Work
Excellence is a form of generosity. Do good work for others.
- habit
Be the person who does what they said they'd do
This sounds obvious. It is extraordinarily rare. If you say you'll send something by Friday, send it Thursday. If you commit to something, treat it as a contract with your own integrity. People who are reliable are magnetically trusted.
- habit
Give credit loudly and often
In a meeting, when someone's idea is used, say "that came from [name]." Write it in the email chain. The person who shares credit is the person everyone wants to work with — and paradoxically, the one everyone remembers.
- ritual
Protect one 90-minute block per day for real thinking
Not email. Not meetings. The work only you can do — the thinking, creating, strategizing. Block it. Defend it. The rest of the day can be reactive. This one block is where your actual value lives.
- habit
Ask people about their life, not just their work
Before diving into an agenda, ask one human question. "How was your weekend?" and then actually listen. The best professional relationships are ones where the humans inside them are visible. People work harder for those who see them.
- ritual
End each week with three questions
What did I do well? What would I do differently? What do I want to carry into next week? Five minutes. No journal needed. This creates a feedback loop that most people never build — and it compounds over years into mastery.
- habit
Send the email that matters first
Email is a to-do list managed by other people's priorities. Before you open your inbox, write the one email that would make today count — the one you'd want to have sent. Send that first. Then open the rest.
- habit
Under-promise, over-deliver
The reputation for excellence is built one delivery at a time. When in doubt, estimate longer than you think and deliver earlier than expected. This simple habit — consistently promising less and giving more — creates a professional reputation that no amount of self-promotion can replicate.
- habit
The two-minute rule
David Allen's insight: if a task takes less than two minutes, doing it now costs less energy than capturing it, tracking it, and doing it later. The psychological overhead of small undone tasks is enormous. Clear them immediately. Your brain will thank you.
- habit
Say no gracefully
"I can't give that the attention it deserves right now" is honest, respectful, and complete. Saying no is not a failure of generosity — it's a recognition that your time and energy are finite and that spreading them thin serves no one. The people who do the best work say no most often.
- habit
Use people's names
Dale Carnegie identified this decades ago and it remains true: a person's name is to them the sweetest sound in any language. Using someone's name in conversation signals that you see them as an individual. It's also remarkably rare. Do it and watch the response.
- ritual
The end-of-day shutdown ritual
Write tomorrow's three most important tasks before you shut down today. Say "shutdown complete" out loud if that helps — it sounds odd and works surprisingly well. The ritual signals to your brain that work is genuinely over. Without a ritual, work never fully ends.
- habit
Cancel the meeting that should be an email
The question "does this meeting need to be a meeting?" is worth asking every single week. Synchronous time is expensive — it costs every participant the same block simultaneously. When a decision can be made asynchronously, choose async. The best meetings are the ones you didn't have to attend.
- habit
Ask for feedback proactively
Most feedback lives in the space between what people think and what they say. Asking directly — "What's one thing I could improve?" — unlocks it. Receiving feedback without defensiveness is a rare and valuable skill. The people who grow fastest in any field ask for feedback more often than those who don't.
- habit
Manage upward with clarity
Managing upward is not politics — it's good communication. Your manager cannot advocate for you, resource you, or unblock you if they don't know what you're working on. Brief them proactively. Share your priorities. Tell them what you need. This is how you become someone they trust with more.
- reflection
Be the colleague everyone wants to work with
Think of the colleague you'd most want on a hard project. What do they actually do? They're probably reliable, clear, calm under pressure, generous with credit, and honest without being harsh. This is a completely achievable profile. None of it requires talent. It requires character.
- reflection
Care about the craft
There's a difference between finishing something and finishing it well. Most people can tell. Caring about the quality of your work — for its own sake, not just because someone is watching — is a form of integrity. The craftsperson's satisfaction is available to anyone willing to give a little more.
- habit
Name the one thing that matters today
The to-do list is a lie. You will never finish it. The real question every morning is: if only one thing gets done today, which one moves the most? Name it. Do it before anything else. Everything else is negotiable. That one thing is not.
- habit
Write one thing with more care today
Clear writing is rare. It requires thinking clearly first — which is why most people avoid it. An email that is precise, scannable, and says exactly what it means saves the recipient time and signals that you respect theirs. Read it once before you send it. That's it.
- question
What kind of career are you building?
Career ambition rarely fails from lack of effort. It fails from lack of clarity about the destination. Where do you want to be in ten years — not in title, but in the kind of work you do, the impact you have, the skills you've built? You can't navigate without a direction.
- habit
Protect people's dignity in hard moments
When you have to give critical feedback, end a project, or tell someone hard news — the how is remembered long after the what. Lead with care. Be private. Be specific. Don't hedge, but don't wound. People rarely forget how they were treated in their most vulnerable professional moments.
- ritual
Start with the hardest thing
The hard thing rarely gets easier by waiting. It gathers weight, becomes a low hum of dread behind everything else you do. Starting with it — even for twenty minutes, even imperfectly — breaks the paralysis and signals to yourself: I am someone who faces the hard thing. That signal compounds over years.
- question
The 30-year test
Not every work period needs to be sustainable — sprints are real, and sometimes the season demands everything. But it's worth asking honestly: is this a sprint, or is this just how I live? Because a pace that cannot continue, won't. The 30-year test isn't about slowing down. It's about knowing whether your current mode is a chapter or a trap.
- habit
Have the conversation you're avoiding
The delay is never neutral — the problem compounds and the eventual conversation gets harder to have kindly. Say the true thing early, when it can still be said gently and without an audience.
- habit
Write the bad first version
Perfectionism at the drafting stage isn't high standards, it's avoidance wearing a respectable coat. Give yourself twenty minutes to produce something genuinely poor. Everything good you've written started this way.
- habit
Spend your standing on someone junior
Credibility is only worth what you spend it on. Name the PhD student who did the work, push back when someone junior is talked over, put a name forward for the invitation. They will remember it for a decade.
- question
Know when it's good enough
Craft matters, and so does knowing which pieces deserve it. Most work has a point past which further polishing serves your anxiety rather than the reader. Find the point and stop there, deliberately, without apologising.
- habit
Decline one meeting this week
Attendance is the cheapest way to look committed and the most expensive way to spend a morning. Decline once, offer to read the notes, and use the hour for something only you can do.
- habit
Read something outside your field
Your instinct for connections across domains is the thing that makes the work distinctive — and it starves if the reading list is only your own literature. Twenty minutes in someone else's field, with no obligation to use it.
- habit
Ask what they're stuck on
People report progress, not paralysis — admitting to being stuck feels like admitting to being slow. Asking directly, and staying quiet long enough for the real answer, is most of what good mentoring is.
- question
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans
Ehrmann's line is easy to nod at and hard to do: the optimisation habit can only see the next deliverable. Take one finished thing — a paper, a course, a hire — and sit with it for a minute as something completed rather than as a base for the next climb.
- habit
List what you did, not what's left
The to-do list is designed to show you the remainder, which means it always reads as failure. Two minutes writing the done-list corrects the distortion, and it's the reason most days feel worse than they were.
- ritual
End the day at an actual time
Working from home removes the walk that used to mark the boundary, so the day dissolves into the evening and neither gets your attention. Choose the time in advance and let the unfinished things be unfinished until tomorrow.
- question
Say the true thing in the room
Saying the unwelcome, accurate thing calmly and once is a rarer skill than being clever. Not to win — to make sure the decision is made with the information in it. The regret runs the other way almost every time.
- habit
Spend the first ninety minutes on the real thing
The first block of the day is when your attention is least contaminated, and it's usually spent on other people's requests. Trade it once this week: the hard, valuable, unpleasant thing first, inbox after.
- habit
Write it down once, properly
Repeated explanation is a signal, not a nuisance. Twenty minutes of writing it down properly pays back for years and is the cheapest gift you can give whoever arrives next.
- habit
Finish something old
Unfinished work costs attention continuously, at a rate far beyond what's left to do. Take the oldest nearly-done item and close it — not because it's urgent, but because carrying it isn't free.
- habit
Ask the obvious question
Rooms full of competent people routinely proceed on shared confusion because nobody wants to be the one who asks. Being that person once buys clarity for everyone and costs about four seconds of discomfort.
- question
Whose work makes yours possible?
Cleaners, administrators, technicians, the colleague who fixes the schedule. The gratitude is usually felt and almost never delivered, because they're not in the meetings where credit gets distributed.
- quote
On what's already done
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
- quote
On ambition's shadow
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.