Here's a question worth considering: when was the last time you optimized something you should have just cut? Optimization is saving ten minutes in a meeting. Prioritization is asking whether the meeting needed to happen at all. In this episode, I walk through six places, work and personal, where the situation was optimizing something that should have been prioritized instead. Why it matters: Most productivity advice makes the wrong things faster instead of asking whether they should happen...

Dolly Parton, screen apnea, and the Meaningful 67. I've been binge-listening to Dolly Parton and doing something I almost never do, which is watching videos on YouTube. When I was four, I sang "Two Doors Down" to my grandparents to their 8-track. I still remember it clearly. Last year I listened to Dolly Parton's America, one of the best podcast series I've ever heard, and her Imagination Library stuck with me. This year Kevin built me my own Little Free Library. It has been such a joy. I...

When one person reads a book about prioritization, they get better at prioritizing. When a team reads it, they get a shared vocabulary for sharing guardrails. That's why the pocket guide is small. It's built to be handed out, carried, and pulled out in a meeting when someone needs a word for what's actually going wrong. Ability. The person you promoted who's drowning. They knew how to prioritize their own work, never a team's, and assuming that skill transfers is how strong technical people...