Productive Flourishing

🌟 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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🌟 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 recommitting to purpose at the halfway point of the year. If you want to see the complete teaching and take part in upcoming sessions, consider upgrading to join us live next month.

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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Does something that you’re working on or living through feel off and you can’t quite pinpoint what’s going on? Like you’re doing a bunch of performative makework or merely putting your time in somewhere in your personal life?

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.

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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I’ve been thinking a lot this week about this subtitle from the July Community Events announcement: “Mid-Year Review, Refocus, Recommit.” It reminds me of the “reduce, reuse, recycle” trilogy from the US Environmental Protection Agency, created in the 1970s as a hierarchy for waste management.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 deliberate decisions before September makes them for you.

We’ll explore themes like:

• Telling the difference between what’s truly active and what’s just still on the list

• Naming stuck or dead work out loud so the team isn’t carrying it in silence

• Closing out work that’s done but still creating friction

• Deciding what belongs in the back half of the annual plan and what doesn’t

Bring questions about: Where your team’s annual plan has drifted from reality, projects that are stuck or dropped but haven’t been named that way, how to have the conversation about what’s no longer in play, and what a deliberate mid-year realignment looks like in practice.

These monthly calls are part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing. 

If you’re not a premium subscriber yet, I encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us Wednesday, July 1, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. PDT.

Paid subscribers, here’s what you need to know to join the call: