Planning is a productive-looking way to procrastinate. An afternoon, a document, and the feeling you worked on the quarter. Then you can execute a list you never examined. Why it matters: If you can't plan, you can't prioritize. If you're not prioritizing, you're planning the wrong things. There's a step before both. Reflect. Prioritize. Plan. In that order. One thing you can do now: Before you plan next quarter, answer one question about the last one. What did you keep saying yes to that...
12 days ago • 1 min read
Optimize or prioritize? | When everything feels urgent | Peyton Manning Last weekend was super fun and active. My brother came to visit, and we hiked about 10 miles, visited the trolls at Dorothea Dix Park, and saw Salt-N-Pepa, En Vogue, and TLC. I also showed him how to use Claude to improve his SEO, GEO, and AEO for his steel business. With Emily Crookston and Todd Rader at the Iconic concert. The setup matters more than the ask: Claude needs to understand your business before you ask it to...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Here's a question worth considering: when was the last time you optimized something you should have just cut? Optimization is saving ten minutes in a meeting. Prioritization is asking whether the meeting needed to happen at all. In this episode, I walk through six places, work and personal, where the situation was optimizing something that should have been prioritized instead. Why it matters: Most productivity advice makes the wrong things faster instead of asking whether they should happen...
26 days ago • 1 min read
Dolly Parton, screen apnea, and the Meaningful 67. I've been binge-listening to Dolly Parton and doing something I almost never do, which is watching videos on YouTube. When I was four, I sang "Two Doors Down" to my grandparents to their 8-track. I still remember it clearly. Last year I listened to Dolly Parton's America, one of the best podcast series I've ever heard, and her Imagination Library stuck with me. This year Kevin built me my own Little Free Library. It has been such a joy. I...
30 days ago • 3 min read
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...
about 1 month 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:...
about 1 month 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...
about 2 months 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...
about 2 months 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...
2 months ago • 1 min read