On Monday, October 20 at 11am EST (i.e. Toronto time...because I'm terrible with time zones!) I’ll be running the first bi-weekly Office Hours call inside ReadyOpsGo (via Skool Live). These sessions are your chance to: - Bring whatever’s tripping you up in your business operations - Ask questions - Brainstorm next steps together with the group No slides. No fluff. Just real talk and problem-solving. See you then & there...bright eyed & bushy tailed!

That’s the punchline from Alex Hormozi’s latest Mozi Minute (newsletter) which really got under my skin. Hormozi explains that the word “priority” literally means the thing that comes first. As in, singular. Not five things. Not three things. One. But most of us? We’ve got lists a mile long. And then we wonder why we feel pulled in ten different directions. ✋guilty as charged He goes on to say that the kicker is: real prioritization hurts. Choosing one thing means saying no to a dozen others. It feels uncomfortable. But that’s the signal you’re finally doing it right. Funny enough, I often say “if you say yes to one thing, you’re saying no to another but reading this newsletter made me realise I am not applying this all the way down into the granular parts of how I work. So, in a nutshell, Hormozi’s point is simple: - Pick the one thing that, if nailed, makes the rest irrelevant. - Go all in. - Forget the rest. And everything else? It’s just distraction dressed up as strategy. ❓So my question is: what’s your one thing right now? ❓ (My sarcastic sense of humor has its own reply, which is: my one thing is this single sheet of paper…the one that has a list of ‘priorities’ on both sides 🤪) My real answer: finishing up my current project (which I’m not loving) but I've had to tell me, myself, and I that I can’t do the other fun things I really want to do until it’s finished.

Last time I shared how I typically set up my week using my template calendar. This week, however, is going to be a different story. I’m about to finish a project and start with the client handover part, which is going to take up most of my time. So, to make it work, I’ve had to rearrange my week and push some things out. A line I often say (no idea where I heard it from) is when you say yes to one thing, you’re saying no to another. For me, in this case it means that just because I said no (for this week) to the things I’m pushing out, doesn’t mean I can forget about them. They’re still there waiting for me…tick tock, tick tock. My solution this week, which I do try to avoid, means working a couple of extra hours so things don’t spiral out of control. The key for me is planning for that instead of letting it blindside me. The criteria I used to decide to go with extra hours versus just pushing it out included (some are obvious) priorities, client dependencies, time constraints (like prepping for my business year end!), etc. This is one area where the criteria often change. And sometimes, I’ll just drop the task altogether or find a way to ‘shrink’ it by doing the bare minimum on it (remembering that done is better than perfect in these cases). How about you? When something takes over your week, how do you keep the rest of your work from falling through the cracks?

Introduce yourself in the comments: - Your name + what your business does - Where you’re based - One challenge in your business you’d love to fix

I’ve shared a few posts this week from Slow Productivity (Cal Newport) and thought I’d close the loop with my own takeaways. The three concepts that stood out for me were: Pull-based workflow - Finish what’s in front of you, then pull the next thing. Work cycles - Work in seasons of focus, then rest before the next one. (This one I’ve tried something similar by doing the 12 Week Year, which I really like, but find it can be hard to stick to it but I would really like to get back to it). Company of One - That bigger is not always better and enough can actually be enough. All three together made me really think a lot about how I could build and run my own projects with less chasing and more intentional choices. Thanks for the conversations this week. I would love to hear if you had one takeaway from these ideas? Which one would fit you best right now?