This week’s been about time — protecting space to think, and noticing how often a meeting is standing in for a decision you could just make. Today’s the practical part. Block one hour this week. No calls booked over it, no email open, phone in another room if that’s what it takes. Better still —…
At Amazon, if something felt hard or unclear, the reflex was always the same: get people in a room. It felt responsible. It felt collaborative. Looking back, a fair number of those meetings weren’t either of those things — they were avoidance, just dressed up with an agenda and a calendar invite. A meeting about…
When I got made redundant from Amazon after nearly a decade, the first thing that hit me wasn’t panic. It was quiet. For years my calendar had been solid blocks of back-to-back meetings — program reviews, team huddles, one-to-ones, engagement sessions. Suddenly all of that was gone, and in the space it left behind, I…
This week has been about operational capacity — the idea that ambition doesn’t really have a ceiling, but people, teams, and systems do. Today, the practical bit: what I actually did about it in my own business this week. I sat down on Monday morning and went through everything that had shown up in my…
The simplest, most immediately actionable calendar habit for founders who want to protect their cognitive capacity and do their best work. Here’s a question worth answering honestly: when in your working week do you do your best thinking? For most founders the answer isn’t ‘during work hours.’ It’s in the shower. On a run. During…
A poorly designed calendar doesn’t just waste time — it generates cognitive drain before your most important work has even started. A few weeks ago I introduced the concept of Decision Fatigue — the well-documented cognitive phenomenon where the quality of our decision-making degrades progressively as we make more decisions across the day. Each choice,…
The gap between the priorities you say you have and the ones your calendar reflects is one of the most telling operational measures in any business. Here’s an exercise worth doing this week. Pull up last week’s calendar and look at it honestly. Not at what you planned — at what actually happened. Where did…
Most delegation fails because it’s incomplete, not because the person can’t do it. Here’s the three-part formula that makes delegation actually stick. Here’s the most common delegation story I hear from founders. They hand over a task. The person asks questions, makes decisions the founder wouldn’t have made, produces an outcome that’s not quite right….
Have you ever had the sense that work shouldn’t be this hard?Not because the work itself is difficult.But because everything around it seems to slow it down.Projects move forward… but slower than expected.Simple tasks require more coordination than they should.Decisions take longer, even when everyone agrees.Nothing is broken.Nothing is catastrophic.And yet, somehow, progress feels dragged…
If someone wanted to understand your leadership style, they probably wouldn’t start with your strategy deck.They’d start with your calendar.Not because calendars are perfect reflections of leadership — but because they reveal something most leaders don’t notice:Your calendar quietly shows what you truly prioritise.And teams are remarkably good at reading those signals.What leaders make time…
