Productive Flourishing

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our September Monthly Momentum Call! We're trying something new this month. Instead of a quick recap, we've written up the key takeaways from our conversation, a few ways to put them into practice, and the resources we mentioned along the way.

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

What came up in this month's conversation1.

• 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.

Find Your Business Flow is back. This cohort-based program is for solo- and micropreneurs wearing every hat and spending more time on busywork than on the work they started their business for. Instead of borrowing someone else’s system, we’ll help you build one that fits how you actually work, so you can create the...

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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...

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“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...

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🌟 While we no longer record the Q&A discussions during our Leadership Strategy Sessions, we continue to record the opening teaching. Enjoy a special preview of what we shared about creating the conditions your team needs to find its flow this fall. If you want to see the complete teaching and take part in upcoming sessions, consider upgrading to join us live next month.

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...

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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:

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...

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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...

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🌟 While we no longer record the Q&A discussions during our Leadership Strategy Sessions, we continue to record the opening teaching. Enjoy a special preview of what we share about resetting your team’s rhythm for the season ahead. If you want to see the complete teaching and take part in upcoming sessions, consider upgrading to join us live next month.

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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When delegation goes wrong, leaders usually blame the person they delegated to. They didn’t follow through. They didn’t ask the right questions. They came back with something completely different from what was asked.

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 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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