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...
3 days ago • 1 min read
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:...
12 days ago • 1 min read
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...
19 days ago • 1 min read
The Sphere, a finished school in Ghana, and one last call for Action Club. We had an epic trip two weeks ago: Vegas with my mom, my brother, and my husband, and the whole point was the Backstreet Boys' 46th sold-out show at The Sphere. Bonus cool: It was a white-out and everyone attending wore white in honor of the 25th anniversary of their Millennium album. I'm not even going to try to describe what The Sphere actually feels like, because there's genuinely nothing to compare it to. I've been...
23 days ago • 4 min read
A few months ago, I watched ICE agents try to manage a TSA checkpoint they weren't authorized to run. The line didn't move because the line wasn't the problem. I see the same thing in organizations. We add bodies, create new Slack channels, schedule another check-in, and call it a solution. The actual source of the problem sits upstream, untouched, because addressing it is harder or uncomfortable.The difference between solving what's visible and solving what's real is the difference between...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Closing dance floors, invisible AI teams, and the last Action Club I'll ever run. The past two weeks were filled with so much fun and goodness. I went to Austin to spend four days at my favorite conference of the year, the National Speaker Association Influence Conference. Two keynotes that stood out were: My friend Ross Bernstein documenting one year of cancer treatments while maintaining his business Don Yeager, former associate editor of Sports Illustrated, on what makes high performers,...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
I've worked remotely since 2002. Led a team of up to 18 people globally, with no Zoom, no cameras on our laptops or phones, and managed to stay and feel connected. So yes...I've got some street cred ;) Here's what two decades of remote work actually taught me: you can optimize all you want, but you need to relentlessly prioritize first. Why it matters: Remote workers tend to work more hours than in-office peers, not because they're more productive, but because the transition doesn't exist....
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
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...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Reflections, Prioritization, and Planning At the end of each quarter, I do reflections: pull out my Powered Path Playbook pages, look at wins, lessons earned, smartest decisions, and start planning the next quarter. This round happened all over the place. Another round of Playbook Quarterly Reflections with Wendy! Wendy and I've been doing quarterly reflections together for about a decade. This time it was Yemeni coffee at Haraz Coffeehouse. My friend Lilly and I did an abbreviated version...
2 months ago • 3 min read