I shared the links below with her and thought I’d share them with you, too:

1. Share Your “Guide to Working with Me” - Early in the relationship, share your “Guide to Working with Me” so your teammates know how best to work with you sooner rather than later. It’s so much easier than waiting until they’ve pushed on one of your peeves.

2. Put the Recommendation Second - Say whether you want your teammates to lead with a recommendation or with a discussion of the problem. Don’t make them guess.

3. The COPP and DRIP Delegation Handshake - Agree on how work gets handed off and how it comes back. New directors will default to whatever their last boss expected unless you give them a shared handshake from day one.

4. Use Shortcodes to Increase Your Team’s Communication Speed and Clarity - Every team develops shortcodes. The question is whether they’re shared or idiosyncratic, and a reorg is when you get to choose.

5. Focus Blocks Are the Real Measure of Your Team’s Capacity - Leaders in transition are often stuck with old projects and responsibilities while they’re simultaneously creating new ones. Count focus blocks to make it a math problem rather than a character or competency problem.

My client’s context was a reorg, but you don’t need to be going through a reorg to implement these ideas and create better team habits. If you haven’t had these conversations in the last year, it’s probably time to have them again.

Premium subscribers: I’ve pulled all five into a clean, printable PDF for you and your team. It’s below.

New to my body of work on team-building and leadership? Continue the journey with the Team Habits Primer.

Go to the Team Habits Primer

October is the last full work month of the year. Once the holidays land, November gives most of us about three working weeks and December about two, so you and your team have closer to eight weeks of execution left in Q4, not twelve.

Pushing yourself or your team harder won’t make up the difference. What helps is sizing your commitments to the weeks you actually have and being honest about which projects are acceptable losses and which aren’t. When you focus on the work that matters most and let the rest go, the year can end with a few real wins rather than a long list of what didn’t get done. And when the holidays arrive, protect that time. Rest is a different way of being productive, not a distraction from it.

In the Q&A, we got into what it looks like to see the full picture before you commit, including:

• Spotting when one big initiative is really three active projects, and resourcing it that way

• Making the case to your manager when you’re carrying two jobs

• Moving people between base teams (steady operations) and expedition teams (new initiatives) without the move feeling like a loss of status

• Talking with the people a change affects before you design around their reaction

Join us for our next Leadership Strategy Session on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PST.

Premium subscribers can watch the full opening teaching and access all related resources shared during the call. 👇🏽

Read more

It’s definitely worth a read and she navigates a lot of the traps that articles and books like this can fall into. She also discusses the role AI plays in this, which made it fresh. This is an extension of her article, not a counterpoint.

That said, I’m unsure that she handled the decentralization of reading as much as I think it’s in play. Consider this morning’s reading: I bounced from Substack, to The Atlantic via Kindle Unlimited, to Libby, and through a few more articles I’d saved across different platforms. I’m unsure that any single “counting” source would be able to track that behavior in any coherent way, as it didn’t generate something tracked like an aggregate sale (BookScan) or something like the Nielsen ratings.

By virtue of my reading books, articles, and long-form blog posts — and being a writer — it’s clear that my reading and writing habits are outliers. I’m writing this at 2 p.m. and haven’t seen, let alone watched, a video of any kind yet, which is another sign that I’m an outlier. To be clear here, it’s not a matter of extreme willpower and focus as much as I’ve set up my digital ecosystem such that I have to go to see short-form content, as I can get sucked into it just as much as anyone else.

My quibble about decentralization and how I bounced around may not be generalizable for her broader thesis that there’s a cultural shift away from reading. Rogue philosophers are rarely a good sample for anything.

From here, I’ll build on some of the quotes from her article.

“When children watched an animated video of a story, they used the region associated with imagination about half as much as they did when looking at static illustrations while listening to an audio recording. Children also used their cerebellum–a part of the brain associated with learning–less when watching a video.”

There’s plenty of mounting evidence that the way we’re reading — or not reading — is leading to worse critical thinking skills. I hadn’t yet considered that imagination may be affected.

Given what else I was writing about this morning, we’re going to need even more imagination to address what’s here and coming in the next few decades. I feel much more optimistic about AI being able to help with critical thinking than I do about it helping us be more imaginative, so if imagination is in jeopardy over generational scales alongside critical thinking, I’m concerned we’re going to have even fewer adult humans able to imagine solutions to the problems humanity hasn’t yet faced.

Or, better stated, we’re going to have less distributed imagination, with more of it concentrated in magnet schools, supercampuses, and private think tanks that are often only available to folks who can afford not only to go to them, but to have the education and preparation to go to them. Divergent thinking and novel approaches to problems are unlikely to emerge from what amounts to an affluent monoculture.1

“Now that being a reader is optional, it can function as an identity marker. When you see someone on the train reading printed matter, it feels like a statement. Perhaps inevitably, such statements have become the stuff of online ridicule: Brandish a book too ostensibly in public, and you might find yourself accused of ‘performative reading.’ […] Today, reading is again clustered among a small minority of the population, but being a person of letters confers less status than it once did.” (Emphasis mine)

I believe the bolded statement is doing a lot more work than its brevity lets on. If there’s less social status accrued to being a reader and seemingly even fewer economic benefits to it, the main reason left for reading is the enjoyment of it. Between doing something cognitively harder and clicking on the next link or swiping, people are going to do the latter.

I also think this dovetails with trends writes about in “You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner.” The precipitous drop in inviting people over for dinner, cards, or parties also removes a lot of the default social gatherings that I think were part of the way books were omnipresent in our lives. Horowitch notes that “Netflix has reportedly told directors and screenwriters to assume the audience isn’t paying attention and to constantly remind viewers what’s going on.” If our personalized entertainment media tells us what’s going on, there’s less room for us to do anything but tell someone else what’s going on, and telling them spoils the discovery that makes it entertaining. Aside from the entertainment, there’s not much else to talk about with people who’ve not already seen it with you.

Up until the mid-2010s, I would get asked what I was reading multiple times a month. I may get asked once or twice a year now and don’t volunteer it that much anymore, either. It could also just be that the questions have switched from “what are you reading?” to “what do you think about [topic]?” More chilling to me is that I just realized today that I no longer maintain and curate a mental list of books to be able to answer questions about them.

I’m legitimately curious about your experience with this, at the same time that the fact that you’re reading this probably makes you a non-generalizable example, too.

“Presented with human and AI-produced text side-by-side, even M.F.A. candidates have been shown to prefer the work of machines.”

In 2024, ’s “People prefer A.I. art because people prefer bad art” added to the despair I was feeling about my writing aspirations. As much as people decry AI slop, research suggests that, en masse, it’s what’s preferred. If enough people prefer the words that a prompt could spit out, why bother with all the toil and effort it takes to do original work? At the time, prescriptive nonfiction — ostensibly the type of writing I do — seemed like it was going the way of horses.

My despair was somewhat worse because my work is part of what’s been used to train LLMs without my consent and so much of it is publicly and freely available. Depending on which platforms you use, your AI tool may be able to generate 75% of the essence of what I’d say. If you’re just looking for bullet points and action prompts, it may do it reasonably well.

In yet another connection, I think the sales drops among megasellers behind Tim Ferriss’s “Has AI Already Killed How-to Nonfiction?” amount to buying non-readers shifting their behaviors in favor of either not reading at all or getting their information from LLMs. “Buying non-readers” is exactly what it sounds like: people who bought books but never read them, at all or past the first three chapters. Much as I said above about trackable activities, “book purchases” were long assumed to be a proxy for “book reading,” but that was a house of cards the whole time.

Part of what made that despair so heavy was that the focus my health journey prompted and walking away from the acquisition had both pointed me back to writing more articles, short books, and other writing-forward projects. I’d come back with a focus at exactly the time AI and short-form video were making what I feel I’m best suited to do less viable.

It wasn’t until I came back around to embracing that I write for people who want to read and think, even if that requires a bit more work and a few more minutes, that I got out of that despair. But even then, it took me a few quarters.

It’s become ever clearer to me that the game is going to be decidedly different going forward. If reading is again clustered among a small minority, as Horowitch put it, then my job could be easier and more aligned with what I want to do. Instead of chasing a bunch of non-readers, I can just write to those of you who are already here.

“Books used to be an essential source of knowledge, memory, wisdom, and morality. They were written by older generations and passed down to the young in a vertical transmission of culture, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me. Now information moves horizontally, from young person to young person. This makes dynamic figures such as MrBeast and TheBurntPeanut the guardians of American culture. The decline of reading didn’t turn the world upside down. It turned the world sideways.” (Emphasis mine)

A few months ago, I was watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and had a pit in my stomach when I fully appreciated that reality TV shows like this were no longer derivatives of our culture, but instead, they were creating and reinforcing culture. More MrBeasts and drama starlets have crossed over into mainstream media than the Mark Robers of the world. We’re getting the culture our attention says we want.2

When I grew up, we knew The Real World wasn’t and Jerry Springer was over the top for entertainment purposes. Between then and now, the intermingling of social media and reality TV has started to create culture and, apparently, American presidents.

When you’re leading through a RIF, there will be days where everything feels impossible.

There’s a saying I come back to in times like these, often attributed to Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard: “You can do one impossible thing at a time.”

You’ll think you’ve accounted for every variable and then someone tells you their visa is at risk. Or they just bought a house. Or they’re about to go on parental leave. Or the person you most trusted has quietly turned against the plan.

You’ll think you’ve hit the emotional bottom, only to find the basement you’re sitting in has sub-basements. This is normal.

A RIF doesn’t unfold like a project plan. It slams forward in lurches, layers, and ambushes. You can’t outpace it and you can’t solve the whole thing at once.

What you can do is manage one impossible thing at a time. Focus on the next consequential conversation, the moment that requires your presence, or the decision that unlocks the next five. Lead from there.

Colin Powell has some old-school wisdom that helps, too: “It will look better in the morning.”

It might not feel better and it might not be completely solved. But you’ll have another day and another chance to face the next impossible thing.

That’s what this kind of leadership is: not the absence of difficulty, but the commitment to face it imperfectly and with purpose until it’s done.

1. “An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and beliefs.”

2. “The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual.”

3. “The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.”1

Harari calls these phenomena, but he’s just as comfortable calling them layers of reality, and that’s how I’m using the word here. When I say “reality,” I mean the reality we actually live in, the one all these layers build together.

So much of what matters and drives us is in that third layer. Meaning, money, status, politics, religion2 - all live in that realm. And as I wrote in How Much of Your Work is an Epicycle?, we will do a lot of work to make sure objective reality matches our inter-subjective beliefs, even when the data from objective reality doesn’t fit.

Over the last few years, I’ve been thinking that there’s a new layer of reality: algorithmic reality. As the name suggests, it’s the level of reality that’s generated by algorithms - machine learning, AI, search engines, and so on. Virtual and augmented reality are mostly algorithmic and are likely to be even more so in the future.

It’s none of the other layers. When algorithmic reality corresponds with objective reality, it’s because it’s been fed by humans. And while these algorithms can sometimes be more truthful about where we put our attention via what we click, search, and engage with, it’s not subjective reality.

Most of the information we get via smartphones, tablets, computers, TVs, and so on is mediated by algorithms. The more AI-native devices get, the more what we see is going to be algorithmic.

For instance, what you’re going to see when you search for something is likely different than what I’m going to see when I search for the same thing. The results are going to be tailored to what the algorithms predict will be useful or interesting to me. We’re training these devices to curate what we want to see, even if we’re not intending to do so.

You’ve no doubt experienced this if you’ve clicked on something out of curiosity and then ads and content about that thing shows up everywhere else you’re reading for weeks. You’ve also probably seen how your social media feeds all of a sudden show a lot more of that, too.

If this were just about getting annoying content for a few weeks, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But we know that manipulation of algorithmic reality has affected elections and affects how we see ourselves, our neighbors, and world. Especially given how much of algorithmic reality is based on outrage, shock and awe, and sound bites.

And that’s the point: subjective, inter-subjective, and algorithmic reality interact with each other. This is how we end up in echo chambers and the virtual version of gated communities. We only hear what we’ve trained the algorithms to feed us and we only interact with people like us. Even when we know we’ve curated our information and online social circles, it’s really easy to forget that what we’re seeing and who we’re interacting with is curated by algorithms.

And even if you go out of your way to get as much unmediated information and meet people outside of your social circles, most folks you talk to are still going to be influenced by their own or others’ algorithmic realities. Influential people and the media can redirect attention away from what they don’t want us to see and toward what they want us to, simply by changing the terms and/or giving us another chew toy for our attention.

The inescapability of algorithmically-mediated information and relationships is why I think it should be on the list alongside the other realities. Algorithmic reality is no less a part of the reality we live in than subjective and inter-subjective reality, but it’s also not those.

And the more people adopt AI into hourly work and lives, the more dominant algorithmic reality is going to become for how individuals understand the world. But that “understanding” isn’t going to be of the world; it’s going to be of unconsciously curated information and groups.

I don’t have a tidy resolution to provide here. For my part, for stuff that really matters to me, I try to use the very same technology that would otherwise narrow what I see to broaden it. I ask AI to steelman contrary positions and invalidate my beliefs. I try to read and learn about people with radically different beliefs than I do, at the same time that I need to be honest that there are a lot of viewpoints that I’ve had my fill of and am no longer willing to entertain, be charitable towards, or give any attention.

Therein lies the tension: I know that even as I go out of my way to diversify my information and groups, I’m still going to be navigating algorithmic reality. Absolute skepticism is too laborious to maintain, so I just have to accept that what I’m seeing is not only mediated by my feelings (subjective reality) and other people’s beliefs (inter-subjective reality), but by computers and algorithms, too.

And maybe there’s some grace and humility to find in that.

It’s really easy for an easy yes to a new commitment to blow up into a whole lot of work or overwhelm us. I’m going to repurpose the project pyramid from Start Finishing to illustrate what happens.

New commitments often come in at the turquoise-colored blocks or above. Covering for a teammate who’s out often comes in there, too.

But if you’re like most folks ‘round here, you’re already at or above the five projects of that size that you can carry well. Even if you can pause one of your active projects quickly, there’s still some transition work that is itself a project for a few weeks that’s happening at the same time you’re spinning up the new project.

This liminal period will be messy and you’re likely going to feel scattered and overloaded, especially if you didn’t anticipate this new project hitting your deck. You’ve taken on all the projects and tasks that live underneath that quarter-sized commitment. And handling all of that is going to spread all of your time blocks even thinner.

The mess and the feelings are temporary and much closer to a situation than a problem. Once you’ve worked through the projects of leaving yourself breadcrumbs and adjusting to the displacement - there will be displacement - you’ll have a period where you have footing again. And if you’re like most of us, you’ll get your footing just in time for another project to stride in.

There’s a natural tendency to cut back on restorative activities during these periods when, in reality, you’re likely going to need more restorative activities. Most of us would understand that if we increased our physical load, we’d need more fuel and rest to compensate for it. But most of us make our daily bread by emotional, cognitive, and relational labor, so taking on new quarter-sized and larger projects amounts to increasing those loads even more. In the same way that we’d need more rest and fuel for physical loads, we need the same for the loads of our work.

I know some readers are going to nod knowingly, then barge on ahead with #MaximumEffort anyway. I get that some folks really have to, as well. But you can’t expect yourself to perform as if you had the margin, fuel, rest, and clarity needed for the next leg.

You also can’t expect to get to all the things you had on deck before you said yes to the new commitment. That yes created its own new pyramid of work. It’s going to crowd out other things and you’re going to feel the weight of it for a bit. You can feel the sting of it, but that may just be the sting of residue that requires no further action.

A problem is something that must or needs to be solved. It’s usually manifest because it’s painful, annoying, disgusting, or dissonant.

A puzzle is something that could be or would be good to solve. It could be “good to solve” because you enjoy the process of solving it or because the outcome you’re looking for would be a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.

A situation is something that either doesn’t need to be solved or will resolve itself on its own. Situations sometimes look and feel like problems because the situation may not be what you want or need. You know you have a situation when it resolves with a true “It is what it is.” You may not like the is-ness of it, but the is-ness is not something to dwell upon. How you accept the is-ness is.

All of them rest on the same foundation: there’s a gap between the world and your vision, goals, needs, or wants. The difference is what to do about the gap.

If you’ve been in a coaching session with me or at one of our community events, you’ve probably heard me say something like “Okay, I hear about the situation. But I’m not sure I hear a problem yet.” Or “Oh, that’s a neat puzzle. Are you making it a problem?”

What happens next is the point: they stop and interrogate what’s really going on. Sometimes they can quickly point to something pressing or hot. Sometimes they see the issue is tied to a strategic or future-building item. And a lot of the time, they see that they don’t actually need to do anything.

The question is always useful because it makes them articulate what’s really going on. Thousands of reps over decades strengthened my ability to see the difference, at the same time that people have different contexts, values, and needs.

True problems and puzzles don’t resolve themselves. They persist until somebody does something to change them. When we make puzzles problems, we live in a place of continual artificial urgency. When we make problems puzzles, we’re ignoring the reality that something needs to change.

Not sure which you have? Ask what happens if you don’t solve it. If something real breaks or degrades, it’s a problem. If the honest answer is nothing, but it’d be nice, it’s a puzzle.

Whether situations create problems is contextual. If I don’t need to do anything outside and have nothing that’s going to be affected by getting wet, then rain is merely a situation. If I rode my motorcycle to meet someone and it unexpectedly started raining, that could be a problem. Or it could just be that I need to ride home in the rain, take a warm shower, change clothes, and avoid emotionally over-investing in the situation.

When we make situations into problems, we amplify the drama and crises in our lives. They’re going to resolve on their own timelines, regardless of what we do about them. But we humans would rather futilely try to change something to assert our control than surrender to reality or other people’s agency. Better to have a healthy shrug than an unhealthy and emotionally expensive urge to fix everything.

On the work front, the situation people most insist is a problem is how behind they are. It feels like a problem because their integrity or reputation seems to be on the line. But flip the scenario: if a valued colleague or friend were in the same spot, they’d apply a lot of grace and see that it’s simply that person’s turn on the fall-down ride.

On the personal front, it’s being sick, injured, or navigating a new diagnosis. Those situations often cause real physical problems. The problems people intensify, though, are around how they’ll be seen and how people will treat them.

The aforementioned shrug can also be a dodge. Sometimes we call a real problem a situation because “it is what it is” costs less than changing something. The tell is that situations resolve on their own timelines and relabeled problems keep coming back around, unsolved.

Truly understanding the difference between all three allows for better prioritization, more peace of mind, and better expectations for ourselves. It may mean letting some puzzles and situations slide off your deck so you can focus on real problems. Or it may reveal the opposite: a project list so full of problems that no puzzles ever get a focus block. Putting out fires all day and never getting to your puzzles gets old.

The next time something has your attention and you feel the urge to fix it, take a beat and evaluate whether you’re dealing with a problem, puzzle, or situation. Adjust accordingly.

I felt a stiffness in it that was unlike other posts that I’ve shared or was working on. Or maybe some strain. Or maybe a lack of spark. If you read it, you probably felt it, too.

At first I thought it may simply be the subject matter. But I actually love writing about teams, leadership, team dynamics, and so on. And I get excited talking to clients about team/org composition and I get excited when people get the difference between base and expedition teams and how it addresses some funk in their teaming.

What I couldn’t see all afternoon and evening was that the strain was coming from how the post got made, not from what it says. The post held up. The way I made it didn’t.

As I was falling asleep, I accepted the simpler answer: the problem was never in the post. By the time I started drafting it, I was tired, compressed, and frustrated.

Prior to drafting that one from scratch in the afternoon, which is already typically not my best writing time, I had worked on two other posts that I was much more excited by. Both of them ended up landing in my typical 1,000 +/- 200 word range.

And it was actually the fourth post I had worked on yesterday. I had edited another post earlier in the morning to add an attribution and that post would’ve been a good one to send yesterday, too. But it was also too long, landing in my typical word count range.

When I’m in a writing groove like I’ve been in for a while, it takes me 30-50 minutes to get to that typical word count. Since drafting doesn’t take me long, I can draft and ship in one focus block. Sometimes I can do it in 30-45 minutes.

Getting my natural drafts down to 300-500 words can take me hours and I usually feel like the posts are off. When I’ve done short writing sprints in the past, I always just assumed that my unsettledness was because I’m used to writing longer posts and that I’d get used to the short ones. And there was a part of me that’s always felt that if I was a better writer, I’d be able to land the shorter posts.

While the latter bit could be a lot of my own head trash, internet and editorial norms play a big part in it. In the mid-2010s, I wrote for fancy magazines that always pushed the 500-800 word limits, but really, the editors wanted shorter posts. Editors were much happier with a 500 word post than an 800 word post, so I’d take the extra hours to hone my work down to those limits, accepting that the slight dissonance I felt every time was just part of playing the game.

Eventually, I stopped playing because the effort and process were no longer worth it to me. I sometimes kick myself because had I just kept at it, I’d likely have a much larger platform now. But, who knows, there’s also a good chance that I would’ve sacrificed the joy of writing on the altar of success.

In fairness to the editors, it’s well known that shorter posts get read. Posts that are read get shared and commented on. Posts that are too long go into the “read later” bucket that no one actually gets to. The editors were doing their jobs and also trying to get my work read. (Thank you, long-suffering and under-appreciated editors!)

As I was thrashing, I posted on Substack Notes and responded:

The trade Carrie mentioned is the one that vexes me.

I think I was chewing on the post all night because I was thrashing about why I claimed that these TiP posts would be 300-500 words. Was it to make it easier on me or because it’s an easier ask of you? Why had I made myself the editor who would eventually make the writer bail?

The average reading rate is 238 words per minute. The difference in reading times between a 500 word post and a 1000 word post is about two minutes. The difference in writing time for me to get most of my ideas into that word count is many hours. And that’s assuming I actually don’t bail on editing or run out of energy.

As you now know from Learning to Live and Work with New Limits, I don’t have the energy I used to. A focus block or two of editing means I’m either going to burn myself out or I’m not likely to publish. Overworking drafts is already why I haven’t been publishing – I don’t need to replicate the pattern by another vector.

So, by the time I got to yesterday’s post, I was tired, compressed, and frustrated because I needed a couple of minutes. I didn’t need those minutes to work on the posts; I needed a couple extra minutes of your reading time.

As I drifted off, I thought about how many other places in my life I had ended up in dissonant or compromised places because I didn’t take an additional minute or two that someone would’ve gladly and graciously given to me. So many corners cut and apologies given, neither of which were needed.

My heart hurt a bit for me, but also for you. Because I know you’ve done the same and may be prone to do it in the future. (Caught you!)

Going forward, I’m going to take the additional minutes I need to make this fun, sustainable, and aligned for me. And if you need a few extra minutes from me to do the same for your efforts, please take them.

In case you’re wondering, yes, I am laughing at myself because it’s not like you come to me for short posts and it’s nowhere close to on-brand for me. When will I learn to stop trying to be something no one expects or is asking me to be? Apparently TiP can mean Thrashing in Public as much as Thinking in Public.

p.s. I reread the post with fresh eyes. It’s good enough and I’m glad I got it out on its own merits. That the process of getting it out catalyzed this post so early is a wonderful bonus.

October has arrived, and with it, overwhelm. If I’m honest, I hit overwhelm a while back but kept pushing myself, thinking I could just get x thing done, or past y deadline, and all would right itself again. You can guess how well that wishful thinking went.

And I know all too well that feeling overwhelmed is a direct result of being overloaded. Or perhaps a more appropriate word for this time of year: overcommitted. Little by little, month by month, I’ve accumulated my fair share of commitment debt, and with only three months left in the year, it feels like that debt needs to be reduced or paid. Debt coming from:

All the things I had planned for 2026. A past version of me was perhaps overly optimistic, considering the best-case scenario, and didn’t account for the project pileup that inevitably happened when that best-case scenario didn’t pan out.

And also all the things I “planned” (intended) to do in 2026. Things that never quite made it to project status because there was no actual plan in place.

And then there were the things that showed up unexpectedly. The opportunities, events, projects, and tasks that only added weight to what I was already carrying. Along with the new ideas and possibilities the unexpected tends to bring along.

Let’s not forget those back-burner projects. The ones that have been left sitting, waiting for better timing, resources, or someone else to be available. And now, with three months left in the year, every damn pot seems to be boiling over all at the same time.

And of course, there are always those things that take up my time, energy, and attention but somehow never make it onto the project list. Like getting sick, traveling, navigating a big change, or tending to relationships.

Commitment debt can show up at any time, but in October it seems to be particularly painful. We’re just far enough from the end of the year to feel like there’s still time to make good on it, but seasoned enough to know November and December will compress the timeline. It’s time to make some hard choices. Otherwise, reality will make them for us.

~ Maghan

Resources to Help You Clear the Way for What Matters

If you're feeling the weight of your own commitment debt, join me. Here's where I'm starting, along with a few resources to help along the way.

1. Get real about what you are carrying.

   For when you need to sort out all your projects:

2. Determine your acceptable and unacceptable losses.

   For when you need to scale back so you can focus on what matters most:

   For when letting go needs to be a team habit, not a one-time fix:

3. Give yourself (and your team) permission to let go.

   For when you need to make peace with the tough choices that come with letting go:

   For when you or your team needs your permission to let go:

4. Pay down the debt.

   For when you need to stop fiddling and call it good enough:

   For when it's time to get the work that made the cut done:

Join Us for Our October Events

Mark your calendars for our September events, open to our paid subscribers:

• Leadership Strategy Session (LSS): Wednesday, October 7, 2026, at 11:00 am PDT
  October’s Focus: October is the last full month to shape how your team finishes the year. That means deciding not just what moves forward, but what doesn't. We'll look at how to lead a strategic withdrawal, so the work that matters most isn't competing with everything else for your team's time, energy, and attention.

• Monthly Momentum Call (MMC): Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 11:00 am PDT
  October’s Focus: With the end of the year in sight, the pull is to fit it all in. But if you don't decide in October what you'll drop, defer, or downsize, November will decide for you. We'll look at how to make those calls so your best work gets the room it needs.

October Momentum Planners

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Base teams work in the known, the predictable, and the routine. Their job is to create or manage a predictable outcome, process, or spec. If they do that, they’re successful.

Expedition teams work in VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) arenas. Even when they know where they’re going, they’re not sure what they’re going to find there. And they sometimes don’t even know how to translate or transport what they find back to base. Learning and discovery tend to be the win conditions for expedition teams.

Just as there are different teams, there are different players. Some folks are base team players. Give them the checklists, spreadsheets, and routines all day and they’re happy.

Expedition team players want to live on the edge. That’s where the thrills and discoveries are. That they may not pull off whatever they’re trying to do is a feature, not a bug.

Some people can toggle between the two, but they’re rarer because they have to be able to switch from solving for VUCA to embracing VUCA.

As I said in Team Habits, team dysfunction (or high function) can often come down to team composition.

A team that needs to be an expedition team that’s stacked with base team players is going to struggle. The team will spend so much time getting ready and trying to factor in all the unknowns that they’ll eat up too much of their expedition and implementation time. And the few expedition team players will be so frustrated at having to pull the base team players along that they’ll be worn out before they actually get anywhere.

A team that needs to be a base team that’s stacked with expedition team players is also going to struggle. The team will always be trying to go somewhere new, flashy, and sexy rather than sticking to the knitting. The few base team players will have to follow the expedition team players around with their checklists and procedures and spend so much time cleaning up messes that they’ll just wish they could do it on their own.

One kind of team— and one kind of player— isn’t inherently better than the other. The goal or outcome to achieve determines the kind of team you need, and the kind of team needed determines what players are needed on that team.

In late 2024, as part of finally going to the Veterans Administration (VA) for some service-related issues I’ve been dealing with since my deployment in the mid-2000s, I discovered that I had all but one of the markers for fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. I knew I had PTSD, hypervigilance, IBS, hip/spinal issues, hearing loss, and tinnitus, but the markers were new information to me.

It also explained a lot of the aches, pains, wipeouts, and doctor visits over the last couple of decades. I had already figured out what activities I could and couldn’t do, but I didn’t know why.

The particular way fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue show up for me creates a challenging balance: I need to work out and move a lot or I’m in pain, but if I work out too much, I can have a fatigue wipeout. I’d gotten used to working in level 4 – 7 pain - that was my normal - but fatigue makes it hard for me to do anything, including everyday tasks and working out.

You read that correctly: if I’m not active enough, I’m in pain. If I’m too active, I can get crippling fatigue and can’t be active.

The can there is important. I’m still figuring out what combination of activities I can do that lead to fatigue and which don’t. And what duration for each activity is recovering, strengthening, and/or fatiguing.

Aside from physical activity, the other major pain and fatigue trigger is stress. I’ve learned that it’s not just distress, but eustress, too. For me, though, a lot of the activities that create eustress tend to be much more moderate and include activity, nature, music, and other elements that calm my nervous system.

Prior to learning that I had fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, it didn’t feel like there was much I could do to be out of pain and have high energy. That’s why I had just accepted the daily pain as my reality and the fatigue as a ride-along to the pain or a random “I overdid” it occurrence.

Pain is a hell of a motivator. Or, better stated, it’s a hell of a motivator when you know you can avoid or lessen it.

So I ended up with the simple goals of increasing movement, decreasing stress, and accepting that I could no longer work a “normal” schedule, let alone the hours I’d built my life and career on. What were previously productivity experiments became health imperatives.

At the top level, it was a simple math problem. But at the root level - at least in the beginning - it was an identity problem. I’ve never been able to succeed by being good enough. I had to be better to get a chance to play and to stay in the game, at least in the creative class I work in and with. I still feel this way, though with less underdog energy.

And one of the ways I’ve been better is to outwork folks and be more consistent over time. I’m rarely the smartest, richest, best connected, or most accomplished person in the room, though I’m often among the most balanced across some of those.

I can’t outwork folks in the short time slices that online careers live in. I can’t be everywhere. It’s not simply that I don’t want to - I can’t anymore. I also don’t want to.

Competitive dynamics aside, I can’t do as much as I want to do and am used to being able to do. I know this is normal as we age, but I have the normal aging decline plus this pain/fatigue condition.

The easiest way for me to adjust to these new conditions has been to think of it like a 20-lb rucksack that I can’t take off. I’ve had to do everything most folks have to do with this 20-lb rucksack and I’ll have to keep carrying it with me. Everything is harder, but with pacing, patience, and making better commitments, I can still get on down the road.

So, yes, it’s going to be one of my five projects. But now I know it’s a project and can quit pretending like it’ll go away.

I got my disability rating in late 2024. Officially being a disabled veteran is a whole other identity reckoning that I’m still working through on a lot of levels. That said, I’m really grateful to have the medical treatment, bodywork, and meds that are helping me manage pain and my nervous system (mostly) covered by the VA rather than spending nearly a grand a month for care.

As part of that care, I started taking Duloxetine in October 2025 and it’s been a godsend for pain, fatigue, and nervous system regulation, at the same time that it’s had other effects on my focus. After a year of taking it, I think I’ve figured out the focus/attention cycles and the support structures I need. Gone are the days of just getting up and cranking, as it’s now a whole two-hour uptake process.

On the work front, the diagnosis and walking away from nearly being acquired in 2024 has led to a deep reckoning about what matters to me, what I no longer can do, and what I no longer want to do. I took the fears and pre-grieving from both as signals for what I really cared about. I’m better at adding the full energetic costs of activities when I’m considering whether to do them or keep doing them. My ideas and goals have a harder time getting a Yes enough to get turned into a project.

What became ever clearer to me is that writing and advising were my unacceptable losses. It’s taken me a few years to get those recentered and you’re reading this on the other side of the void I’ve been in.

I’ll likely share more details about the changes I’ve made and where things may be headed as we go along, but this health journey has been both a catalyst and foundation for so much of my thinking and reconsiderations. It’s not something I want to be defined by, but it’s also not something that I can or want to ignore.

Decision memos to bosses and boards typically follow a standard format: Issue, Discussion, Recommendation. IDR is solid, and it’s the house style of staff colleges, law schools, and policy programs. I teach my clients to reorder it.

Issue, Recommendation, Discussion.

Here’s why. In practice, the recommendation gets buried under seven or eight pages of discussion. Decision-makers take forever to find what’s being asked of them, and discussion-first invites them into the weeds of the decision before they need to be there, debating details instead of championing or approving the broad thrust.

The components carry their own disciplines:

Issue. Statable in two or three sentences. If you can’t state it that tightly, one of three things is wrong: you don’t understand the issue well enough, you’re writing at too low an altitude, or you don’t understand what your decision-makers need to see to decide.

Recommendation. What to do. It goes second.

Discussion. One to two pages, prose or a bulleted summary. Same discipline as the issue: what the decision-makers need to know and no more.

When I teach this, the pushback comes fast: “Don’t I need to build my case first? Isn’t leading with the recommendation abrupt?”

No. A well-written issue and recommendation do much of the case-building on their own, because together they tell your decider what you were considering and optimizing for. The issue opens a gap. The recommendation closes it. The discussion shows how it was closed.

A tight recommendation does something else, too: it shows your decision-makers what blind spots you may have missed, and it lets them introduce parameters you weren’t considering. They can often do that without reading the discussion at all. If you spot trends in what they add, you’ll know what to seed your next recommendations with.

Worried that leading with your recommendation anchors your deciders into rubber-stamping it? It tends to run the other way: a recommendation they can see is one they can push on. The buried recommendation is the one that slides through unexamined.

Consider what burying the recommendation actually costs. Your decision-makers have to wade through pages to find what you’re asking of them, so the memo goes into the “print out and deep thinking” space people pretend they have in their schedules. The response, when it finally comes, is often some version of “So, what are you asking me for?”

The advanced version of the mistake inverts. People who’ve learned to lead with the recommendation sometimes skip the issue, and the recommendation floats unanchored. That response sounds like “Okay, it took me a while to figure out what we were talking about and why it mattered.” Both mistakes produce the same outcome: slower decisions.

Leaders often get queasy about IRD. It can feel presumptuous, as if you’re telling your decision-makers what to decide before you’ve earned the right to. Burying the recommendation is that queasiness expressing itself structurally: discussion-first is an attempt to earn trust on paper. The memo was never going to be the instrument that builds the trust case, though. Operate as if you already have the trust of the people you’re writing to.

If you’re unsure whether your decision-makers would prefer the recommendation or discussion up front, ask them what they’d rather receive. In my experience, the answer is the recommendation up front, every time, because decision-makers look for the ask first and then calibrate how deeply to engage based on the scale of the ask. If your organization mandates a memo template, the reorder still works: put the recommendation in the cover note or executive summary and let the template be the template.

This also explains why IDR remains the standard in large, impersonal organizations: IDR doesn’t rely on trust. The facts and the case are what they are, whoever wrote the memo. If you’re writing to people who know you, though, discussion-first leaves that relationship unused.

The format also works in the other direction. Founders and executives writing to their teams can run the same structure with one change: the R becomes Resolution rather than Recommendation. A recommendation asks someone above you to decide; a resolution tells the people you lead what you’ve decided, and the discussion still shows your work at the altitude they need it.1

How is this different from BLUF-ing your memo? Depending on how you write the BLUF, it may be the same thing — a three-sentence BLUF can carry all the relevant information. Typically, though, trying to do that stuffs the BLUF full of discussion items your reader doesn’t need yet. IRD keeps the layers separate so each can do its job.

You already have their trust, or you wouldn’t be the one writing the memo. Write like it.

New to my teaming work? Keep going with the Team Habits Primer.

Here’s the summary:

Shorter, daily-ish posts where I think out loud about whatever I’m chewing on. More unfiltered and unpolished, likely including more shop talk and personal wonderings alongside core themes.

I could list a lot of audience-facing and strategic reasons why I’m doing this, but they all cut against doing it equally well. The main reason I want to do it is because I’m creatively constipated after a few years of thrashing, making publishing harder than it needs to be, and behind-the-scenes stuff that I’ll likely talk about in pieces going forward.

If you’ve been on one of our community events, you’ve probably heard me say “Your cage; your key.” I’m eating my own cooking here.

As the summary suggests, TiP posts will span more than what I’ve made “core” areas. They’ll also be more fragments and snippets I pick up throughout the days.

Some writers are using social media, including Substack Notes, for similar kinds of efforts. That feels backwards to me, as you’ve already signed up and, like me, the last thing you’re probably wanting is Yet Another Social Media place to be. TiP posts will be hitting your Inbox.

By short, I mean they may be 300-500 words. TiP is doing some work for me that Twitter used to do; I hope it does the same “quick idea discovery” work that social media does for some.

Because Substack makes it awkward to add people to sections, I accidentally added everyone to the new section. I decided to accept the “mistake” as probably closer to what makes sense. If you’d rather not get short posts, it’s easy enough to unsubscribe from this section, Thinking in Public, and get whatever else you were already getting.

As exciting as it is to kick the shackles off, I’m going to give this a six-month evaluation period. I know I’ll be excited the first few weeks. I also know that I’ll feel the displacement consequences four to six weeks from now. Six months is a long enough new project cocoon.

My ask: hit the “love” button or comment if you’re liking the new content. It’ll be fuel for when my excitement wanes and will amplify my own excitement and curiosity.

And if you don’t want to get TiP content, please unsubscribe from the section. I won’t be looking much and will be focusing on who this is for - me and people who dig it. You won’t hurt my feelings and I’d rather not increase the noise in your Inbox.

You can tell it’s a TiP post because you’ll see “Charlie Gilkey (TiP)” as the sender. And unsubscribing is as easy as hitting unsubscribe in the footer of your email, then turning the toggle off for Thinking in Public. See the pic below.

That’s it for today. See you tomorrow with whatever I’m thinking about enough to share.

Post-publish edit: I’m going to create a muse board with folks who reply or email me, which will help me center who I’m writing to. and are already added, as are others who’ve emailed me.

We hope you’ll join us for our next Monthly Momentum Call on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Session Highlights

What came up in this month's conversation1.

Flow comes from conditions you set up, not from open time.

• Focus. It takes energy and attention as well as time. A clear afternoon with nothing left in the tank won’t get you into flow.

• Challenge that matches your skill. Too easy and you’re bored. Too hard and you’re anxious. Aim for work that stretches you without feeling impossible.

• Clear goals and feedback. A goal you never test against the world is a wish. Perfectionism gets in the way here because it keeps you from shipping, and without shipping you get no feedback.

• Self-trust. Trust the skills you have, or your ability to figure it out. IABCD (intention, awareness, boundaries, courage, discipline) is the toolkit for building it.

Verb the noun.

Intention, awareness, boundaries, courage, and discipline are nouns, and nouns just sit there. Ask what you’ll do to create each one. The same goes for identity. If you want to be a writer, write. If you want to be a leader, lead.

When the tools aren’t working, look for loss of backing.

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

loss of backing

n. An abrupt collapse of trust in yourself—having abandoned a resolution, surrendered to your demons, or squandered an opportunity you swore you’d take seriously this time—which resets your expectations and makes it that much harder to guarantee that your word is worth anything, even to yourself.

If you keep reaching for a new system, an accountability partner, or the one person who’ll fix everything, loss of backing is often what’s really going on. You rebuild that trust by shipping. You don’t have to start with the big annual goals. Start with your week and prove to yourself that you can ship, week after week. Once that feels steady, move to the month, then the quarter.

Pick a Goldilocks goal.

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When was the last time you were in flow? Likely, you know what I mean by that question, but if asked, could you define flow?

Ask 100 people, and you’ll likely hear 100 interpretations. But I’d bet that most would include something about time, specifically losing track of it.

Yet flow cannot be found in time.

Because flow cannot tell time. It reads no clocks. It doesn’t keep a calendar. It doesn’t care about the day of the week. It doesn’t magically show up on January 1st, the start of the month, or on Monday morning.

In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 1990 seminal work on the subject, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he defines it as:

The state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

His definition includes the concepts of enjoyment, immersion, and interestingly, effort, but not time. Csikszentmihalyi does get into time in relation to flow, but less as a defining characteristic and more on how flow exists outside of its normal conventions.

The safest generalization to make about this phenomenon is to say that during the flow experience, the sense of time bears little relation to the passage of time as measured by the absolute convention of the clock.

Because time is an absolute, while flow is a feeling. And feelings can have varying degrees of intensity that do not fit within the finite confines of time.

Csikszentmihalyi didn’t spend decades researching time, or what one can do with it; he spent them studying one particular feeling: enjoyment.

A Study of Joy in Action

Flow is often associated with the movement of water. In fact, the term comes from how many in Csikszentmihalyi’s study referred to their state of enjoyment: “It was like I was floating,” and “I was carried away by flow.”

And they themselves were in motion of some sort. They were describing feelings reached while engaged in physical or mental activities that brought them to this blissful state.

Yes, it is possible to find joy in quiet moments where you are simply an observer, a passive participant. In watching a beautiful sunset or hearing a baby’s laughter. But what Csikszentmihalyi was studying was joy in action. In how we are capable of bringing that sense of joy to life through the activities we engage in.

Okay, there’s a little more to it than just the activities.

My Joy and Your Joy Are Not the Same (and That’s Okay)

Over more than two decades, Csikszentmihalyi studied hundreds of individuals engaged in all types of activities. He interviewed rock climbers, factory and clerical workers, doctors, writers, artists, musicians, and chess players. He studied people in all types of occupations, participating in different hobbies, playing different roles.

There were similarities in how they described their flow experience even though the activities themselves were very different. A doctor and rock climber might share the experience of being in flow, but unless both have a medical degree and enjoy scaling mountains, they likely wouldn’t find flow in both activities.

And if, like me, you are neither a doctor nor a rock climber (and the thought of blood, whether as a part of your day-to-day occupation or an occupational hazard, makes you queasy), you’ll be happy to know you can find your own way into flow.

Depending on how you look at it, that can be good news or bad news. Good news in that it is possible for all of us, but bad news in that there is no foolproof formula to achieve it.

…a joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.

But maybe that in itself is good news, because if everyone could find it in the exact same way, in the exact same activity, then wouldn’t it cease to be enjoyable?

So back to the question I asked at the start. When was the last time you found yourself in flow?

Now that you know what flow is, and even more importantly what it isn’t, it’s time to look at how to find your way back to that feeling. That’s what we’ll get to in the next part of this series.

“On a full day, when everything lines up, when he [1] has no obligations and nowhere to be, he gets about two hours of real writing done.” — , from his interview with Steven Pressfield

I originally read that quote as a restack, commented on it, and moved on. When I later read Rain's full post, I almost pulled this one because he canvassed the same ground, but we're going in different directions, so I'm posting it later anyway.

So many people keep putting their best work off because there’s a big gap between the amount of time they have and the amount of time they think they need. If only they had the time of a real [Insert Blank Here].

If only I had the life and time of a real writer.

If only I had the life and time of a real musician.

If only I had the life and time of a real executive or leader.

I work with or am friends with enough people who are that real version to know that they/we don’t have the time people think we do. Get successful enough at any craft or career and your time gets eaten up about the same, if you let it. And even if you don’t let it, it still gets nibbled away.

In most instances, it’s not that successful practitioners have big blocks of free time, but that they instead have smaller blocks of time that they put consistently towards certain projects. This is where the “3 focus blocks per project per week” guideline came from in Start Finishing: with that many, you can move about any significant project forward in a smaller amount of time than most people think.

Going back to Pressfield’s quote, notice that it says “when everything lines up,” not “do this every day to turn pro,” which is what I suspect many creators who’ve read his work imagine Pressfield would say. Pressfield tends to be direct and succinct, so if it was indeed “I show up to write every day,” he would’ve said that.

Let’s get real: believing that the real people doing the work have much more time than we do gives us all a convenient excuse to avoid doing the work. There’s nothing particularly mysterious or inaccessible about carving out, say, three writing blocks a week or 20-minute writing sessions every day.

As I wrote in the preface of ’s great From Big Idea to Book:

The true mystery and gift are how mundane the magic of writing is. Minutes of writing sentences, applied over time, become drafts of manuscripts. Quick emails to friends become conversations that unlock new pathways or epiphanies. Many small edits transform okay sentences into the micro-masterpieces that you’ll be proud of for a lifetime.

What’s true of writing is true of a lot of activities, including leadership and teaming well. Minutes over time add up.

Energy and Attention Are the Critical Components of a Focus Block

A common trip-up people have about focus blocks or admissions like Pressfield’s is to think that the open time in their schedule is automatically available for deep work. This is especially true of open times during the workday.

But the more critical components of focus blocks aren’t the time component. Energy and attention actually do more governing of whether it’s a focus block than time does.

The Two-Hour Rule still holds: two hours is the right size for a unit of creative work. But it’s a planning unit, and a planning unit needs to be put into a focus block. The clock can’t do that part — energy and attention do.

If you are your aging mother’s primary caregiver and she just fell, even if you’re just sitting at the hospital with two open hours and have the wherewithal for a focus block, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to do anything other than be there and use your energy and attention to take care of your mom and navigate the medical system.

If you’re having to switch to a new medication that’s messing with your cognition, energy, or hormones, that two-hour block of time you’ve labeled a focus block may not actually be a focus block.

If you’re worried about money, grieving, sick, or going through a divorce, you may be able to sit there for two hours, but your mind and heart are anchored to other things that likely matter more to you.

I can hear a lot of your head trash about how all of the above are just excuses and/or the Resistance. True professionals would be able to soldier through any of those. Plenty of people have done their best work throughout any of those conditions, so you should be able to, as well.

But let’s go back to the opening quote:

“On a full day, when everything lines up, when he has no obligations and nowhere to be”

Full day. When everything lines up. When he has no obligations and nowhere to be.

That set of conditions is rare for a lot of people, especially women and people of color. There’s always an obligation or self-expectation that operates as one, things often don’t line up, and full days are rare.

The craft part of being the professional very quickly becomes the easiest part of being a professional. Designing, iterating, and adapting your life and work to create the conditions where you can do your best work is the hard and ever-changing part.

This part is often overlooked and under-discussed. We see the work and results that mid- and late-career Creative Giants create and that’s the interesting stuff of podcasts, interviews, and so on. But it’s the mundane and boring parts of their life that are often just as important as their brilliance and mastery of their craft.

Putting the Minutes In

I’ll be honest that when I read Pressfield’s quote, I immediately latched on to the “two hours” part. With some of the things I’m working through, it was affirming.

It was only when I walked on it and thought about it more that I realized that the first parts I just highlighted were also important and worth amplifying for myself and others. I add them not to give us all cop outs, but to remind us that we’re not robots.

Whatever your work is, you know that it’s about putting the minutes and blocks in to make it happen. There’s nothing overly mysterious about it.

If your life is such that you can’t carve out enough focus blocks, that’s not a craft competency problem. If you’re reading this, it’s probably not a character problem, either. It’s much more likely that you have some competing priorities, head trash, and/or priority projects that you haven’t acknowledged as such.

Competing priorities, head trash, and unacknowledged priority projects eat your energy and attention. It’s displacement at play.

But just remember, even when you get things aligned and you create some focus blocks, you may not end up with full days where you can work on whatever you want. It’s probably going to come down to one or two focus blocks a day.

Looping back around, now you probably see why I suggest (at least) three focus blocks per week per project. It’s doable for a lot of us, a forcing function to make us get real about how many projects we can actually work on at a time, and sustainable over years.

If you design your life and work to get more focus blocks than that, great! But you’d probably surprise yourself if you put three focus blocks per week on your priority project for the next month. The Focus Block Planner and the Weekly Block Planner from the Free Planners page can help with this.

The next time you’re caught in the “if I were a real [Insert Blank Here], I’d have the time to do my best work” trap, remember that even Pressfield only gets two hours. What are you going to do with yours?

Most leaders assume their team will find its footing this fall on instinct: pick up where things left off, figure out what’s next, get back into rhythm without much help. But that’s usually not how it goes.

Flow doesn’t happen on its own. It’s up to you to create the conditions that let your team find it: enough focus, the right stretch between skill and challenge, clear feedback, and enough trust in themselves to keep going. If that rhythm isn’t showing up on your team, the fix starts with you. Look at what you’re doing, or not doing, that’s keeping those conditions from being there.

This month’s Q&A carried that same thread through a few very different conversations, including:

• Diagnosing a leadership problem from a team problem before you decide how to intervene

• Using a focus-block threshold to separate a capacity problem from a character problem

• Why change work stalls in organizations that keep funding new initiatives without retiring old ones

• Setting goals a team will actually invest in, rather than ones that feel unreachable or automatic

• Keeping the foundational work from losing out to newer, more exciting priorities

• Building a team schedule that respects individual energy patterns while protecting shared coordination time

Our next Leadership Strategy Session will be on Wednesday, October 7, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Premium subscribers can watch the full opening teaching and access all related resources shared during the call. 👇🏽

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I love September. You can feel the change of season in the air, there are new, fresh notebooks to fill up, and, for me, there’s cake of the birthday variety. 🎂  

I just wish this month didn’t also always seem to show up with a burst of go-go-go, rush-rush-rush, get-it-done-before-the-end-of-the-year energy. No matter how well we plan for it, the urgency, or feeling that everything is urgent, shows up on September’s doorstep.

But what if we didn’t let it in? What if instead of inviting in the chaos we chose to fall into flow?

Flow, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, described it, is:

…the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

Sign me up!

Unfortunately, you can’t magically create flow. But you can create the conditions for it.

If you’d like to invite a little more flow into your fall, make room for the four conditions Csikszentmihalyi introduced in his book:

Flow Condition #1: Flow Requires Focus

You step into September with the best of intentions, but pretty quickly all those projects you said you’d get back to after summer are now kicking down your door. It’s like they, along with everyone in your life, have woken up from their summer slumber and demand attention. Hard to focus when everything is hitting, all at once.

I’d love to say the solve was as simple as putting a few focus blocks on your schedule and voilà, focus! But by now you know that’s not how focus blocks work. The first step is creating the container. The second, harder step, is protecting it: set your blocks for the times you’re actually primed for focus, bring just one task in with you, and guard it against everything else trying to get in.

Flow Condition #2: Flow Lives at the Intersection of Challenge and Skill

Around this time of year, we start to realize that we’re not as close to our annual goals as we had hoped we’d be. To address this issue, we take one of two routes:

1. We get over-ambitious and try to cram it all in, which may help us reach the goal but at what cost?

2. We flag the goal as impossible, so why bother?

Luckily, there’s a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth option. We can take a close look at the goals we set 9 months ago, the resources available now, and determine if the goal needs adjustment. That might be dropping it entirely, deferring it, extending the deadline, or maybe lowering the bar to something we can reach with just a bit of stretch.

Flow Condition #3: Flow Requires Clear Goals and Immediate Feedback

I’ve already talked about goals above, so let’s focus on the feedback side of things for a minute. Because in September you are likely drowning in emails, reminders, and notifications. People who were quiet all summer have reappeared fresh and more than ready to share their ideas and opinions.

This is where the connection between clear goals and feedback is important. If you do the work to get clear on what your goals are now, you can start to separate the signal from the noise and focus on the feedback that directly correlates to those goals.

Flow Condition #4: Flow Requires Self-Trust

September can be overwhelming, and it’s near-impossible to trust your own read on things when you’re too busy just putting one foot in front of the other.

This aspect of flow isn’t about being capable at the task. It’s about trusting your capability to figure things out. The problem is that overwhelm makes it hard to see that clearly. When everything’s coming at you at once, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you’ve been here before, buried under more than you thought you could handle, and gotten through it anyway.

You can’t control what energy you, or those around you, will show up with in September. But you can create the conditions to make the transition into fall a little more flowful.

~ Maghan

Resources to Help You Fall Into Flow

For when you realize those small interruptions are costing you a lot more than you think:

For when you’re carrying more than this season can hold:

For when you’re listening for feedback on projects that no longer need you to:

For five ways to build your self-trust:

Join Us for Our September Events

Mark your calendars for our September events, open to our paid subscribers:

• Leadership Strategy Session (LSS): Wednesday, September 9, 2026, at 11:00 am PDT
  September’s Focus: Leading your team out of reaction and into the kind of focus that actually moves things forward.

• Monthly Momentum Call (MMC): Wednesday, September 23, 2026, at 11:00 am PDT
  September’s Focus: Finding your way back to the work that matters, even in a month built for reacting instead of responding.

September Momentum Planners

The Momentum Planners were built to keep your most important work front and center. Download the free version of our September planners, now available only to subscribers.

Paid subscribers can access the full suite of dated planners below. 👇 If you don’t see them, please make sure you’re logged in to your paid account.

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🌟 Enjoy a special preview of this month's call replay! We're sharing a clip from our opening conversation on protecting your energy and priorities as the season shifts, before anyone else's urgency gets to set your pace. If you're not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full recording and be part of upcoming sessions.

August has a way of quietly resetting the rules. The energy that carries you through summer isn’t the energy that gets you through fall, and if you’re not paying attention, you can find yourself fighting a season that’s already moved on without you.

This month we opened with a reminder that your priorities don’t have to bend just because everyone else suddenly needs something from you. The same question kept coming back in different forms: whose timeline are you actually running on, and who gave them the authority to set it?

Whatever season you’re walking into this fall, remember you get to set the pace. You get to own your own time.

Here’s where that showed up:

• Reading your own energy before the season shifts: Why the fall transition can hit without warning, and the two tools that help you get ahead of it before you’re fighting yourself in September.

• Navigating a major life transition without rushing yourself: In the middle of a big identity shift, like sending a kid off to college, jumping straight into “getting in gear” can be a way of avoiding the moment instead of moving through it. Give yourself room before forcing momentum.

• Pricing without guessing what someone else can afford: Never make assumptions about a client’s budget on their behalf. It costs what it costs, and you don’t owe anyone a pre-emptive discount.

• Turning frustration into a boundary, not a grudge: A short, clear email can buy you the time and clarity you need, and cognitive labor spent stewing over a problem still counts as labor.

• Giving yourself permission to protect what feeds you: The thing you keep deprioritizing usually isn’t a planning problem; it’s a permission problem. Tying it to a trigger makes it automatic instead of optional.

• Closing thoughts: focus blocks for your whole life, not just your work: Even on your best day, real focused output is smaller than you’d guess. The question this fall isn’t how to do more, it’s where your focus blocks need to go, for your career and your life.

Our next Monthly Momentum Call will be on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Premium subscribers can watch the full recording and find the session highlights below, along with all the resources mentioned throughout the call. 👇🏽

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August is a tale of two months. The first half feels like summer, but at some point in the month (maybe it already has), your end-of-year mode kicks in. You’re already three to six months ahead in your head, calculating what has to happen before December. Your team is going to need some time to catch up.

Recognize your team is still in gear-shifting mode and set your expectations for your team and yourself accordingly. Use August as a primer so everyone can ease into the faster pace that September will inevitably bring.

And as that pace picks up, so will the weight of what’s on your plate. This month’s Q&A brought up a few such challenges, including:

• Redirecting decisions and knowledge during a leadership transition, without waiting for a single handover meeting to cover it all

• Naming a dip in team readiness after a departure as normal, not a personal failing

• Framing covering work as a temporary hold from the start, so reintegration feels like a handoff instead of a negotiation

• Auditing what’s actually needed before recalibrating a role after someone returns from extended leave

• Weighing loyalty to one against team and organizational responsibility

• Building functional trust with a neurodivergent teammate without abandoning team-wide expectations

Our next Leadership Strategy Session will be on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Premium subscribers can watch the full opening teaching and access all related resources shared during the call. 👇🏽

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