Simon Joliveau Breney

Listen: Make sure to genuinely listen to concerns and red flags. Though it may sound like complaining, the fact that people care is a good sign. Most times teams on the ground can identify major flaws in a plan much more quickly than Leadership.

A very basic three-category scale of Urgency could go something like this:

• “ASAP” represents the highest band of urgency. If we don’t deliver this ASAP, then the value (whatever total value that might be) will quickly evaporate – someone will get there before us or the opportunity (however big or small) will be massively impaired.

• “Soon”

Only in newer keyboards are the letters printed on top of the keys, or charred from their surface by a laser. In older ones – those from the early 1960s laboratory computers, or the 1980s microcomputers – the way every key was constructed was by first molding the letter from plastic of one color, and then grabbing a different plastic and molding

Netflix has defaulted to the most expensive plan, and used just about every dimension of the table to emphasize that choice is the best one:

• It has a much better color schema

• Lots of bullets on why that plan is best

• That plan is default and on the left, not the right

I quickly learned that it was easier for me to focus on work in the hours before lunch, so when I found myself struggling with a not-so-hard task late in the day, I’d give myself permission to quit and pick it up again in the morning. Almost every time, I’d breeze through and finish in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken me the previous night.

“Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want.” - Jeff Bezos, 2016 Letter To Shareholders

The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list.