Companies that adopt a remote-first strategy will free up significant funds that would otherwise be allocated to fixed costs, such as office space and employee perks, while also increasing team productivity. There are mixed results, but approximately 90 percent of employers who responded to this Stanford University survey reported that their teams’ productivity remained about the same. […]
We are almost through January — it’s time for a refresh on the New Year’s Resolutions, or your February reset. How’s it going? Sunrise journaling, three-mile walk/run, inbox zero by 7 a.m. Start early; make the day happen. But then, you get the investor notes, a production hiccup, a sick kid. Routines don’t fail because […]
You know the drill. A 30-minute status call eats up 45 minutes of your focus: three people talk, seven listen, and the real work waits. Modern teams run faster on async, yet calendars still carry the scar tissue of old habits. The payoff here is simple: tune your calendar so status flows without standing meetings, […]
You open Slack and 47 red badges stare back. Your day is a tug-of-war between status pings and the focus time you need for work that actually moves the needle. Here is the good news. You can keep the benefits of real-time chat and still protect serious concentration. The playbook below shows how teams carve […]
If your Slack looks like a slot machine, constant pings and “got a sec?” messages, your handoff is broken. We felt that pain. Then we rebuilt our handoff to run in 10 minutes, start to finish. The result: DMs dropped, decisions sped up, and everyone knew what “done” meant. This playbook is the exact checklist […]
You don’t lose focus in one grand moment. You leak it in tiny drips: a peek at messages, a quick tab, a mental tab. The fix is just as small. Micro-habits are low-effort behaviors that stack up, giving you attention you can actually spend on meaningful work. In studying how busy operators build sustainable focus […]
You do not need another 30-minute status call that goes nowhere, with everyone on their phones. Most updates are better as artifacts than as airtime; get the info on a one-page sheet; use the same update format and place every time. When teams move routine communication to clear, lightweight async systems, calendars open up, and […]
You can feel it when hybrid starts wobbling. Slack gets noisy, calendars overheat, office days drift, and work slows down because no one is sure who owes or owns what by when. The fix is not more meetings. It is a compact set of guardrails that makes time, location, and attention predictable without turning your […]
You open your inbox and two hours vanish to “Sounds good” and “Can you clarify?” replies. The work isn’t the problem. The workflow is. Email ping-pong thrives on fuzzy ownership, missing context, and vague next steps. The fix isn’t another tool. It’s designing emails that trigger actions, decisions, or calendar events with as little back-and-forth […]
You do not beat burnout with a week off in July, and maybe that week off for the December holiday? You can also beat it in 45 to 90 minutes, which you’ll actually take this Thursday. Burnout is a capacity problem, not a character flaw. The fix is practical: design small, repeatable “recovery blocks” into […]
