What it actually isContext switching is the mental cost of moving between tasks, roles, or types of thinking. It’s not just big interruptions — a call that runs over, a deadline that collides with another deadline. It’s smaller than that: the message answered mid-task, the tab that stays open behind another one, the client question…
Years ago, when I was doing web design work, I had a client who loved to send “quick questions.” A message about a font choice on a Tuesday morning. A call about a broken link on Wednesday afternoon. A five minute favour to check whether something looked right before they showed it to their own…
Someone once described my desk at the NGO as “organised chaos,” and I took it as a compliment at the time. Everything had a place, even if that place made sense to nobody but me. I could put my hands on any document in under a minute. I thought that made me good at my…
At Amazon, if there was a gap in a process, it rarely showed. Not because the process was perfect — because there were so many people around it that someone else quietly filled the hole before it became a problem. That’s the hidden luxury of scale: gaps get absorbed. When I left and started Your…
You don’t need to build everything today. You need to find your most fragile process and take one deliberate step toward making it stronger. Most businesses have one process that’s held together more by habit and memory than by design. One area where, if you’re honest, everything works because the right people happen to remember…
It’s almost never a people problem. It’s almost always a hand-off problem — and the difference matters enormously for how you fix it. Here’s a pattern I see repeatedly in growing businesses.Things are working. The team is capable. The founder is confident. And then growth happens — a new client, a new hire, a new…
Every time you fix the same problem twice, you’re paying rent on a business that should own its processes by now. Here’s how to start building instead. Here’s a question worth answering honestly: how many times this week have you explained something that already happened last week? The same onboarding question. The same client communication…
