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...

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But the question worth sitting with first is simpler: what did you actually give them to work with?

If you’ve read “Email Is Harder Than You Think,” you already know that the hard communication work is the part leaders most often skip. It’s far easier to fire off a quick message than to stop and think through what someone actually needs to do the work well. COPP is what doing that hard work looks like in practice.

And DRIP is what you teach your team to give back.

I discussed DRIP briefly in Team Habits, but the DRIP / COPP pair is the full communication handshake. One side gives context. The other side returns work. When both are happening, delegation stops being a gamble.

COPP: Your Communication Discipline

COPP is a framework for what to communicate before you hand something off. It keeps you on the WHAT and WHY side of the handoff and out of the HOW, which helps you avoid the delegation mistake that caps what your team can do at what you can specify. COPP has four components.

Context is the “why this matters,” in three sentences or fewer. Most leaders skip it entirely, which leaves people doing work they don’t understand, for reasons they can’t articulate, with no sense of how it connects to anything else....

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As I write this, it’s the end of July, and we’re just entering yet another weeks-long heat wave here in Vienna. So it feels strange for me to be writing about the transition into fall, and probably even more jarring to read about it. But that’s where we are, or at least where we’ll be in a few weeks as we shift from planning the next summer adventure to planning the rest of the year.

Because August is your runway to the final months of the year. We start the month in full summer mode, a slower pace, looser rhythms, and plenty of “let’s talk about that after the summer.” And then, somewhere around mid- or late August, depending on your circumstances, you find yourself feeling caught up in the urgency (sometimes real, often manufactured) as you realize the end of the year is much closer than the start.

If you’ve been with us for any amount of time, you know we do not subscribe to the false notion that your work needs to fit neatly into the contrived January to December construct, but that doesn’t mean you won’t feel its effects.

So before the feeling hits in full force come September, use August not just to determine what needs to get done between now and the holidays but, maybe more importantly, how you want to spend that time. What do you want to take with you from this summer? What do you want to leave behind? What takes priority?

And don’t forget that as the seasons shift, so does our energy. Before the rush...

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No matter how many posts, podcasts, and resources we have on time blocking, I always feel like this is a topic that we could write countless posts about. Because while the theory behind it is so foundational and the mechanics so simple, the applications are endless.

Our most comprehensive breakdown of time blocking and the one we point to most often is the first in this collection, How to Be a Productive Powerhouse Using Time Blocking. The important word in that title is not productive, not powerhouse, or the phrase time blocking; it’s using. (The verb is always going to be the most impactful word, but more on that in a future collection.) Theory and mechanics are useless if you don’t put them to use.

What works for me might not work for you and vice versa. My energy peaks and valleys are likely different from yours. What holds my attention might be different. And my life looks different from yours. So while below you will find no less than 20 posts on the topic, the point of this collection is not to study them all, but to read one or maybe a few, and then take something you learn and apply it to your own circumstances.

In this collection you’ll find posts about:

• The fundamentals of time blocking

• The energy + time equation

• The 4 blocks: focus, recovery, admin, and social

• The building blocks of time blocking

• Creating containers for the work

• Time blocking and teams

• Blocking time for your team’s focus

• Resources and worksheets around time blocking (and more)

Now,...

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🌟 Enjoy a special preview of this month's call replay! We're sharing a clip from Charlie's closing thoughts on ghost naysayers, real yaysayers, and using the key you already have. If you're not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full recording and be part of upcoming sessions.

So much of what keeps us quiet, careful, or small isn’t worth organizing our lives around.

Most of the time, what’s actually holding us back isn’t a critic. It’s the idea of one, real or otherwise. Sometimes it’s a real person who’s invested in being critical and isn’t going to change their mind no matter what you do. More often it’s someone we can’t even name, a ghost “somebody” who was never actually watching in the first place.

This month’s conversations kept circling back to exactly that split.

Whether it showed up as panic during a slow season, the fear of sounding like you’re bragging, or assuming your work is too complicated for people to get, each of our conversations came down to some story about how “someone” might react, standing in for what’s actually true.

What if instead of listening to those naysayers, real or imagined, you listen to the people who are actually on your side?

Prove your yaysayers right.

This month we also covered:

• Half-year review walk through: Why looking back at who actually showed up for you over the last six months is the fastest way to find your...

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jenn Labin.

Some mornings I do everything right and still wake up feeling terrible. It can be so easy to fall into bitterness, self-pity, and isolation when you’re managing life with chronic health challenges. I have literally a dozen different diagnoses that show up with symptoms like migraines, exhaustion, joint pain, muscle pain, brain fog, poor sleep. . . I’m tired just trying to capture it all.

The kicker is that someone like me can do everything they’re supposed to do to manage their health and still feel like garbage. Every day I drink 100oz of fluids, eat gluten-free, meditate, stretch, track exertion to manage my energy, and take medication seven times daily. But today I woke up to a wicked headache and debilitating pain. For no reason.

We can only work on five projects maximum at any given time; managing chronic health conditions counts as at least one project. In my case, I am still trying to get to root causes and effective treatment plans with my care team, so I have to count my health as two project slots. My hope is that I will get to a point in 3-6 months where it only counts as one project. When two of your five available projects are devoted to simply staying functional, it changes what productivity has to look like.

All of this means that no matter how hard I try, I can’t rely on having a 40-hour work week. (Or, as a business owner, a 60-hour work week.) At the moment, there are weeks when...

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Here’s a pattern I’ve seen across two decades of working with teams: when teamwork gets hard, we assume we have a people problem. Someone’s not pulling their weight. Someone’s difficult. If we could just change them, work would work.

Most of the time, that assumption is wrong. You don’t have a people problem — you have a team habits problem. It’s not you, and it’s probably not them either.

Think about it: most of us know, like, and care about our teammates. What frustrates us is how work happens with them, not who they are. Meetings that go nowhere. Plans half the team doesn’t know about. Projects that stall because nobody knows who owns them.

Those are habits, not character flaws, and teams have habits just like people do. They’re often invisible to us precisely because they’re shared.

That’s good news because while most people resist being changed, they’re surprisingly open to changing how the team works together. That’s the core idea of my book Team Habits, and it’s the thread that runs through everything below.

One more thing before we dig in: you don’t need to be the manager to use any of this. Every one of us participates in our team’s habits, which means every one of us can be a force for improving them.

The eight principles below are a primer to the teaming side of Productive Flourishing. Like its sister page, the Productivity Primer, each principle links deeper into the...

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The instinct at the halfway mark is to start with status: what’s done, what’s behind, what’s still moving.

We’d encourage you to resist that instinct and start somewhere else instead, with the purpose behind the goals you set back in the fall or in January. That’s a long time ago. Most of us can barely remember what felt important then, and some of what got set out no longer has the same job to do, either because it’s been accomplished by a different route or because it no longer serves the goal it was meant to serve.

Reconnecting with purpose first tells you which projects deserve a restart and which ones deserve to be retired.

From there, the real work is getting honest about capacity, not the capacity the calendar suggests you have, but what your team can actually give for the rest of Q3.

This month’s Q&A also covered:

• Introducing a team-level project discipline when the concept is still new, and how many active change projects a team can realistically carry at once

• Building in margin across time horizons rather than assuming quarters, months, and weeks divide...

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It might be that you don’t understand aspects of what’s going on at work or you’re misaligned somewhere. But there’s a good chance that you intuitively know that there’s some paradigm you’re working from that’s not tracking reality.

When some part of you knows something is wrong, the story about the work saps more energy than the work itself. Your tension may not be about you, but instead the fact that you’re dealing with an epicycle.

I’m lifting the word “epicycle” from astronomy and the philosophy of science. It comes from a centuries-long stretch where brilliant people collectively built an enormous amount of work to avoid changing one wrong idea.

The History of Epicycles

Before astronomers realized during the Scientific Revolution that the Earth orbits the sun, they operated under two assumptions from Ptolemaic and Platonic thinking: (1) the Earth was the universe’s center and (2) celestial bodies moved in perfect circular orbits.

The circle wasn’t a random geometric choice. It was a philosophical choice because heavenly objects were perfect and the circle was a perfect form. So it was axiomatic that we had circles moving in circles.

Celestial bodies...

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The three Rs for mid-year also represent a sort of “hierarchy” — or at least a three-step process — for evaluating objectives and projects at this halfway point of the year.

Step 1: Review

Much the same way we benefit from a quarterly review at the end of Q1, a similar review at the end of Q2 can serve us, too. Added benefit: we’ve got another quarter of work under our belts, so we have more data with which to make changes or adjustments to our plans and projects to set ourselves up for a successful back half of the year.

Step 2: Refocus

Once the review step is complete, we have a better understanding of which projects we’ll keep, which we’ll adjust, and which we’ll jettison altogether, based on our current objectives, team or individual capacity, capabilities, readiness, and the like. We’ll enter the second half of the year with a tighter focus on those projects we believe will best move the needle on our objectives, and that we have the best chance to complete with the time and resources we have available.

Step 3: Recommit

This last step is one that is often overlooked, but is as important as the other two....

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🌟 Enjoy a special preview of this month’s call replay! We’re sharing a clip from our opening conversation on why high energy and real capacity aren’t the same thing, and what happens when you mistake one for the other. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full recording and be part of upcoming sessions.

This month we explored a distinction that’s easy to miss: energy and capacity aren’t the same thing. High energy doesn’t automatically mean higher capacity. You still have to account for the limitations of time and attention. When you hit an energetic peak, the instinct may be to reach for more but the five-project rule still applies.

Summer has a way of loading your plate with projects that never make it onto your official list. The seasonal logistics, the life shifts, the things you’re holding for other people. When you don’t count those, you can end up holding more than five projects without realizing it, and something you genuinely care about might get bumped to the bottom of the list until it falls off entirely. That’s not a motivation problem or a discipline problem. It’s a math problem.

“Not now” doesn’t mean “never.” Pausing something you care about, intentionally and honestly, is how you protect both the project and your capacity to do it well.

This month’s Q&A also covered:

• Expanding into a new market when your existing...

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Summer is full. If you’re not navigating vacation schedules and shifting team availability, you’re probably managing the particular busyness that July brings on its own. The last thing that feels pressing right now is pausing to take stock.

Which is exactly why July is a good time to do it.

Underneath the busyness of these summer months, most of us are still carrying the full weight of everything the first half of the year left on our plates: projects that shifted status without anyone deciding they should, work that’s done but never got properly closed out, goals that quietly changed shape somewhere along the way. None of it feels urgent right now because summer has a way of softening the edges of things.

September won’t.

When the pace picks back up, that weight doesn’t disappear. It just becomes a lot harder to sort through with intention when everything else is pressing at once. The leaders and individuals who arrive at the back half of the year with a clear picture of what’s actually in play, and what they’ve deliberately set down, are in a very different position than those who suddenly have to figure it out under pressure.

This month, both our Leadership Strategy Session (July 1) and Monthly Momentum Call (July 15) explore what it looks like to use this stretch of summer to take that look, while there's still room to make deliberate choices about what deserves your focus in the back half.

We hope to see you in July! (Details below...

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Our Monthly Momentum Calls are designed to help you focus on what matters most, offering a supportive space to clarify goals, overcome challenges, and make meaningful progress — whether you’re pursuing a creative project, growing your business, or balancing life responsibilities.

Each 60-minute session blends teaching, hot- support-seat coaching, and interactive Q&A, providing real-time support and actionable insights to help you move forward with clarity and purpose.

July’s Focus: The Mid-Year Gut Check Your Projects Need

At the start of the year you made commitments. Some are moving. Some have quietly become something else along the way.

There’s probably a project that had real energy in January that’s been bumped so many times it no longer has a real place on your calendar. Something you finished months ago that you never properly wrapped up, so loose ends from it keep resurfacing at inconvenient times. A goal that looked different once you actually got into it, and you’ve been carrying the low-level guilt of not pushing it forward without ever officially deciding to change course.

Right now, none of it feels particularly loud. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. July is the window to look at what you’re actually carrying and decide, deliberately, what comes with you into the back half. Because in September, with the pace back and the pressure on, those decisions will get a lot harder.

We’ll explore:

• Taking stock...

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To be a leader means managing constant complexity. Shifting priorities, team dynamics, capacity challenges, and the pressure to execute while everything keeps changing.

Our Leadership Strategy Sessions are supportive, no-fluff monthly virtual meetings for leaders navigating the real challenges of modern team life.

Each session blends practical guidance, coaching, and peer Q&A. We tackle what’s most timely and relevant, from clarifying team roles and managing capacity to leading through change and building trust.

You don’t need to prep. You just need to show up as you are, with whatever’s on your plate. These sessions are designed to meet you where you are.

July’s Focus: The Mid-Year Inventory Your Annual Plan Needs

The annual plan you built in January was based on what you knew then. Six months in, some of that picture has held. Some of it hasn’t. And right now, while the pace is slower and the team is in and out, it can be hard to notice what’s shifted.

But it’s there. Projects that have stalled without anyone naming them stuck. Work that’s functionally done but never properly closed out, still generating quiet friction. Initiatives that were deprioritized months ago but are still showing up in status updates because nobody’s said out loud that they’re off the table.

July is a good moment to look at what’s actually on your team’s plate against what the annual plan says should be there, and make some...

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Last month we focused on getting ahead of the summer shift. Now we’re in it.

The leadership work of this season comes down to one thing: expectations. What kind of season is your team actually in? What are you maintaining, and what does that work look like when it’s done well? What behaviors and outcomes are you solving for between now and September? Get those answers out of your head and in front of your team before July gets slippery, and resist the pull to force this season into something it isn’t shaping up to be.

That thread ran through the entire session, from the teaching to every Q&A conversation.

This month’s Q&A also covered:

• Whether to plan around quarters or semesters, and how to choose the frame that matches your actual energy cycles without creating extra translation work

• Reframing a season of lower business output as intentional investment in relationships and network-building, rather than evidence of falling behind

• Why being intentional and being transactional are not in conflict, and how confusing the two gets in the way of showing up authentically in relationships

• ...

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Our May tips talked about choosing the cadence that works best for you. Maghan shared how she’s experimenting with semesters instead of quarters, because that feels more energetically aligned to where she is, and where her transition points are between her yearly “seasons.”

I realized (again) in my haiku practice, after each piece explored themes of change, that I’m deep in a transition of my own. I touched on this in April’s tips, where I was feeling the restless energy of spring and that sense of a change on the horizon. But in the past couple months, that feeling of transition has intensified.

As Mom’s dementia journey has created changes for her, my role as caregiver has changed, too. From the last several years where I was the primary “doer” of Mom’s care, to this transitional phase where I need help helping her, to (very soon now) a time when Mom’s care will be entirely in the hands of professionals.

All of which has me thinking about transitions and changes and the labor required of them, and how that relates to seasons of building/growing and maintaining/resting we’ll be touching on in June. I’m reminded that transitions, whether personal or organizational, often require elements of both: of maintaining what’s critical while simultaneously working on the core project(s) that represent the change.

Sometimes that change project requires intensity and growth energy, a strong plan and concerted...

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Email Is Harder Than You Think

Most people treat email like it’s the easy part of the day, but it’s sneakily one of the more taxing things you might do.

When you scroll social media or read an article, you’re consuming. It’s a low-obligation, low-consequence activity because you usually don’t have to decide anything, respond to anyone, or track a single open loop.

When you write a proposal or work through a strategy doc, you’re producing. It’s high effort but coherent, with one context, one goal, and one thread to hold.

Email is neither of those things.

The Third Category of Work

Every message you open starts a sequence of context and content shifts. You figure out who this person is and what they actually need. You decide what the right response is — and often, whether now is even the right time to give it. Then you write it in a way that moves things forward.

And then you do it again, with a different person, a different project, and different stakes, sometimes within the same minute.

Most of those decisions resolve in seconds. Newsletters can be skimmed or archived, meetings can be accepted or declined, and (truly) quick questions can be answered quickly.

That’s genuine admin work, and it’s what admin blocks are built for.

But a small segment of emails can’t be resolved that way. They’re the ones that trigger “okay, I need to actually think about this one.” Back in 2009, I called these Jumbos, but...

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🌟 Enjoy a special preview of this month's call replay! We're sharing a clip from our opening conversation on mapping your personal energy cycles and why the calendar you're using might be working against you. If you're not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full recording and be part of upcoming sessions.

Thank you to everyone who joined our May Monthly Momentum Call!

There is a moment in May where you start to feel it. The rhythm that carried you through spring begins to shift. Energy changes, the summer stretches out ahead, and the months to come look and feel different from the ones behind you. (And for those of you in the southern hemisphere, the same is true as you move into winter and your own seasonal shift takes hold.)

This month, we explored what it actually looks like to plan around your own seasonal energy rather than defaulting to a calendar that wasn’t designed with you in mind. Our OpTempo Wheel worksheet was built for teams, but it turns out it’s just as useful for mapping the natural rhythms of your own year. Plotting your energy across 12 months makes the patterns hard to ignore, and might have you asking the same question it raised for us:

What if your planning year started when your energy peaks, not when the calendar says to?

Here are some of the other topics we explored this month:

• Timing a creative relaunch around life transitions: How to think about when to restart a project you’ve been sitting on, when...

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May was about looking honestly at what you, your projects, and your team could actually hold between now and September. Reading your OpTempo (operational tempo) before the season arrived rather than discovering it when something dropped.

June is where that work has to translate into how you actually work.

Not everyone arrives in June in the same season. Some teams have real energy right now and meaningful work that matches it. Some individuals are in a genuine growth stretch. Others are in something slower, a season that calls for maintaining rather than building, tending what’s already in motion rather than launching what’s new. Both are legitimate. Neither runs itself.

The harder truth is that the seasons requiring more deliberate leadership (for your team or yourself) aren’t always the ones with the most energy. Knowing what season you’re in is only half the work. Leading yourself or your team well during a slower season without defaulting to building-season expectations or letting the slower pace become drift, is where the real skill lives.

This month, both our Leadership Strategy Session and Monthly Momentum Call explore what it looks like to lead well in the season you’re actually in.

We hope to see you in June! (Details below 👇🏽)

Leadership Strategy Session

For leaders navigating team dynamics, organizational priorities, and the challenge of maintaining sustainable momentum while delivering results.

Wednesday, June 3, 2026 at 11am...

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Our Monthly Momentum Calls are designed to help you focus on what matters most, offering a supportive space to clarify goals, overcome challenges, and make meaningful progress — whether you’re pursuing a creative project, growing your business, or balancing life responsibilities.

Each 60-minute session blends teaching, hot- support-seat coaching, and interactive Q&A, providing real-time support and actionable insights to help you move forward with clarity and purpose.

June’s Focus: Leading Yourself Through the Season You’re In

You came into May with a question: what does this season actually have room for? Maybe you have some version of an answer now. Maybe it confirmed that this is a real growth stretch for you and your projects. Maybe it revealed something slower, a season better suited to sustaining than expanding.

What neither answer comes with is an instruction manual for how to work well within it.

A growth season without enough structure scatters. A slower season without enough intention drifts. The work in June is learning to lead yourself skillfully, making real progress on what the season can actually hold, and resisting the pull to measure that progress against a season you’re not in. Part of that is seeing the season clearly, including the projects that summer quietly adds to your plate that never make it onto your official list.

We’ll explore:

• What working well actually looks like in your season, whether that’s growth or...

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