Most of the professionals I coach don’t have a time problem. They have a fragmentation problem, and time blocking is almost always where we start fixing it. They come to me saying they need to “get better at time management.” Then we open their calendar together. What we find is a workday chopped into pieces so small that no serious thinking could fit in any of them. There’s a 30 minute gap between two meetings, then a 20 minute window before lunch, then an afternoon that disappears into messages. By Friday they have been busy for 50 hours and can’t name one thing they moved forward. That’s why this is…

Most people who come to me for coaching do not have a time problem. They have an attention problem that looks like a time problem. They tell me the day disappeared, that they answered forty emails and sat through three meetings and still never opened the proposal that actually mattered. When I hear that story, one of the first tools I hand over is the pomodoro technique. I do not recommend it because it is trendy, and I do not believe a kitchen timer has magical powers. I recommend it because it makes you be honest about where your working hours really go. Over the years I have taught this…

I have measured a lot of home offices over the years, and the questions people ask me about home office setup essentials barely change from one client to the next. My clients’ setups have included spare bedrooms, closets with the doors taken off, a corner of a garage, and more kitchen tables than I can count. The people who call me rarely have a furniture problem at first. They have a neck that aches by 3 p.m., a right shoulder that clicks, or eyes that feel like sandpaper by Thursday. Almost always, the cause traces back to a handful of purchases they either skipped, rushed, or got wrong. So this…

I want to start with a confession. For the first two years of my coaching practice, whenever clients asked me how to build a morning routine, I handed them the wrong advice. In fact, I gave them lists. Wake at five, drink lemon water, journal three pages, meditate twenty minutes, work out, read ten pages, plan the day. It looked beautiful on paper. However, it almost never survived contact with an actual Tuesday. What changed my approach was a client I’ll call Marisol, a hospital pharmacist with two kids and a commute that ate an hour of her day. She came to our third session nearly in tears because she…

If you want to know how to stop procrastinating, the key is not forcing more discipline on yourself, but understanding why you put things off in the first place. Most people who ask me for help expect a lecture about willpower. They sit down on the couch in my office, apologize for being late on something like a thesis, a tax return, or an email to a family member, and wait for me to tell them to try harder. I never do. After many years of working with chronic procrastinators, I can tell you that trying harder is almost never the missing ingredient. The people I see are usually trying…

I’ve spent most of my career helping companies and their people figure out how to stay productive working from home. Before 2020, that mostly meant tech startups and a few forward-thinking agencies. After 2020, it meant almost everyone. Hundreds of conversations later, I can tell you the question I hear more than any other isn’t about software or policy. It’s a quieter, more personal one: “Why do I feel busy all day at home but get so little done?” If you’ve asked yourself that, you’re in good company. The problem is rarely motivation or discipline. Most of the time, people are trying to run an office day inside a house…