way round. You find out what you have to say by writing it down, week after week, for someone in particular.

So this is a letter. It will arrive on Sunday mornings. It will be about attention, about craft, about the slow and often boring work of making things well. Sometimes it will be about type, because that is my job. Mostly it will be about the hours in between.

What to expect

• One letter a week, rarely longer than a cup of coffee.
• No growth hacks, no threads, no "ten tools that will change your life."
• Occasional drawings, often crooked.

If that sounds like your kind of Sunday, I am glad you are here.