System Fragility: Why Good Systems Still Collapse
You are not bad at sticking with things. You've just been sticking with things that were never designed to survive a bad week.
Priority Chaos: Why Everything Feels Urgent at Once
The strange thing about "everything feels urgent" is that it's almost never true — until there's no room left to be wrong about what isn't.
In the last post, I talked about capacity overload — the gap between what's coming in and what's actually sustainable. This post is about what that overload tends to produce once it's been running for a while…
Capacity Overload: When the System Isn't the Problem
The most common thing I hear from new clients is "I just need a better system." Almost none of them do. They need less on the system.
It's Not Four Problems. It's One, Wearing Four Masks
If you've ever tried to fix your "priority problem" and found that the fix didn't stick, I want to offer a different diagnosis: you didn't have a priority problem. You had a capacity problem wearing a priority problem's clothes…
5. What ADHD Taught Me About Building Systems for Everyone
“I have ADHD. The systems I’ve built for myself turned out to work remarkably well for people who don’t.”
4. The Secret to a Work System That Never Goes Stale
“The most common reason a good system stops working has nothing to do with the system.”
3. A Lead Tracker You Can Build in 10 Minutes (Using the Tools You Already Have)
In the last two posts I’ve made the case that work systems fail because of design, not discipline — and walked through the principles that make a system lightweight enough to actually survive real life.
This is where it gets concrete.
2. It's Not Willpower. It's Design.
In my last post, I made the case that work systems fail not because of how you work, but because of how they’re designed.
That reframe leads naturally to a question: if the standard approach doesn’t work, what does?
Working with Reality: 1.Why Your System is Failing
The problem isn’t you — it’s a mismatch between system design and real-world conditions. If you’ve ever abandoned a productivity system and blamed yourself, this is for you.
Happy Tax Day! (And How I Cope With That)
The System You Didn’t Choose
Think about the last time you had to learn something entirely new, which is now part of your daily routine. Remember how much thinking you had to do about it, and how tiring it was? And now, it just happens…
The Community of Practice
We Learn Backwards
How I got Into Coaching
The Basics: Iteration
Iteration is the act of a repeated process, or the result of that process…
The Basics: Compassion
It’s not widely known, and you might never guess if your only exposure to “Agile” has been the workplace, but compassion is part of the original Agile Manifesto:
The Basics: Reflection
When I was just getting started as an Agile coach, my mentor described the foundation of Agile as being “a period in which to do work coupled with a formal process of reflection at the end of it”.
The Basics: Recovery
There is a very strong parallel between Agile practice and meditation…