What a Design Day actually looks like...

Last week, I spent three days in a dome house in the mountains of Burnsville, North Carolina, with my friend Wendy.

I call this Design Days: No email, no meetings, just heads-down focus on one project. She was working on a keynote. I worked on my new book, The Right Things First: A Pocket Guide to Relentless Prioritization. It will literally fit in your pocket. It's with three beta readers right now, and I'll be launching it later this summer. More to come on that.

What's a Design Day? Out-of-office alerts are on (clients notified a week in advance), no meetings, no inbox. The deep work part of our brain needs at least 15 to 25 minutes just to get warmed up, and that's if nothing's about to interrupt it. RaderCo implemented these three times a year at Blueprint Medicines. Abdo, a full-service accounting firm, runs eight deep focus weeks a year. (Beat that.)

Wendy and I took a Hungryroot box with us, took turns fixing meals, and worked until about 5pm each day. In between writing sprints, I walked down the mountain and back. At night, we watched stand-up comedy to get our brains ready for the next day.

RaderCo Marketing Specialist Lisa and I are doing our Design Days at the lake in June to work through a new round of branding photos. Same concept, different setting.

Think about something coming up in the next quarter that deserves one full day of your undivided attention.

Block it. Tell everyone in advance.

Wednesday was my last day of Improv 1. If you feel you've lost your ability to be silly or creative, I recommend signing up for a class. Carol Dweck's research on growth mindset comes down to one thing: real confidence is your readiness to grow, not your résumé or your title. Signing up for something where you are genuinely bad at first is one of the fastest ways to prove that to yourself. If improv feels too far outside your comfort zone, that's exactly why you should do it.

When you get this, I'll be on my way to visit the wild horses on Shackleford Banks, walk on the beach, and drink more coffee than I should.

On with the Weekender!

Why Smart People Still Struggle to Focus at Work

Every ping triggers the involuntary part of your brain. Every ignored notification is a microdecision. Across 150 messages a day, that adds up to decision fatigue that affects your work, your willpower, and, yes, what you eat for dinner. One thing you can do now: Count how many devices are delivering your email. If it's more than two, remove one today. WATCH (8 min)

When Event Mode Becomes a Lifestyle Most remote leadership advice assumes your team is in one place and occasionally distributed. Meeting professionals have never worked that way. They're managing across venues, time zones, vendors, and stakeholders who all believe their issue is the most urgent one in the room. The problem isn't that a team works remotely. It's that urgency has no off switch. One thing you can do now: build a 30-minute cool-off rule for scope change requests before responding. Let the urgency settle. Then decide. READ HERE

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P.S. The book is real. The pocket is literal. If you're interested in joining the launch team, reply to get your spot.