Hi Reader, An extra note this week, because this one only works on a Monday. (Your usual letter still comes on Friday.) This week I'm posting one practice a day on LinkedIn on how a cognitive athlete runs a high-performance week. Today's is the one that has made a really big difference for me, and I wanted you to have it while there's still a whole week to use it. Ask a capable person what their plan is for the week and you get one of two answers. They open their calendar, or they show you...
1 day ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, This week I went to a 110th birthday party. Not for a person but for Troop 6 in Brookline, Massachusetts - a Scout troop that has been meeting, tying knots, burning marshmallows and building character continuously since 1916. I find this almost impossible to believe. Most organizations don’t last a decade. This one has outlasted two world wars, the invention of the internet (and perhaps more challenging - social media) and many, many predictions of its own irrelevance. It has not...
4 days ago • 2 min read
Each week I want to write to you about human flourishing, about your flourishing. Last week the question got much larger with some dire predictions from trusted sources, and they were hard to process and know how to act. On Wednesday last week, Cal Newport sent a surprisingly alarmist email: Anthropic Just Threatened to Kill Billions of People. This Is Not Okay. He followed it with Superintelligence is a Fairy Tale. But Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm, which was the more useful of the two....
11 days ago • 4 min read
As you settle into this long weekend and think about the new habits, rhythms and rituals you’ll use to have an incredible September 15 to December 15 (see Halcyon Days), one of the most overwhelming “essential business” tools you’ll need an approach for is your email. Yes, we tackled this in Jarvis, working with AI and other tools to triage for you. And yes, there are other helpful systems and tools that want to help you tackle this (Gmail’s Important-first inbox, SaneBox, Superhuman), and...
25 days ago • 3 min read
Dearest gentle readers, Happy Friday in the midst of the summer. I hope you have allowed July to be good to you so far. Having grown up in Durban where we did not really have seasons (well okay we did - one was sun-with-lots-of-rain, and the other was sun-without-rain), I’ve been delighted to get to know the seasons here in Boston. And summer really can be beautiful. This is the power of gratitude practices - same world, very different experience. Sometimes (for those of us who need a little...
2 months ago • 6 min read
Hi everyone, Something unexpected changed for me over the last few weeks, and I want to share it in its rough-but-ready form — because you can take the best of it and start using it now to: overcome email overwhelm, and gain an actually helpful intelligent assistant — one that knows how to: protect your precious deep work time, triage email by urgency, your key relationships, and the projects you’re actively working on, and apply the principles of cognitive high performance to you. Here’s my...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hi everyone, This week’s newsletter was carefully timed. It’s Thursday. For most of us this means we are moving toward the end of the week, but we are not there yet. There is still time. Time for what? Time to prepare to end this week really well, and to prepare for a great week next week (and as a bonus have a wonderful weekend). This doesn’t mean giving up on this week - I hope you are still intensely committed to achieving what matters most this week, and that you will do so with optimal...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Every week, I share one key idea from my work at the intersection of cognitive high performance, human flourishing, and sustainable excellence. Welcome to MakeTimeFlow - dedicated to helping visionary, family-focused founders and leaders optimize their time, to act and achieve deep success. Sign up here if this email was forwarded to you. Deep Success matters now because owning your time and attention - choosing what you focus on rather than having it chosen for you - has become a rare and...
3 months ago • 5 min read
Hello MakeTimeFlow member! 👋 I just released the latest MTF update. I'm excited to share that it pulls our last 2 releases together around one idea: You should see your whole day in MakeTimeFlow, and MakeTimeFlow should stand beside you while you work it. Here are the improvements: All your Google calendars: Connect Google and pick which calendars to bring in — your primary stays two-way, and the rest appear as muted, read-only blocks so you can plan around commitments from everywhere. An...
4 months ago • 1 min read