Our Reclaim Your Workday Action Club started off with a bang!

Twenty people have committed to changing habits—for themselves, their team, or their whole company.

This week covered Chapter One: Focus and Attention…plus a hot seat question that felt painfully relatable: how do you break the habit of switchtasking when you work in a culture that expects you to respond immediately?

Club commitments included:

• Create a virtual office hour on Mon/Wed/Fri
• Put chat in DND w/ a status message during meetings and deep work
• Set up an automatic focus zone on the phone during work hours.

Ahas included:

• Learning about Work Offline mode in Outlook
• Needing to agree on what 'urgent' is within the team
• Testing changes as a pilot (better buy-in)

Last week, I spoke to over 1,000 accountants about elevating their focus and extinguishing their email. Thirteen years ago, I was all about getting to inbox zero. Not for everyone, not anymore. Spam and marketing emails have turned most inboxes into a carnival—and I’m not interested in anyone spending their best brainpower trying to “win” against spambots and emails they never asked for. (I get spam daily from people who desperately want to buy my business.)

Now, it’s about filters, rules, and managing the inbox so you don't miss what matters in all the chaos. It's about email triage, not spending time in your inbox working to get to zero—at the expense of the work you were hired to do.

If your team is drowning in email and distractions, I’m booking keynotes + trainings right now.

This problem is too expensive to tolerate.

I’ve also been volunteering a lot with emerging speakers. My Super Sexy Speaker Systems blog post was a Top Four of 2025 for the National Speakers Association, and my webinar last week on the same topic had one of the highest registration numbers for NSA! I led a Systems Action Lab for the NSA Central Florida Speakers Academy, and I’m mentoring 11 emerging speakers in NSA Carolinas.

Here’s the lesson I keep re-learning about systems: They don’t CONFINE you.

Systems free you up to focus on what lights you up—creating content, rehearsing, and SPEAKING (or whatever your jam is!)

One system that set our NSA chat on fire: Text Expanders.

A text expander turns a few letters into full paragraphs or templates with only a few keystrokes. Never type the same thing over and over again. I use Snippety, but there are plenty of choices. (Future podcast episode in the works!)

I walked with mentee and ghostwriter Emily Crookston—The Pocket PhD—to help her prioritize after attending a conference. You know that post-conference feeling: your brain is full, everything is a shiny object, and suddenly you have 47 new 'to-dos'. If that’s you, check out my episode Optimize Conferences: Pre-Event Strategies to Post-Event Follow-Up​

On a fun note: if you live in the Raleigh area, you must see the trolls at Dorothea Dix Park. Over 400 volunteers, three weeks of work, 2,200 volunteer hours, and 24 tons of reclaimed wood.

When you get this, I’ll be meeting one of my first RaderCo clients for a walkie-talkie & coffee—and prepping for a music-filled weekend with Kevin performing three times. March 6-7 is the International Global Day of Unplugging. Find a 24-hour period to unplug and focus on the people around you in real life. It doesn't have to be a digital detox; a digital downsize works too.

Focus on something real: meeting with people instead of viewing them on social media, watching a live sport instead of watching it on YouTube (better yet…play it). I’d love to see how you spend the 24 hours!

On with the Weekender!

One Thing You Can Do Now: Start standing when you present (Zoom or in-person). Your movements are more natural—and you command the space.

PERFORMANCE POWER TIP Episode 120: Presentation Skills for Professionals: Five Moves That Actually Land I break down five moves you can use to present effectively—right-sizing content, running Zoom/Teams, and making decisions like you’re in charge (because you are!). LISTEN (16 min) READ SUMMARY (2 min)

One Thing You Can Do Now: Leave your phone in another room or at least out of reach. Research consistently shows: if your phone is in sight, part of your brain is “on call” for the next buzz, so your focus takes a hit.

RADERCO-REWIND Episode 64: How to Focus at Work One from the vault worth a re-listen as one of our most downloaded episodes. If your focus feels “fine” until your day gets loud—this episode gives you practical ways to protect attention when you’re juggling real work, real people, and real interruptions. LiISTEN (14 min) READ SUMMARY (4 min)

​

P.S. Need a keynote or workshop that helps your people reclaim focus, reduce email chaos, and get real work done again? Hit reply with “SPEAKING” with your event date + audience size.