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...

Think about a priority you keep restarting. A health habit. A relationship. A project that stays at the top of the list and never gets the time. There are three reasons it stalls, and they look identical from the outside. You don't know how. You don't have the room. You're not the one deciding. The Right Things First: A Pocket Guide to Relentless Prioritization is out today, along with the mini-keynote I recorded in Austin, which is the whole argument in 14 minutes. Why it matters:...

A client of mine broke her foot. Boot, crutches, six weeks, couldn't drive. Suddenly she had more room for her priorities than she'd had in years. She still couldn't get to them. She needed rides and help, and she waited on whoever had room in their week to give it. Someone else was running her schedule. That's an agency problem. Most prioritization advice treats every stall the same way, try harder, and that only fixes one of three. Why it matters: A priority doesn't rise unless something...