Two packed (and awesome) weeks over here...

I spent most of them rebuilding my speaking catalog from the ground up. I love burning things down to ashes and rebuilding. What started as a refresh turned into something bigger. I retired one topic entirely, moved another into a different home, and reworked all of them. Some had been Frankensteined together over the years. I wanted each one to have a clear outcome and reflect what I'm passionate about teaching now.

The bigger driver was making room for my new anchor keynote, The Right Things First: Why the Smartest People in the Room Still Choose Wrong, and its companion, The Right Things First: A Pocket Guide to Relentless Prioritization. I'm excited about how these landed, and new materials are coming. This weekend I get to debut a mini version at the NSA Influence Conference in Austin.

In between, I spoke for Morrisville Chamber of Commerce Life Sciences Unplugged at the Lenovo Executive Business Center on how to reclaim your workday.

One thing I keep coming back to in that session: relentless prioritization beats endless optimization. We reach for optimization first. We create inbox filters instead of unsubscribing from emails. We shorten meetings to 50 minutes without asking whether the meeting needs to happen at all, whether it could be async, whether fewer people need to be in the room, whether it even needs to exist.

July 16 was RaderCo's 13th birthday. I gave away the Kindle version of Reclaim Your Workday for free, and I sent voice messages to 13 people to tell them exactly what their support meant to this business.

On the 19th, Kevin and I celebrated 28 years of marriage. We have a tradition, on our anniversary and on New Year's Eve, of working through a couples' reflections template I built. It's normally a bonus inside the Powered Path Program, but in honor of the day and because it's a secret sauce in our marriage, I'm giving it to everyone.

Earlier this week I had lunch with my friend Ali Ingersoll, who wrote what I'm confident will be one of my top three books of the year: Unbreakable (ish). Ali is a quadriplegic. I learned a lot about healthcare and paralysis, but her life before any of that was already extraordinary: grew up on Cat Island, spearfished as a child, traveled to China alone as a teenager without speaking the language, did Outward Bound in Australia for fun, played games with Michael Jackson and jumped on trampolines at the Playboy Mansion (I can't make this stuff up). If you pick up one book this year, make it this one. The audio is especially good because Ali reads it herself.

When you get this, I'll be in the air, headed to Austin for the National Speakers Association Influence Conference. A thousand-plus speakers, great keynotes, ideas I won't see coming, and yes, closing down the dance floor in the evening.

On with the Weekender!

Better remote 1:1s start with better questions Remote employees are less likely to get promoted than in-office peers, and visibility is why.

Three questions I've used for over a decade: biggest win, lesson earned, and smartest decision. One thing you can do now: add one of these to your next one-on-one this week and see what surfaces. WATCH HERE (5 min)

Your workday back, one session at a time... Reclaim Your Workday Action Club is open for the fall. On Tuesdays (one Wednesday, September 9), 45 minutes each, August 25 through October 13.

Light on theory, and built around real coaching on your actual workday: a 10-minute lesson, 30 minutes of live Coaching Spotlights, and 5 minutes to commit to one change before you log off. $379 to join. Bringing a few people? The Team Pack is $299 each for groups of 3 to 5. Reply for details. GRAB YOUR SEAT

Heading to a conference?

Conferences can be overwhelming, especially when you're going home with pages of notes and no plan to act on them. Since I'm headed to Influence this weekend, I'm sharing one of my top episodes: 95 - Optimize Conferences: Pre-Event Strategies to Post-Event Follow-Up. LISTEN HERE

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P.S. The Right Things First: A Pocket Guide to Relentless Prioritization is coming. If you want to be one of the first to buy it for your team or company, hit reply and let me know.