We were most of the way through a full-day mid-year talent review. Powered by coffee, we had dissected the Top Performers. We had battled over the Underperformers, because no manager wants to tell someone they are missing expectations and put them on a performance improvement plan.

Now, late afternoon, we were working through everyone else. We had submitted our draft ratings, and we still had to move a few people down from Exceeds to Achieves.

Alex was an old-timer and in good standing. He had rotated through a few roles with different managers within our group, and he reported to me now. He had moved to my team four months earlier, for a big project I needed covered.

He hadn’t wowed me, but he was solid. His history in the system was Achieves for the last two years. I didn’t have the data to rate him Exceeds, and I knew nobody would call him an Underperformer.

I walked through his deliverables and goals, all on track, and paused.

Our head of shared services spoke up. His team served all of our teams, so he had an unusual vantage point on our people.

“I think we may not be giving enough credit to Alex. Ten minutes ago we gave John an Exceeds rating. And John is building on the foundation that Alex set up last year.”

I looked at Alex’s former manager. He used to manage both of them. He was nodding.

“What I have noticed with Alex,” the speaker continued, “is that he does a really solid job every time. He is one of the best customers my team has. His requirements are complete, he delivers on time. The products he has built are top quality. What have you guys seen of him?”

Two of Alex’s former managers and I looked at each other.

“He saved a project for me two years ago,” said his first manager slowly. “It was Escalation Central. Then he came in, and it went quiet. It launched on time. I remember the Director who sponsored it being very happy.”

“Is this the same Director who complains about everything we do?”

“Yeah…”

“Alex did a great job last year,” jumped in the second manager. “You may remember I tried to advocate for an Exceeds six months ago.” He turned to our boss. “The results weren’t in yet, and you told me we needed to meet the curve.”

Our boss looked at him. “So… if you were calibrating between John and Alex now, who would you rate higher?”

“Alex. I can see the results now.”

The boss turned to me. “Let’s move him to Exceeds.”

Alex got lucky. The dice do not always land that way. Six months earlier we had spent two minutes on him and nobody spoke up. He stayed at Achieves. I have sat in reviews where the manager was the only person who knew the employee, and reviews where the previous manager had left. Those people stayed in the middle.

The longer you stay in the middle the harder it becomes to break out.

Could this be happening to you?

I was not a negligent manager. Alex had been on my team for four months and I had six other people to rate. For the others I had the data. Top Performers tend to raise performance and expectations in their 1:1s. Alex never did. I was preparing for the review the night before, because the time I had blocked got eaten by escalations. It was 11pm by the time I got to Alex and I wasn’t going to ping his former manager that late – I thought the prior ratings gave me the whole story.

How your rating is decided

Your manager writes your draft rating, judging you against the rest of their team. Then they sit down with the other managers who report to your skip, and every rating gets discussed and defended. That meeting is calibration. In my experience it pushes ratings down more often than up, because managers rate their own teams too high in the draft. Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.

In a small company, calibration may be informal, half a day in a leadership offsite. Everyone has visibility to everyone else.

In a big company calibration rolls up through the layers. A leader with 200 people might spend three days a cycle on it: a day on the group their managers have pre-calibrated, half a day on their own directs, and a day calibrating those with their peers. Most companies run one annual review with mid-year or quarterly check-ins. The annual one determines compensation. The mid-year one steers role changes, succession planning and who gets the visible projects. It also sets the expectations for the annual one.

Many companies base their ratings on the bell curve: there is a group of top performers, a group that exceeds expectations, a group that achieves them and a handful of people that underperform. The number of bands and the percentages vary. The curve is forced, which means the percentages have to hold at scale. On a team of 20 you can argue for a fifth top performer in addition to the fourth. On a team of 200, the numbers have to come out.

Most recently the bell curve is losing ground to the power law, where a small number of people drive a disproportionate share of impact (O’Boyle and Aguinis found this pattern across researchers, entertainers, politicians and athletes in their 2012 study). So companies are swapping hard quotas for softer guidelines and moving more budget to the top performers.

But whatever the method, calibration still happens. It matters more, not less. Under a hard quota on a team of 200 there are 40 Top Performers and no more. Under a guideline your manager can argue for a forty-first, and that place goes to whoever has the most convincing case. A case is more convincing when other people in the room have seen your work.

What you can do

Most of the advice on how to prepare for performance reviews focuses on you and your manager. I summarize it in three steps:

1. Do a great job.

2. Update your brag file (to learn more about the brag file read this excellent piece by Julia Evans).

3. Work with your manager on the rating you would like to achieve in the next cycle, check every 3 months if you are on track and share your achievements from the brag file before the performance review.

This is great advice. Few people do it. Alex did the first and skipped the rest. But even people who do all three miss the point: your manager does not decide your rating. They defend it. So one more thing you can do is:

4. Prepare the room. Your manager presents your rating in the room and then their peers pour water or fuel on it.

What I mean by preparing the room:

• Write down the six to ten people likely to be in the calibration meeting: your manager’s peers, your skip, and sometimes senior individual contributors at your manager’s level.

• Mark the ones you have worked with in the last six months. They are the ones who might speak up. Supporters, neutrals or detractors?

• For supporters, close the loop on results. If their team helped you deliver something, give them the credit.

• For detractors, defuse them. If you screwed up, grab a coffee, apologize, ask for feedback. If they give feedback – act on it. If you don’t do this, they will share the story of your screwup in the meeting. I know, you hope that they have forgotten, but, trust me, they haven’t. If you fix it, they will share that story instead. And everyone loves to hear how someone came back from failure.

• If you have not worked with any of them in the last six months, ask your manager how to change that. A cross-functional project one of them is running, a shared review, support in a hiring event. You cannot fix the last cycle. You can set up the next one.

If it feels furtive, tell your manager that you are doing it. Any manager worth having will be pleased, because a case with outside corroboration is easier for them to defend than one without.

To make this concrete, what Alex could have done in my example above:

☑️ Checked the numbers on his last project and sent them to me before the review. (Sharing context.)

☑️ Pinged his former manager, congratulated them on the impact of the project and asked for a mentoring catchup. (Reminder to the old boss about the good stuff.)

☑️ At the mentoring catchup, asked the former manager for advice on how to exceed expectations in the new role. (Building mentoring relationship and sharing ambition that he may not yet be comfortable sharing with the current manager.)

☑️ Sent an email to the head of shared services praising specific team members for support of the project with numbers of the project impact. (Lifting others and preparing the room.)

Some people will feel uneasy about this. It looks like politics.

Politics is gaining at somebody else’s expense by means other than the work. Now look at what I suggested. Tell a team what their contribution led to. Give credit. Apologise to someone you let down and act on what they tell you. Ask a former manager for advice. None of it requires anyone to believe something that is not true, and nobody loses if you do it.

The alternative is not fairness. The alternative is not being recognised for your great work, unless you get lucky like Alex did.

I don’t recommend jumping to step four if you haven’t done the previous ones. If you and your manager are not on the same page about your performance, no amount of reaching up and across will help. And – don’t go campaigning aggressively across all of your manager’s peers. They will compare notes in the room and it will backfire.

Why do this? If you work hard, will it not eventually catch up with you?

Sure, reputation travels. If everyone stayed in the same role, it would find you. But everyone moves, all the time. Your manager takes a job in another team. Your sponsor leaves. Your org gets a new leader. Each time, you start again from zero context, missing one cycle of compensation and development opportunities.

A few years earlier I sat in another calibration meeting. A manager was presenting Anna*. He had rated her Exceeds and the case was strong. She was 20% ahead of her goals when the next best person on his team was 5% ahead, and she had just signed a key partnership, a negotiation that normally takes years. The room poked at the rating, it held, and we were ready to move on.

Then the Director spoke.

“Who was in that final negotiation with her? I know I wasn’t.”

“I wasn’t either. I was taking over the team around then.”

“She signed it on her own?”

“As far as I’m aware.”

“So she is overachieving by 20% vs next best at 5%, was Exceeds last year as well. We don’t have the details - you are her third manager in 18 months. And she signed a major partnership on her own. So… why are we discussing her at this level and not one level higher?”

“The promo process closed last week,” someone said helpfully.

Anna left the company two months later.

The system noticed her, but it was too late.

Don’t wait for the system. Focus on what you can do.

✅ Find out when the next review is. Five minutes.

✅ Write your brag file for the last six months. One hour, and useful for your own annual review even if you never send it.

✅ Ask your manager whether they want a list of your achievements ahead of the review. One message. Most say yes.

✅ Map the room and do one thing about one relationship. Thirty minutes. Do it this week, not in December.

(Manager, we look out for our teams, but forget to look out for ourselves. Your rating is discussed too, by your manager’s peers. When was the last time you spoke to them?)

If you are new to my newsletter, please subscribe. I write a lot about productivity, career, and combining it with raising children. If you are a subscriber already, share it with one friend who also goes through a performance review cycle.

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P.S. I am writing a book with a working title How To Be A Top Performer aimed at employees who want to be top performers and managers who want high performing teams. It will be short and practical. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations (like, what topics you would like me to cover). If you’d like to help shape the book, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

* Disclaimer: Names and details are changed, and my stories are composites drawn from many reviews.

I was managing a small team. I wanted to be good at it, so I read a few books. Good Manager Rule 1: show up to your employee 1:1s.

He was senior, had a large team, and was new to the company. Out of our four scheduled 1:1s he showed up to one. For the rest – no note, no cancellation, no apology. I sat in the meeting room each time, waiting. I felt unimportant.

I needed decisions from him, so I started sending him an email for each 1:1 he skipped: “Decision I need from you, plan for next week, achievements from last week”. I reasoned that if he saw me going in the wrong direction, he’d stop me. I never got any response. Either I was doing everything right, or it wasn’t worth his time.

It bothered me enough that I mustered up the courage to talk to him about it. I barely knew him. How do you challenge a man who might fire you?

He showed up to the next 1:1. This was my chance, and the next one might be a month away. My heart was in my throat as I spoke.

“I know you are very busy, but I find it difficult not knowing whether you will come to our 1:1 or not. I sit here, waiting for you, and I feel really neglected. Is there something we can do so that our 1:1s happen more frequently?”

He didn’t fire me. He laughed.

He said: “Is this bothering you? Let’s move it to Thursdays. Tuesdays are busy for me.”

And that was it.

He actually came to more 1:1s – and for the ones he skipped, he cancelled them in the calendar.

I didn’t have a name for it then. I had set a boundary. I learnt the word later, from a book about raising toddlers, and boundary works on senior executives too.

What’s a boundary?

A boundary at work is a limit you set to protect your time, energy, and well-being. It defines what you will and will not do, and what you will and will not accept from others.

Boundaries have a huge impact on our lives, but no one teaches us to recognise them, set them and defend them.

So we dance around each other’s, trying to be polite, and stumble over them anyway. We let ours be crossed and pay for it. Crossed often enough, it turns into resentment and burnout. Gallup found that 76% of employees experience burnout at work at least sometimes, and 28% feel it very often or always.

Signs that your boundary is being violated

Burnout is the lagging indicator. These come first:

• Irritability

• The sinking feeling when you see a message from a particular person

• Always moving your own commitments to accommodate others

• Regretting having said “yes”

• Repeatedly rehearsing a conversation in your head on your commute

• Using “No problem” and “it’s fine” a lot

• Being ‘fine’ at work and snapping at home for no good reason

If you recognised yourself, pick one situation and hold it in mind while you read. There is a five-step method at the end.

Sometimes you are your own enemy

But before we talk about other people, let’s look in the mirror. We are often unaware where our own boundaries lie.

I ran into this when I first started at Amazon 15 years ago.

The ownership was enormous and the work was fun, so I worked a lot. No one asked me to. My actions had a real customer impact, and there was always more I could do. A growing company is like an addictive video game.

After a while I noticed I was turning pessimistic. Life faded to grey.

Maybe I was pushing too hard. I started watching my mood like a canary in the coal mine, and the pattern showed up quickly: the grey arrived after a few consecutive 60-hour weeks. So I made a rule. Keep work under 60h, whatever happens. It held.

Balancing on the edge of burnout is a poor way to find your limits.

Sometimes we are ready to shift our boundaries before anyone even asks. If it is ambition, check that the people above you value it as much as it is costing you. If it is fear (”I cannot afford to lose this job”), that is harder, and I will come back to it.

Name it before you fix it

Boundary violations most commonly fall into five categories:

• Availability - Your hours. When you are reachable and how many hours in total you work.

• Workload - Your capacity. What you own and how much of it.

• Attention - Your focus inside those hours. I wrote a post about interruptions on this one.

• Autonomy - The “how” of the work. Micromanagement violates the autonomy boundary.

• Conduct - Your dignity. How you are spoken to and treated.

There are a few more boundaries that I won’t cover, like values (e.g. being asked to do something you think is wrong), environment (e.g. working conditions), money (e.g. reimbursement of certain work expenses), privacy (e.g. having access to employee personal phone).

So the categories above are what’s being claimed.

The next question is why it is claimed, because the answer determines whether you need a conversation, a negotiation, a decision, or a protocol.

Why they are violating your boundary:

• Awareness – the person is unaware of the boundary. In this case, a single polite conversation can help. It’s good to start from here.

• Constraint – the person is aware of your boundary, but they have constraints of their own. For example, your team is short-staffed and your boss is asking you to take on extra work while she is filling the position. In case of a constraint, you can and you should negotiate.

• Culture – sometimes, it is the norm around here. Investment bankers are known to be in the office until 1am, so you wouldn’t go into the field expecting workshops on the work-life balance. In case of the culture, you have a choice to fit in, negotiate a local exception (if possible), or leave.

• Intent – the violator is aware of your boundary and they are doing it anyway. This is the bucket we reach for first (“I have a bad boss”) and it is frequently wrong. Check the other three before you land here, then see the bully protocol below.

What to do when someone is violating your boundary

I will give you three situations from real life and then draw a few general lessons. Each situation has a different balance of power: down, up, across.

When it is a subordinate

Situation: Last-minute brainstorm

Category: Availability

Type: Awareness

I stand up to pack my bag. It’s 17:50 and I need to pick up my kids. An employee raises his head, sees that I am leaving and asks me a question. I stay behind and we spend a few minutes on the whiteboard brainstorming.

I am the last parent at the childcare again. The guilt goes in like a claw.

The next day the situation repeats. I stand up to leave, and he asks me another question. Irritated (ah, the sign!) I tell him: “Can you send me an email and I look at it when I get home?”

I discuss this in the next 1:1 with him and explain my boundary. He is fine with sending me an email or delaying the question till the next day.

I add the rule to my “How to work with me” manual for future team members.

A living doc on how to work with you scales. I give mine to new joiners, and I ask my team to write their own and swap them at offsites. It gets working styles and boundaries onto the table without a confrontation.

The original Manager README idea came from Rands in Repose.

When it is your boss

Situation: Overnight work request

Category: Availability

Type: Awareness/Culture

I once had a manager, a former top strategy consultant, who called in a meeting at 6pm and asked for results by the next morning. I was not in the meeting, but some members of my team were. They worked overnight and came to me the next day, worried that this may turn into a regular occurrence. The work he asked for was regular work, not an emergency.

I went to him to clarify the expectations. While Amazonians are known to work hard, usually we get more extensive deadlines than that.

His response: “If they were not OK with it, they should have said so.”

He meant it. He didn’t realise that for someone two levels below saying “no” was harder than jumping out of a plane.

Where he came from, an overnight turnaround was ordinary. Now he knew it was not ordinary here, and he had just given the team permission to say no.

The script I would use if I were in that meeting:

✅ “We hear your feedback. It is important to fix this. It is 18:30 now, so what I would suggest is that we come in tomorrow morning, clear our calendars and work on it until it is done. We will give you a progress update at 11 am. Does this work?”

It takes the problem seriously, commits the team, and leaves room for him to correct you if you have the urgency wrong.

If the response is: “We have a customer presentation tomorrow at 9am” (Why are we finding this out now?), then the boundary moves. The team is working late tonight, but can compensate for it later. And after the customer meeting you should discuss how to avoid the last minute surprises in the future.

When it is your peer

Situation: Yelling colleague

Category: Conduct

Type: Awareness (expectations mismatch, made worse by pressure)

I get a ping from a stakeholder: “I’ve just been in a very uncomfortable meeting. Frederic (senior manager from a partner team) yelled at Mark on your team because he hadn’t done something. You may want to check in with Mark. It was very awkward.”

I ping Mark right away.

“Hey, I heard you just had a bad meeting. Want to talk about it?”

Mark debriefs me. He is senior, so he holds it, but I can sense he is upset. I tell him I am sorry it happened and that I will take it up with Frederic.

I get off the phone and ping Frederic: “I have heard that you yelled at my employee, can we talk?”

We jump on a call and he huffs and puffs to me about the situation. I listen to understand his point of view. It is a mismatch of expectations. Frederic thought Mark owned the topic. Mark thought he was helping out on something that was not his.

I let him talk it out and clarify that Mark doesn’t own the topic. Then I say:

“Look, regardless of the situation, yelling at my employee is not appropriate. He is junior to you and it is not right to raise your voice at him. If you have a problem with my team, come to me. That’s why we have our regular 1:1. If you do it again, I will escalate it to your manager.”

Frederic apologises. He is under a lot of pressure. But I have given him a set of boundaries he can work with.

I call Mark again and debrief him on my conversation. We brainstorm how to avoid such situations in the future.

As with any conflict, understand first. If the other side is emotional or stressed, my message will not land. So I defuse the situation, and only then bring my boundary demand.

Across these three stories, the same things were true. Nobody was violating the boundary on purpose: it was a lack of awareness or a different cultural norm. And every time, there were two fixes to make: today’s, and the one that stops it in the future.

Be cautious on flexibility. Bending your boundary once can genuinely buy you goodwill, and I have done it. But make sure to signpost it as an exception. If no one knows it was an exception, it becomes your new baseline.

How to deal with a bully

While this is rare, you may come across a bully at work.

A boss who is yelling at you and others.

A peer who constantly escalates.

You have made them explicitly aware of your boundary, you have looked for a compromise to no avail, and what they are doing is not culturally accepted in your company. They are making your life miserable on purpose. What can you do?

This protocol works both at work and at school (I teach it to my kids).

The first step in dealing with bullies – start documenting.

“On this date at this time this has happened (witnesses, if any).”

Second step – seek coalition. Are there other people suffering from the same person? If it is a true bad actor, you will not be the only victim. Suggest that they document their experiences too. If nobody else has the same experience, find out what they do differently. It may be a technique you can borrow.

Third step – once you have a couple of instances, and your own efforts to resolve the conflict are not working, make your manager aware of the situation. Going up the management chain of the bully is the right next step and your manager can help. You can also check with your manager if it is possible to change projects or teams.

Finally, if you have already gone up your chain and the offender’s chain and it still hasn’t worked, it is time to involve HR. Documentation and coalition are your allies. They clearly show that the bully is the problem, not you. Once HR gets involved, and you have sufficient documentation and witnesses, the situation often resolves quickly.

If the bully is your boss, documentation and coalition matter even more. It is your word vs theirs. However, you have a decision to make: are you willing to fight? The easiest path may be to switch teams.

Low power situations

All of this assumes you are in a position to protect your boundaries.

But there are genuine situations when you are in a position of a lower power. Sole earner, on a work visa, bad labour market, just started a job, performance improvement plan.

Even in these situations, your ability to set boundaries is bigger than it seems.

I remember once, as a leadership team, we were reviewing an anonymous team survey where a verbatim comment said: “As an immigrant to this country I feel like I don’t have the right to say no.” We looked around the table and every single leader there was also “an immigrant to this country” which didn’t stop us from saying no to our own managers. Like my ex-consultant boss, we were expecting our people to tell us “no, I cannot do this”, like we did – but not everyone felt that they could.

Your leaders expect you to push back and tell them when things are not right.

I once had a top performer who was very good at Workload and Availability boundaries. He had his work planned out with estimates of how long things would take. Whenever I asked him to take on something new, he would quickly reprioritise and tell me what it meant. Sometimes he said “yes”, sometimes he said “no” – but “no” was always accompanied by “this is what it would cost”.

“You asked me to work on initiatives A and B, and now you are adding C. I cannot do all three. What is their relative importance to help me prioritize?”

Did I love hearing this as a manager? No. I would prefer to get everything done. I would also like to have my cake and eat it.

But I can live with a bit of disappointment. And I’d rather it be an explicit discussion, than finding out two weeks later that high priority initiative got dropped.

He used this method on me and I asked him to teach it to the whole team.

Now I am teaching it to you.

What else can you do?

• Do not ask for a blanket boundary, do it case by case. For example:

✅ “I cannot finish this tonight because I have plans I cannot cancel, but I will come in early tomorrow morning and finish it by 10 am. Would this work?”

• Concede now, but negotiate for the future.

✅ “Handling this escalation was hard on the team, how can we make it easier next time?”

• Ask colleagues how they handled it. Someone has usually solved a version of your problem already.

• Certain boundaries are backed by law. As an example, flexible work and the right to disconnect have been coming into force post-pandemic in many countries. They differ by country, so do your research and ask HR what your company policies are.

Most of the stories in this post end well. But that’s not always the case. A friend of mine was asked to do something he disagreed with. He refused. In the next re-org he was demoted from manager to individual contributor.

Boundaries have a price. So does not having them, and that one you pay every week.

Over to you

So what is the boundary situation that you need to deal with?

Try it next week. Most of the time, it costs you one brave conversation. You feel courageous and more in control.

Good luck (and let me know how it goes)!

P.S. I am writing a book with a working title How To Be A Top Performer aimed at employees who want to be top performers and managers who want high performing teams. It will be a short and practical. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations (like, what topics you would like me to cover). If you’d like to help shape the book, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

My team has worked on the case for two months. We benchmarked against recent country launches to cover every base. The financial model is solid. The market analysis is solid. We checked it, stress-tested it, synthesised it. My boss made us polish it so many times that I’m dreaming of certain paragraphs.

The VP is restless. He skims the doc, then flicks through the appendices. Something is bothering him. Not a good sign. At the thirty-minute mark I ask if everyone is ready. He dives straight in.

“Why don’t we build a fulfillment center in the country? I cannot see the business case in this document.”

Boom.

My mind goes blank. How could I have anticipated this question?

Amazon’s advantage in Europe is existing infrastructure: we can serve a new country cross-border. A fulfillment center is an expensive investment on day one. It would tank the business case, likely turn it into a “no go” on the five-year horizon.

“This is an expensive investment,” I hear myself say.

“I know. Look at the benefits, look at Prime offering, look at renting one, size the options. It is not. In. The. Doc.”

My boss steps in: “We have some preliminary calculations. Let us strengthen the case and get back to you.”

We finish the meeting early and walk out of the room. I give myself an F. I failed my VP — I hadn’t modelled something he thought was necessary. I failed my team — two months of their work, and it feels like none of it mattered.

My boss slows down. “You seemed defensive in there. That’s not a good way to handle these meetings. If you get a question you don’t know the answer to - just take a follow up.”

Oh yes, and I failed on this too. Great.

I failed not because I didn’t know the answer. Nobody knows every answer. I failed because I didn’t know how to handle not knowing. That’s the skill this piece is about: handling curveball questions.

Senior decision-makers see you once or twice a year. In the room, you’re secondary to whatever decision they are trying to make. But how you handle it doesn’t vanish into the ether — it resurfaces later, when your name comes up for a promotion and the senior person in that room remembers whether you belonged in it. They call it executive presence, and it’s a multiplier on the work. Nail the analysis and freeze in the Q&A, and the multiplier is zero.

Initially, I handled curveball questions the way I handled tricky exam questions at university. Prepare. Cover all the bases. My “backpocket” docs would end up longer than the actual six-pager. But Hermione Granger’s approach fails in the business world — you can learn the textbook, but the real world is more complex than the syllabus.

So I started asking every senior leader I could reach: “How do you handle the curveball questions?”

I got the full range of answers, from “It just comes naturally to me” to “Practice, practice, practice.” So here’s the playbook I built from all of it. It breaks into three parts: what you do before you’re in the room, while you’re in it, and after. If you’re admitted “to the room” occasionally, save this and practice it beforehand. If you’re in the room all the time, share it with your junior leaders. And if I’ve missed anything, tell me.

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Before the meeting - Preparation

When you hear “preparation”, you probably think: brainstorm a bunch of tricky questions with your team or AI brainstorming partner and prepare answers for each. That’s preparation 101.

The real prep is understanding your audience. What is in their head? What context do they have? How are they thinking?

This has saved me countless hours of busy work. I don’t need to cover all the bases – I need to figure out what questions they are likely to ask, and prepare for them.

To do this I often:

✔️ Ask the decision-maker directly what they want you to cover. It’s especially useful when they’re in the moment: they just asked your team for a piece of work, and you are missing the context. A quick follow-up clarifies it. This needs some courage — and a boss who doesn’t mind you jumping the hierarchy. (Some bosses will prohibit it and won’t do it themselves. Sometimes it’s easier to ask for forgiveness, but you know your boss better than I do.) Works best over messenger or email.

✔️ Reach out to someone close to the decision-maker — more accessible, and holding most of the same context. At Amazon, most VPs have a Chief of Staff (the role used to be called a “technical advisor,” or TA). Part of their job is making the VP effective, which means clarifying context and decision criteria before meetings. They can often pre-read your document and flag what’s missing.

✔️ Talk to someone who’s presented to this decision-maker recently, and ask what questions came up.

👉 What was the surprising question they asked you?

The decision-maker isn’t there to catch you out. They’re making a decision. Their questions feel tricky because they are operating at a different level of context — your job is to rise to it. The more you can shift into their frame of reference, the better you’ll answer their questions.

The piece of context I was missing in that VP meeting — and I only discovered by accident a few months later — was that he’d asked someone to size the fulfillment center business case two years earlier. Neither my boss nor I were in our roles back then, so we had no idea the question had ever been asked. To him, it looked like his request had been ignored. No wonder he was irritated.

The same rule applies when you’re presenting to an audience, not just a decision-maker: you need to be in their heads. What’s the demographic? What are their concerns? What’s morale like? Get the insider view before you walk in: talk to HR, check the morale surveys, talk to a couple of insiders to triangulate the picture.

In the meeting

Clarify the question

You are in the meeting. You get the tough question.

Make sure you are answering the right question. Which means: clarify.

✅ Can you elaborate on this?

✅ Just to make I am answering the right question – what do you mean by X?

This does two things: it buys you time, and it makes sure you’re answering the question they actually asked, not the one you assumed. (Save yourself from a “Mummy, what’s a virgin?” situation.)

Diagnose the type of question

In my experience, curveball questions fall into four types: a missing piece of data, a missing scenario, a blind spot, or a challenge to the frame itself.

A missing piece of data

👉 Example: What’s our price competitiveness in this category?

The answer here is a precise number. Often, it already exists in the appendix, the decision-maker just hasn’t found it. Point them to the right page. If you genuinely don’t have the number and can’t estimate it on the spot, take a follow-up (just like my boss suggested).

✅ “Let me get this number and come back to you.” (and then send an email as soon as you can)

Senior leaders ask this type of question to pull the team away from averages. Averages mask the opportunity: the mean hides the width of the distribution, and the outliers are often where the insight lives.

A missing scenario

👉 Example: What would happen if we did X?

This type requires you to switch into brainstorming mode and think out loud. You’ve usually worked through more scenarios than you present: three or four of the most distinct ones make the cut. The decision-maker may raise one you haven’t tested. The best move is to walk them through your reasoning live and shape the scenario together.

A blind spot

👉 Example: How would our customers alter their long-term behaviour if we made this change?

Teams naturally think in if-then terms, and forget the system around it, the system full of other agents who can change their behaviour in response. You catch the first-order consequences, and miss the second- and third-order ones. Maybe you’ve built the sustainability case but not looked at the commercials. Or nailed the commercials but missed the PR impact.

This question shows up when the decision-maker already believes you’re solving the right problem, but may be missing a piece of the puzzle.

A challenge to the frame

👉 An example question would be: Why are we doing this at all?

Unlike a blind spot, this isn’t a gap inside your analysis — it’s a challenge to the frame itself. The decision-maker is coming at it with fresh eyes, checking: are you even solving the right problem? Would your solution hold up from a completely different angle?

Manage your state

Work on your fight/flight/freeze response

You’re in the meeting with a Senior VP. They’re three or four levels above you, with more authority, more experience, more gravitas than you. You’ve probably heard stories of them tearing apart someone’s presentation. Your body treats this like a threat, so it goes into fight, flight, or freeze mode.

I remember getting feedback from a teammate early on: “You don’t seem like yourself in these meetings.” My freeze response was kicking in and my mind was going blank. It took me years to name what was happening. But now that you have a name for the mechanism, you can start working through your own reaction.

Practice

One of my bosses used to drill us: “You meet the senior VP in the elevator and they ask how your project’s going. Your answer, now!”

The one time I actually met a senior VP in the elevator, he was silent, lost in thought. All that practice, for nothing.

Still, the drilling was useful for something else: training yourself to communicate on point, at speed.

You can run the same drill today with an AI brainstorming partner: have it pepper you with questions and give you feedback on your answers.

Figure out what keeps you calm

If I feel like I did everything I could, my mind is calmer. So that’s what I aim for before every meeting: write a list, tick everything off.

A friend of mine has a specific breathing routine she runs through before big meetings and presentations.

Elite athletes build recovery routines for exactly this. Josh Waitzkin, a tai chi chuan world champion, developed a deliberate routine that lets him regain composure in seconds under extreme stress (I wrote about the lessons from his book here).

Buy time to think

Beyond clarifying the question, you can buy yourself more time before answering.

✅ Repeat the question back. Often the questioner jumps in with more detail unprompted.

✅ “Let me rephrase that as <the question, in slightly different words>. Am I understanding this correctly?”

✅ “Great question. Let me think about this for a second. Here’s how I’d handle it…”

✅ “We’d use a three-pronged approach here. First… second… and finally…” You don’t need all three points ready before you start talking. Start with the first, and your mind will find two and three as you go. Leading with structure makes you look in control, and if you get interrupted before the third point, nobody will notice.

After the meeting - Debrief

Once you’re out of the meeting, write down the curveball question you got. Think through how you could have handled it better, and what stopped you.

Did you underprepare?

Could you have anticipated the data question or the missing scenario?

Was it a blind spot, or a different frame of reference?

Did fight, flight, or freeze kick in?

Work on it for next time.

Run enough iterations, and answering curveball questions becomes second nature.

I was in the monthly Availability review for one of the Amazon retail teams. Their product availability was among the best worldwide, and they were duly proud of it. Their director congratulated them, then asked: “But what’s stopping us from achieving 100% availability?”

They stumbled. They’d focused so hard on improving availability that they’d never looked at the gap itself. I walked out of that meeting still turning the question over: how would I have answered it? I ran the numbers and found the three main reasons behind the gap at the EU level. We were already working on all three. We just hadn’t framed it that way.

Two days later, I was in my own review with the VP of Europe. He asked the exact same question. Senior leaders think alike, it turns out. I was calm, composed, and gave him the three reasons and our action plan in twenty seconds. He nodded and asked to include the data bridge on the first page from now on.

My boss just looked at me: “Wow, you nailed it.”

In the end it was just practice, practice, practice.

If you’re in the room occasionally, come back to this piece before your next high-stakes meeting. If you’re in the room all the time, forward this to the leader on your team who’s about to be in one for the first time.

Share

P.S. I am writing a book with a working title How To Be A Top Performer aimed at employees who want to be top performers and managers who want high performing teams. It will be a short and practical. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations (like, what topics you would like me to cover). If you’d like to help shape the book, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

“Bags not!” I said laughing. “You win.”

I had a busy week coming up too – a team workshop and a VP review. Then again, it’s always busy at Amazon.

Crisis Day 0, 19:00. Now I wasn’t laughing. I was staring at my toddler who barely touched his dinner and the thermometer that said 38.5C (101.3F).

Oh-oh.

He went to sleep easily that night, so I sat down to rearrange my meetings and squeeze in a couple more working hours.

Crisis Day 1, 7:00: I gave him nurofen and took him to the creche. Not mentioning anything about the fever (yes, I know, I’ve been THAT parent). Nurofen will buy me a few hours.

Workshop with the team in the morning, reshuffle the topics to cover the key ones I am needed for.

Crisis Day 1 12:10: “Your child has fever, please pick him up now”.

You cannot bring him in until the fever is normal again.

Damn. Where are you, childcare, when I need you?

We both moved to the new country, started new roles, had to prove ourselves and had no family around to help. Luckily, in the integration course in my first week I learnt that Luxembourg has a service Krank Kanner Doheem (literally: Sick Children at Home) where, if you child is sick, you can call and they will send a trained childminder to your home while you go to work. You have to register in advance and submit a bunch of paperwork. So I registered. It was time to call them now.

Crisis Day 1 15:00: They had a caregiver available the next day (morning only) and the following day all day. Phew! She would show up the next morning at 7am and leave at 12.

I typed up the instructions and translated them into French and German (bless Google Translate) because 11 years ago English was not widely spoken in Luxembourg.

Crisis Day 2 and 3. The foresight paid off - the nurse who came the next morning only spoke German.

I got myself 1.5 more days of work and by the evening of the last day my toddler had recovered.

The crisis survived.

This wasn’t a one-off. Every working mum deals with crises like this, over and over.

A colleague once joked she was paying a fortune “to boost my daughter’s immune system”. On Monday her baby would go to nursery, on Tuesday she would have fever or vomit, so my colleague would call an emergency childminder. The baby would recover by Friday and then next week the cycle would start again. She was thinking about hiring a full-time nanny – it would be cheaper.

Emergencies are guaranteed. And the more kids you have, the more frequently sh*t will happen.

Build that safety net in advance. Think disaster preparedness. If you haven’t built the net, you are the net.

I can’t help seeing my family as a system with predictable failure modes.

Failure mode one: Default childcare is failing you - build defence before you need it.

Failure mode two: Mum is out, no one knows how to run things. The fix only works if you’ve trained another operator before you need them. An untested partner isn’t a backup.

Failure mode three: overloaded system. This is the layer people forget: the safety net has a load limit too. All the redundancy in the world won’t save a week you have overcommitted past capacity. Build in slack on purpose.

Here’s how I’ve engineered around these failure modes.

Scenario 1. Default childcare is failing you (or child is sick)

This is the most common emergency and the hardest to build redundancy for. But you can think of it as “defence in depth” – layers prepared in advance. On top of the regular childcare you have (school, nursery, nanny), you can build contingency layers. These layers are generally: FFN (family, friend or neighbour - which in majority of cases means a grandparent), paid au pair or nanny, and one-off emergency option (subsidised or not). If a nanny already looks after your child day to day, she’s not a contingency. She’s the default.

Grandparents have been running backup childcare for generations: in the United States today 22% of grandparents provide regular childcare and 72% provide occasional childcare. In Germany and Italy 46% and 39% respectively provide regular childcare (source).

Here’s a pattern I’ve watched repeat across many teams, over many years: women who kept climbing almost always had real, reliable childcare backup — a nanny, an au pair, a grandparent, a stay-at-home partner. Women without that support weren’t less capable or less driven. They were firefighting solo. You can cover one crisis, two… eventually, one too many arrives at once. I recently saw a post on Instagram with 49K likes from a supermom of 2 under 2 who took a step up at work. Both she and her husband had ambitious roles and no extra help. After 10 months she had to step back and ask for a smaller role.

The difference is not ambition. It is infrastructure.

Nanny and au pair are not accessible to everyone. However, many families who can afford them, do not think about it. It feels unnecessary. It feels like “I can do it myself”. Meanwhile, for the mothers I see around me, hiring domestic and childcare help is an investment in their own career and we are not treating it as such.

Creating these options is not easy. They require time, energy, trade-offs and luck. Bringing my mother over to Luxembourg required 3 years of court appeals. I know colleagues who went through the same 3 year process and got rejected at the end.

It’s impossible to find a solution that would work for every family all the time. Online is filled with stories of things that didn’t work. They get more clicks. Keep testing arrangements, and eventually you’ll weave your own net of what works.

Maybe one grandparent can come and stay for 3-6 months per year. Maybe a friend’s au pair can be your occasional emergency caregiver. Maybe other working moms have creative options – they won’t share unless you ask. “Building a village” in the neighbourhood helps too. If school gets cancelled due to weather and your kids have friends nearby, you can split the day half-and-half with other parents.

For emergency childcare, keep a checklist ready for the substitute caregiver:

☑️ child allergies,

☑️ medications with precise dosage and timing,

☑️ food preferences,

☑️ nap times,

☑️ home wifi password,

☑️ your number and backup contact (partner, grandparent).

Write this checklist once and then update each time you need it. It is always easier to work from an 80% ready list, than to reconstruct everything from scratch under pressure.

You do not have to absorb every emergency yourself. Hiring help isn’t a household expense. It’s a career investment. Build your safety net.

Scenario 2. Mum is out, no one knows where things are

In Fair Play, Eve Rodsky recalls an incident when mums gathered to march in support of breast cancer survivors and then have their “girls lunch”. But the lunch fell through because their partners kept texting things like “Where is Josh’s soccer bag” or “I cannot find Anna’s pants” or “What do I make kids for lunch”. They had to cut the lunch short and go home to sort it out.

If this sounds familiar, this scenario is for you.

Even in families that started as 50/50 before kids, during maternity leave, the woman picks up a lot of home and baby responsibilities. And because we practice them a lot, we get better and better, so the “oh, I’ll just do it myself” labour division kicks in. The trick is that even a small task, too small to bother delegating, often leads to a string of bigger and bigger tasks - and by the time you notice, you’re in over your head.

Signing a permission slip takes ten seconds. That ten seconds turns into two minutes adding it to the family calendar, five minutes checking supplies — and reordering sunscreen. If, heaven forbid, it is an educational daytrip abroad (Luxembourg speciality) it will require a visit to the townhall for an official permission which wipes out two hours from your work day. I am all for educational trips, but can we please change the paperwork rules already?

So we build expertise, clock our 10,000 hours and become irreplaceable.

That’s not simply a competence gap. It’s an information gap. Ten thousand hours of practice means that you have built a whole library of small patterns and hacks. We don’t think of it as a knowledge library, but it is.

In the office “you cannot be promoted if you are irreplaceable”. The advice we get: train your replacement. The same principle applies at home. Do you want to be promoted from every-evening-lunchbox-maker?

Hand off the playbook.

In most cases the second operator is your partner, but from a certain age and for certain tasks, it can be children too – the lunchbox, for instance.

Three most common mistakes mums make in this situation: 1) they throw the person in the deep end and hope they will figure it out, 2) they rescue too soon, and 3) they criticise.

I am guilty of all three.

Throw in the deep end – with a lifebuoy. When my husband took over organizing our kids’ birthdays - I gave him my own checklist. It’s rare enough that anyone forgets the essentials. It doesn’t stop him from periodically asking me “Do you think I forgot something?” - but then we check the list together.

As you can guess, I am a big fan of checklists, standard operating procedures and written instructions.

I have a holiday packing list for myself and kids. I print each of them a copy before holiday and let them pack. Even the five year old (his sister reads it to him). We do occasionally end up with ten pairs of shorts and not enough socks, but that’s how they learn real consequences.

Rescue too soon – let them fail and learn. When my kids are going to a sports practice and I am in the room - I am going to be the ponytail-maker, shoelace-tier and water-bottle-filler. If I am not in the room, the laces get tied, ponytails made, and – yes, water bottles sometimes get forgotten, though there is drinking water at the pitch. And after getting sunburnt once, my daughter is now quite diligent at reminding everyone about the sunscreen. The best solution I found is to step away and get busy doing something else.

You have to be patient. Like, really patient.

Take the morning routine. Getting three little kids out of the door on time is not easy. My husband was in charge. It took him months of iterations to develop the system that worked. He gave the kids more autonomy: a designated schoolbag-and-sports corner, plus sticky cards spelling out the order of tasks. I wouldn’t have thought of it.

Picture of the kids morning checklist in our living room.

He bought a big box of matchbox cars, put it on display and told our youngest “If you do not tantrum and we get to school on time, you will get a new matchbox car when you come back home”. It didn’t save us from all the tantrums, but it was more effective than I anticipated. And no, my son doesn’t demand a car each day for going to school now 🙂.

The best thing about it? The system works. And it doesn’t need me to run it.

Criticise – set the right bar and praise instead. If you were coaching a beginner in the high jump, you wouldn’t set the bar at Olympic gold level, would you? But that’s exactly what we do with the household tasks.

It’s hard enough to take on something new, but if all the person hears is criticism instead of encouragement, their motivation plummets.

Instead, spot them doing things right.

❌ “Where are the veggies?”

✅ “Thanks for making the quick dinner tonight.”

Give them the playbook, negotiate where the bar needs to be and step back. Do. Not. Criticise.

I recommend going on business trips. If you feel like you cannot, practice Scenario 2 modes until you can. Do a few trial runs first, so the dad has mastered the morning and evening routines before you actually leave. And research shows that work-family conflict eases for women during the business trips, as you get some respite from the mental load. Though it climbs back up once you return. Maybe by then your partner is grateful to have you back.

If your family members know what to do when you are out – you get more freedom to BE out.

Scenario 3. All things colliding in the same busy week

A couple of years back, I had one of those weeks. The work was slammed. Looming business trip. And my youngest got very sick. I was researching his condition, booking specialist visits, booking flights.

Then I got Covid. Covid usually wipes me out for a week. All I could do was lie down in a dark room, not even read.

So I cancelled everything at work, including travel, handed the specialists’ appointments to my husband and locked myself in the bedroom.

And everyone survived fine.

We can drop more of these balls than we’d think. So for crazy weeks my rule is: cancel and reschedule. An excuse from a working mom most people will understand. They may offer help too.

But if you are having a “crazy week” every other week, it’s probably self-inflicted. Time to apply some planning tactics. Here are my three hard-earned ones.

The first one: say “yes” only if you are willing to go tomorrow. Someone invites you to a conference in New York in three months. This sounds appealing so you say yes. As the date gets closer, reality catches up: a work deadline lands right after. It cuts into the kids’ vacation. You’ll be jetlagged. The venue is on the outskirts of the city, and the topic is barely relevant to what you do.

You start wondering - why did I say yes in the first place? Future plans always look better from a distance.

So for each such future commitment I test it: “If this event was happening tomorrow, would I go?”

If the answer is ”I already have too much on”, the answer is no.

The second one is to set policies, Tim Ferriss style.

For instance, I used to bake, but now I don’t. Too much effort. So whenever there is a birthday, a sports club event, a bake-off sale - I buy a cake or don’t bring anything.

The third tactic, for dealing with a never-ending list of things that have to get done: queue them and do them one at a time.

Earlier this year I had about 8 prescription papers for various kids procedures from the paediatrician. If I were to do them all at once, I would just live in hospitals. This was not going to happen.

How did I eat the elephant? Piece by piece.

I picked up the most urgent one and set up an appointment for it. Once we dealt with that, I picked up the next. And so on.

Simply knowing that I would eventually get to all these issues, keeps me calm.

I’d been using this approach for years before I discovered it has a scientific backing.

Zeigarnik effect states that unfinished tasks occupy working memory and create persistent cognitive tension until resolved. Masicampo and Baumeister found that simply making a plan to finish a task resolves that tension. Turns out, eating elephant piece by piece is the right approach.

So here we are - three failure modes, three layers of the safety net. Build them before you need them. It takes time. It takes multiple iterations, especially if kids are involved as operators. Don’t give up. Have another bite.

The system you build will never be perfect. It will fail sometimes. All systems have an error rate. Go from 20% error rate to 10%, and that’s still a 2x relief. You’ve got this, momma. Keep going.

So where was I? Oh yeah.

External interruptions train your brain to interrupt itself. If we have been continuously interrupted for one hour, it will be harder to focus during the next one even without any interruptions. Minimize the external interruptions, and you get more deep work done during actual working hours.

Microsoft 365 telemetry shows that an average employee gets pinged every 2 minutes - email, messages, meeting reminders. Millions of users. They know. They are probably going “muahaha!” right now:

Microsoft, please change the default system setting to “no notifications”. It will drive a mental health revolution. I promise.

But until they do so, you are on your own. With my 15 tips below. Tips 1-6 plus the note in the end are for ICs. Tips 7-15 are for managers. Jokes are for everyone.

Tips for everyone

#1. Disable all notifications on your devices

We have this huge FOMO about disabling notifications. Let me tell you straight — you will not miss out on anything. I have had notifications disabled for 20+ years, working for 5 different companies and 11 different bosses. This didn’t stop me from being praised, promoted and rated as a top performer.

But this will never work in my job!

If your job is an emergency helpline, you are right. For everyone else: knowledge workers are not measured on response speed. We don’t need to be ON all the time. Even on call roles run rotations – say, one week in six. If your team needs constant coverage, look at what first responders do and adopt one of their models.

Yeah, but my boss expects immediate responses!

Does she?

You will see your boss’s messages within 30 minutes anyway and reply the moment you do. Most managers know you are in the middle of something. They will wait. If you are unsure, have the conversation — I would prefer my own employees not to be interruption-driven.

I keep a VIP group (my manager and spouse) and mute everyone else.

Viable. Fiddly to set up across all apps. There is a drawback of being buzzed about the color of flip flops for your son during the board meeting. Or by your boss accidentally at midnight. I prefer a 100% filter.

I recently disabled almost all notifications on my personal phone. You know, those badge icons at the top? I caught myself clearing them obsessively – responding to messages, archiving emails – then putting my phone down with a sense of accomplishment. Only to realise I hadn’t done the thing I picked it up to do!

Polina’s focus - 1 : Notifications - 0.

Try it for two weeks, see how it feels.

But what if the school calls with an emergency?

They will find you. My phone is permanently on silent. Last time there was a school emergency, I happened to be looking at it when they called.

The universe gets through on the important stuff.

#2. Do not start your day in email

We have all heard this advice. We fully intend to follow it. Then Outlook opens the email first and “Oh, here is the answer I’ve been waiting for!”.

Thirty minutes later, your morning concentration is gone. “Muahaha!” again.

You can change the default Outlook setting to open your calendar instead.

File > Options > Advanced > Outlook start and exit > Browse next to “Start Outlook in this folder:” > Calendar > OK > OK. If your version looks different, Google it.

I heard this on a senior leaders course at Amazon three years ago. The collective exhale in the room was palpable. The best productivity tip I have ever received, hands down.

#3. Limit email checking to two blocks

Tim Ferris pioneered email batching in his 4-Hour Workweek in 2007. His autoresponder read: “Due to high workload, I am currently checking and responding to email twice daily at 12:00 P.M. ET and 4:00 P.M.”

I block half an hour for email, twice a day.

There are apps like Boomerang Inbox Pause (paid) that companies use to block incoming emails during set hours. If your company doesn’t have it, use willpower.

#4. Set up access channels with different priority

A VIP group gives right to certain people to interrupt you on anything. Priority channels solve this. Even VIPs get triaged.

Mine: Email → Slack → WhatsApp. WhatsApp I check multiple times a day, even on holiday. Slack I read and answer the same day — inbox zero for personal messages. Email — I declared bankruptcy years ago. Too many, too long. I use filters instead: I read emails from my chain of command, emails my team flags for my attention, and emails related to our top 5 priorities.

Your channels will differ. Set them up and tell the people who matter.

#5. Be in the meeting

One of my bosses used to ask right before the meeting: “So, what do we want to get out of this?”

At first, this threw me off. “What do you mean? They scheduled it”.

His point was: don’t be in the meeting that doesn’t give you value. He trained me to walk into any meeting with my own agenda.

Like:

☑️ I want to convince stakeholder X.

☑️ I want to get everyone aligned on Y.

☑️ I want context on Z.

(The last one is a cop-out. There are faster ways to get context than an hour-long meeting).

Checking email and clearing approvals while nominally in a meeting is not a great use of your time. It is both things done badly, with context switching draining you the whole time.

If the meeting isn’t worth your time, decline upfront. If you realise mid-meeting you are not needed, tell the meeting owner, drop off and get something useful done.

#6. Wear big headphones

Big headphones send a signal: “please do not interrupt me”.

Resting bitch face helps too.

If you are not naturally equipped with one, hide away from your office desk.

One more thing: brown noise. Every parent has tried white noise to get a child to sleep. When they are finally asleep, you get out of that room relieved – white noise is strangely draining.

I had no idea brown and pink noises existed until a reader mentioned it (thanks, Jaimi). I tried it when writing this post. Much nicer than white noise! Like a waterfall in the distance.

Tips for managers

I wrote about the team capacity formula in the manager productivity hacks post:

More Resource is off the table in Big Tech. Everyone is chasing Capability upgrades: AI tools, upskilling. But the Interruption sits right there, forgotten, low-hanging fruit.

#7. You are the biggest interruption

Most managers underestimate their own impact on their team.

I open Slack and see one message in my VIP queue: “Hey”.

It was sent 15 minutes ago.

My heart starts racing: “Hi boss, what’s up?”. Send.

Silence.

Let me see if there is anything in the email from him. No.

He still hasn’t read my message.

I have no choice but to keep checking Slack every 2 minutes from now on.

Disclaimer: my boss has totally never done this, I just heard that some other people do this.

✅ Put your request in the same message as “hey”.

Add this to your next 1:1 doc: “I want to minimize interruptions for you – from me and from others. What’s the single biggest thing that would help?” Then listen.

#8. Discuss communication norms in 1:1s and team huddle

You know what works for you. Make it explicit for your team.

If you need your team to read your email within 5 minutes, say so. If you don’t have a stopwatch, tell them they can respond when they see it. Clarity beats guessing.

Discuss team norms too. You may have a chatty colleague who arrives at 10 am mid-focus-block. Or maybe that’s the moment the whole team looks forward to — a stretch, a coffee, a human conversation. Find out which.

Some people need a brainstorming partner. Others need a corner to hide in. Pair up the brainstormers. Let the corner-hiders put up their red bandanna do-not-disturb signs.

#9. Set up office hours and triage queues with SLAs

If your team handles a high volume of stakeholder requests, set up office hours, triage queues, and SLAs.

But we are not an operations team!

I have run many strategic teams at Amazon. The difference between operational and strategic teams is that operational teams have tools to handle high inbound volume quickly and efficiently.

Strategic teams have a few specialized experts that everyone wants a piece of. As their manager, I have no idea how many times a day they are interrupted. They say “oh, it’s nothing”. Then I introduce a ticket queue and see five tickets a day. They see 5 tickets too and suddenly understand the price of being the nice go-to person. So they quickly implement the next tip 👇

#10. Document Frequently Asked Questions and point everyone to them first

Last year one of my teams trained an AI persona on their FAQs. At some point everyone was on holiday or sick and an obscure technical question landed on me. I was about to reply “I have no idea, let’s wait for Monday” when I remembered the AI persona. I asked. It answered. I sent the link to the requester: “try this.” It solved the issue.

Build a good FAQ. Think of it as your lines of defence: first line automated, second line junior expert, third line senior expert.

#11. Tell your team that you are happy to deal with escalations

When stakeholders cannot reach your team, they come to you. Zero escalations usually means your team is overstretching. Some escalations are healthy. Normalise them.

One of my top performers managed a busy operational process. She was getting the important things done.

When a stakeholder escalated: “X hasn’t responded to my follow-ups from yesterday, can you help?” — I pointed them to the wiki: SLA for their request was five working days, and they would hear back by the deadline.

Escalations show you the system is working as designed. When it isn’t, they show you what to fix.

#12. Have a visible team’s goals list

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) work well for this.

“Our team is heads-down on our OKRs <link>. If your request isn’t related to them, we won’t be able to help until next quarter.”

No OKRs? A shared goals document does the same job.

#13. Clarify expectations before committing your team

“Sure, we can do this”, says a well-intentioned manager. Internal monologue, exposed to noone: “This will probably take my team 30 minutes. Query some data and send an email”.

Partner team manager: “Yes 💪. Done and polished for my board meeting”.

Team: “That’s three days of work out of nowhere. I guess I’m working overnight”.

Two things to prevent this:

First, catch yourself committing and clarify on the spot: “I expect this would take my team 30 minutes. We can turn it around this week or next.”

If you don’t know the scope, don’t commit: “Let me huddle with my team and get back to you by X” or “Submit it to our intake queue (Tip #9!) and we’ll get back to you next Tuesday.”

Second, debrief your team right after. Clarify the new task priority as:

🔴 Drop everything now
🟡 This week
🟢 Do if you can, this week or next
👋 Nice to have
🚫 Actually, don’t do

The debrief can be a Slack message. It doesn’t need to be a meeting.

#14. Anticipate interruptions

In every cross-functional role I have had, the most disruptive interruptions were predictable. Someone has a big meeting coming. They need data. They ping you the day before as if it is an emergency. It is not. They just didn’t plan ahead.

So I plan ahead for them.

I keep a rolling two-month calendar of all the key meetings scheduled across our partner teams and review it in the weekly team huddle. When someone pings me with “I need this piece of data for Andy Jassy’s doc today” I already know their review is in two weeks. Which means the deadline is not today.

This gives me three things:

• I can call the bluff: “your meeting is not until the 14th, give my team more time”.

• I can plan for genuinely busy periods instead of being ambushed by them.

• I can sometimes avoid redundant meetings altogether: “we already have X meeting scheduled with the right attendees — can we add this topic there?”

Feel free to steal the rolling calendar. It is the closest thing I have found to a crystal ball.

#15. Set time blocks in your team’s calendar and defend them

If you discuss with your team and decide that they want a dedicated “maker’s time”, block it in their calendar. I have seen the “no meeting Wednesday” or “no meeting until 3pm on certain days”.

A verbal agreement is fine, but a calendar block gives your team explicit permission — and it’s visible to stakeholders too.

Your job as manager is to defend this time from external stakeholders, including your boss. You won’t protect it 100%. Aim for 80%.

Revisit it every six months. Still working? What got in the way? New team members may not even know the policy exists.

Managers: you don’t have to agree with all 15 tips. But if even one is worth trying — send it to your team before the next huddle and discuss it there.

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A note for Individual Contributors

Have you read the manager section and thought: “I wish my manager would do this”?

I hear you.

Before I became a manager, I read books for managers and wished my bosses would read them too.

I remember a senior leadership course at Amazon — culture norms, burnout, managing up — where someone asked the trainer: “Do you teach this to Directors and VPs too?” Everyone laughed because they had the same question.

The adults are us, you know?

You have more power than you think. Try this:

“Hey boss, I read this article in Polina’s newsletter and want to do a small experiment for two weeks to protect my focus time. For this I need…”

Then negotiate.

✨ Maybe focused blocks only work Tuesday and Wednesday mornings — other days you are needed in meetings.

✨ Maybe you agree to trial “no notifications” policy for 2 weeks.

✨ Maybe you build the ticket queue and FAQ just for yourself and see if it helps. Good ideas spread.

If you find something that gives you more focused hours, share it. Managers love grassroots innovation. You would be surprised how much you can shape team norms without a management title (and guess who I am more likely to recommend for the next team lead position?)

What’s your tip #16? Drop it in the comments.

Thanks to Richard Russell for beta-reading this post.

P.S. I am writing a book with a working title How To Be A Top Performer aimed at employees who want to be top performers and managers who want high performing teams. It will be a short and practical. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations (like, what topics you would like me to cover). If you’d like to help shape the book, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

I started this newsletter 18 months ago alongside a full-time job at Amazon and three children at home. I write about meaningful work, productivity under real constraints, and careers that compound. I publish every other week.

I write one post a year to take stock of the numbers and mechanisms that are building my flywheel. I keep discovering more and more. Read the 7 lessons from last year if you are curious.

Lesson 8. It’s not likes, it’s shares

Four months ago I fed Claude all my posts and their numbers and asked what worked. It told me I was measuring the wrong thing. Likes are vanity. Share rate is the engine. Mine was hovering around 1%, so I ignored it as noise.

What is a good share rate? I asked. Turns out:

I was sitting on a post with a 2.9% share rate and had no idea.

Lesson 9. What drives the share rate

So I asked Claude where I can learn more about shareability and who has good insights on the topic. It gave me three sources.

One was Contagious by Jonah Berger. I had already read the book and it didn’t inspire many ideas for my newsletter. It’s an MBA professor type of textbook, useful as a primer on driving word-of-mouth.

The second recommendation was . He writes about viral products. I earmarked some of his stuff to read later, especially around product engagement and retention.

But the home run was with his POP writing framework, his Ultimate Guide to Writing Online and his How I Write podcast. I added 20 episodes to my list in one sitting. Three favourites so far: Alex Hormozi on copywriting, Daniel Pink on writing truly useful stuff and Atul Gawande on improving your thinking through writing.

Lesson 10. How this knowledge impacted my share rate in practice

My average share rate went from 0.7% in 2025 to 1.4% in 2026 to date. And here is the graph of the total views for the newsletter since inception:

I have found two things that improve the share rate.

The first is the trigger topic. Starting a new role, for instance. People change roles 13 times on average — and that’s before counting internal moves, promotions, and scope resets.

The second thing is the depth of experience behind the post. The more deeply I experienced the topic, the better share rate it got. I had 6 distinct roles in my 14 years at Amazon and even for the roles I “stayed in” my scope expanded, team and stakeholders changed every year. So I perfected the starting playbook before sharing it. Save it now and thank me later.

I have not yet been able to improve the share rate by spending more time on the post. Better writing improves a post from 1.1% to 1.2%. But the condensed years of usefulness is what drives the gradient up.

That’s why overnight success takes a decade. The usefulness has to accumulate before it can be shared.

I can do it through my own experience, or by interviewing others. This is what Lenny Rachitsky did for his newsletter. It was many instances of wisdom, distilled.

Lesson 11. I stumble on hits in the process of writing

Measuring, learning and optimising lifts the average. But most likely, you will not have your best idea asa result of this analysis. It will come to you in the process of writing. Often, a terrible first draft will turn into your best piece.

Kevin Kelly said it. I lived it.

I was mulling over the draft of my Ultimate Guide to 1:1 post. It didn’t look like a future hit. I kept questioning what value I am adding by writing things that Andy Grove, Ben Horowitz and Julie Zhuo already covered? And then on Friday night, one day before my Saturday publish deadline, it dawned on me that no one really teaches an individual contributor the value of the 1:1. It meant scrapping everything and starting over at 10pm. I did it anyway. That post went to get 50K views and a 4% share rate — the best I’ve ever had.

Lesson 12. Promoting other people’s content brought me 62 subscribers from one note

I have created a marketing routine that I have been using unchanged since the beginning. I write a post (95% of all effort) and then create Substack note, tweet and LinkedIn post. I use Claude to help me with drafts and angles based on the original post and then edit the drafts. The marketing part takes me less than 30 min.

Dave Anderson wrote about high value subscribers coming from LinkedIn so I use that as my main “marketing channel”. Colleagues tell me they like my LinkedIn posts. I want to say: read the newsletter, it’s better. Instead I say: thank you. So far LinkedIn has given me 8% of my new subscribers.

Substack has given me 70% overall (search is 1% and the rest is “direct” or not attributable).

Substack notes brought just over 50% of my subscribers. The notes where I promote my posts, the notes where someone else promotes my post, and — this was a complete surprise — the notes where I promote someone else’s good content. For instance, this note when I restacked Operator’s Handbook post brought me 62 subscribers. Who knew?

These days, inspired by , I started adding second and third promo note. Giacomo is quite active on notes and often reposts very similar notes at different times of the day. I have seen his subscriber and follower growth, so I am stealing his trick!

Some numbers from this experiment:

• the first note about promo decisions post got 1,176 impressions and 113 interactions (11% click-through),

• for the second one the click-through rate was 8%,

• for the third one 7%.

Cumulatively, the follow up notes I measured gave me between 30% to 56% additional click-throughs compared to the original note. So Giacomo is not doing it for nothing.

Another trick I learnt from : I restack when people restack some piece of my content with a note or a quote. Creators should do this more for each other - this lifts interesting “back catalogue” articles and, as I discovered above, drives subscribers for the restacker too.

Finally, as every marketer will tell you, it is much easier to promote a good product. The note saying “This post was shared over 1,400 times” got 62K impressions. Let your winners run.

Lesson 13. The audience is larger than you think

Internet researcher Jakob Nielsen formulated the 90-9-1 rule which breaks community engagement into three tiers:

• Creators 1%: The power users who are most actively engaged. They start discussions and drive the conversation. For a newsletter of 2000 subscribers, this is just 20 people.

• Contributors 9%: Users who participate occasionally. They comment, reply, or share the creators’ posts. This is the visible part of the audience, another 180 people.

• Observers 90%: The silent majority. They read, watch, or consume the content but never respond or actively engage. For the creator these people are not visible. You have to trust that these people are there, they are reading and benefitting from it.

The stage is bigger than it looks from where you’re standing.

Lesson 14. Series decay - part 1 buys subscribers, parts 2 and 3 return to baseline

The research on newsletters suggests that series work to increase subscriber count. It makes sense. If the first post of the series is good, people subscribe to get the next one.

I have tried this approach out of necessity: some posts became too time-consuming, so I have to stop and save the rest for next time.

The first post, indeed, gets a boost of subscribers, but parts 2 & 3 return to average. For instance, part 1 of Senior Manager Guide to AI post had 2.5K views and 60 new subscribers, part 2 had 700 views and only 3 subscribers which was close to my average at the time. Finishing part 3 after this felt like a slog.

My rule now: two parts maximum.

Lesson 15. Testing titles

Substack allows to run an experiment on titles. In the first hour of newsletter publish, if I choose to do so, it does an A/B test, sending the newsletter to equal number of subscribers and monitoring which title gets a higher open rate.

It is funny, but the titles I like never win:

My favorite “Why Your Best Performance Isn’t Getting You Promoted” got 19% initial open rate while Inside the Promotion Decision: A Field Guide got 24%.

“Two Careers, Young Kids, No Time: How to Survive The Squeeze” had 21% first hour open rate and The Modern Family Wasn’t Designed for Two Careers got 29%.

Polina vs audience 0:2. I now run the title tests before trusting my instincts.

***

Graham Weaver tells a story on Invest Like the Best podcast when he didn’t make the rowing team his first year in college. They called everyone who didn’t make it “land warriors” and gave them access to rowing machines. He calculated how many people got cut and worked out that he had to show up at 5:30am in order to get a machine to himself, so he did. And - no one else showed up. But he kept coming every morning and after 3 weeks, the only other guy who was rowing so early too, Mike Teti, who was training for the US national team, took Graham under his wing and taught him some things about rowing. By putting in the reps, Graham got on the team, got to captain by his final year and led the team to win the national championship.

Graham’s Mike Teti turned out to be one person. Mine turned out to be hundreds — readers who forwarded a post to a colleague, creators who restacked something I wrote, strangers who sent a one-line reply saying why they subscribed. I am 40 reps in. No idea what rep 80 looks like. I can’t wait to find out.

What I am looking forward to

Do more collabs and content syndication. James Clear pitched his best work to major media outlets and built his subscriber base through it. I haven’t done this yet. That’s my biggest untapped lever. If you’re a creator or editor who might be interested, let me know.

Learn more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). My SEO knowledge is 20 years old and it shows — only 1.1% of my visitors come from search, and even less from AI. AEO is new SEO re-dressed. I’ve been leaving traffic on the table. Time to fix this.

Get better at marketing. I want to do more marketing experiments. inspired me to keep a Marketing Inspiration Board — a file where I steal ideas from other creators.

Here is one I am trying today. I have a LinkedIn post promoting this newsletter: HERE. Liking it takes two seconds and shows it to a few hundred of your connections. That’s how many of you found me. TIA!

Choose a name for my newsletter. I need a name for this newsletter. ‘Polina’s Newsletter’ has served me for 18 months but it’s not a brand. My favourite option is High Agency, but George Mack beat me to it. That name was bound to be taken by some highly agentic person.

Get better at writing. I am halfway through Everybody Writes by Ann Handley and Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield. I have Sol Stein On Writing and James Scott Bell Conflict and Suspense on the “to be read” list. How I Write podcast is my walking companion.

Write a useful book. Three book ideas I am thinking about now:

1. Secrets of the top performers (Things your manager won’t tell you). This one for early career folks. Inspired by my most popular post to date.

2. A lighter and improved productivity system over Getting Things Done. When people ask me for the best productivity book I know, I still recommend this one (thank you, ). I still use parts of the GTD system 25 years after the book came out, but I chiselled away a lot of the original. It’s kind of like a column in Sagrada Familia compared to a column in a regular gothic cathedral. I feel like his book needs a successor.

3. The book I couldn’t find when I needed it: a practical guide for working mothers that doesn’t make you angry with the system or your husband. Laura Vanderkam is the best in this space. After her, for a mile, nothing. Cal Newport reads like science fiction for anyone with three children and a full-time job. I want to write the book with actual tools: one that you could read and pass to your partner.

If any of these is a book you’d read, reply with the number 1, 2, or 3. Takes five seconds and genuinely helps me decide.

Thanks to Richard Russell for beta-reading this post.

“Let us work through this and come back to you”, I replied.

In my head I sighed: “You just want to have the cake and eat it too”.

This was the first time I had written a hotly debated topic at Amazon. Amazon has a culture of debate (which not everyone knows about) and writing (which everyone does). Combining these two creates a one page document with two or three viable options with pros and cons. The expectation is that at the end of the debate, one option wins. If there is no clear winner, the most senior person in the room makes a judgement call.

The prep for the debate was intense. Two teams worked through the previous week to articulate two debated options. We pulled the data. We assessed and discarded numerous options. We “jumped on the call” a number of times because the other team was not happy with our phrasing. We rephrased. They tore apart our option. We rebuilt. We tore apart theirs. They proposed a replacement. In the process, we came to understand the other side well enough to argue either.

It was painful but useful. Both options were viable. Neither was perfect.

We felt ready for the debate.

In fact, we felt ready to let the VP decide the outcome and then move on to the execution, whatever option he chose.

Instead, he sent us for a rethink.

At that time I didn’t know the theory, so it seemed that he asked us to work harder and come up with a compromise. I came across the theory by accident when reading Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind.

Martin argues that humans have a bunch of factory presets.

One factory preset of our mind is a tendency to assume that our model of reality is identical to the reality itself.

Let me pause here.

No one tells us that our world view is an approximation of reality. In fact, we are taught the opposite. We are taught to look for the right answer and, once found, defend it. If we face another answer, it is obviously wrong. We then conflate our model of reality with our identity, and defend it with fervour, without realising that this is just a map of the territory, not a territory itself.

Even in mathematics, the most rigorous domain that humans have, models are scoped approximations. Take Euclidean geometry. It rests on the assumption that through a point outside a line, there is exactly one parallel line to the original line. We use it in everyday life to build houses, to apportion land, to carve lenses. But Euclidean geometry is an approximation. It is true on a plane, but not true on a sphere: meridian lines are parallel at the equator, but meet at the poles. Or in space: gravity bends light.

In the debate above, my team had one model of reality, the other team had a different model. We sharpened each of our models in preparation, but neither model was good enough. The VP wanted us to get closer to reality. So he asked for the next iteration in search of a better solution.

The better solution exists precisely because reality is more complex than any option can capture. So if you are not satisfied with the two options you are looking at, you can look for - and eventually find - a better one. Amazon calls it “we are an AND company”. Martin calls it integrative thinking.

One of Martin’s examples is Isadore Sharp. Sharp built and ran a couple of hotels in the 1960s. They conformed to the mainstream hotel models at the time: one was a small motel with a friendly service, the other a huge business-traveller hotel with many amenities. While both were profitable, Sharp saw neither model as satisfactory. He wanted to create a hotel chain that provided fantastic personalized service and had great amenities too. He searched and he iterated. In the end he came up with the premium hotel model which didn’t trade off amenities against service. He invented the Four Seasons hotel chain.

Why don’t we practice integrative thinking more often?

There are two layers to that.

First, it’s hard. Holding two conflicting ideas in our head while looking for a creative integration of both is hard work for the brain. So our brain pushes us to save resources. It’s called the need for cognitive closure. We tend to choose one option, close the cognitive loop and justify to ourselves why it was a (somewhat) better option. It takes a VP to ask you to raise your game. 🙂

The second layer is that the integrative solution can feel like cheating. In my MBA days I was part of the “profitability” team in the ethics class when we had to present the sustainability vs profitability debate. My team hijacked the debate and argued that companies can be both profitable and sustainable. We won by the class vote, but the other team felt that we stole their moral high ground.

So these days I have a cheat sheet that helps me override the factory presets and practice more integrative thinking. You can save it too:

To close on the Amazon debate - our VP was right. We huddled with the other team and found a better solution that was superior to both options. It felt like a joint win.

Thank you for reading. Next time you are staring at two not so good options, you are armed. There is always hope for a better answer, because reality is much more complex than we think.

This is a conversation space just for subscribers - kind of like group chat or live hangout. The first topic I have added is discussing the last post about AI health/nutrition system. I’d love to hear suggestions if anyone has tried experiments, improvements, habit changes or other tracking with AI tools.

In the future I’ll post questions and ideas that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

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2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

“This is new, what’s up?” I asked.

He told me he had been tracking his micronutrients with AI. I joked that I would pay him ten euros a month if he turned it into a SaaS product. He said it wasn’t worth building. It was easy to set up yourself. We finished lunch and ran to our next meetings.

The idea sat in my subconscious for six months. Until, one quiet Saturday morning, while kids were at rugby, I built myself an AI nutrition prompt.

It took ten minutes.

I dictated what I had eaten that day.

Its first observation was eye-opening: I was under-eating protein in my main meals.

The following morning I topped up my breakfast with cottage cheese and ate a full jar of sardines at lunch. Next thing I knew, it was dinnertime, and I had forgotten about my afternoon snack entirely.

This is not normal for me. I am a lifetime 4pm fridge visitor. Every afternoon I would find myself on a trip for a (decaf) coffee and something else more substantial.

I tried water. I tried willpower. I tried fruit. I settled on keeping it mostly healthy. Trailmix is healthy, right?

Turns out, the snacks were not the problem. They were a symptom of not having enough protein early in the day. I had no idea.

I am three weeks into my AI nutrition experiment. Here are the small adjustments I have made that created a big difference.

Real-time feedback changes what you actually do

Three years ago, I went to a dietician. She asked me to keep a food journal for two weeks. Then she rescheduled our second appointment, so by the time she read it, the journal was three weeks old.

She picked on some things, but most of them felt like outliers. The cake was a colleague’s birthday. The sausages were on a hike with no other food in sight.

She made a few useful suggestions. The best one — serving vegetables before dinner — worked for over a year. (How many times do I have to remind my husband? Eventually, I let it slide for the sake of the relationship.)

The rest did not stick.

With my AI coach I switched from a backwards-looking food journaling to forward planning almost immediately. My first try: I am going to a kid’s birthday this afternoon. I know there will be tempting junk food, how do I avoid it?

It nudged me to make one choice and pre-commit instead of grazing. At the end, it praised me for finishing half the kids’ burger, because it was protein and a reasonable choice in that environment.

I knew that pre-commitment improves decision outcomes. It had not occurred to me to use it at a six-year-old’s birthday party.

My afternoon energy crash had a cause

I do All The Right Things: I sleep 7.5 hours a night, I eat whole foods, I train four times a week. And still, most afternoons, I run out of energy. My GP now just shrugs when I tell him I am tired. We’ve been through this before and he helped me fix my iron, prescribed Vitamin D. Blood tests are fine.

“You are a working mum”, he says.

So I write fatigue off as a cost of the life I live.

One afternoon I told my AI coach about the energy crash.

It said: you had a hard swim at lunch and no carbs around training.

I sat with that.

In my teens and twenties, when I competed, we used to carb load. But these days my insulin resistance markers have been creeping up, and I had been cutting carbs for years, Gary Taubes style.

At the same time, I train four times a week, inspired by Peter Attia’s Outlive.

I had been solving one problem and creating another. The evidence was in front of me every single afternoon and I had been calling it “getting old”.

Could it really be that simple?

Last week I started adding deliberate carbs before and after training. The “can I just lie down?” feeling disappeared.

Maybe it is that simple.

Fixing forgetfulness

Selenium is an essential trace mineral and Brazil nuts are especially selenium-rich. I knew this, but I kept forgetting to eat them. One day, after I logged it, my AI coach nudged me to make them a daily habit.

“I try”, I said, “but I forget”.

“Put them in a jar next to the coffee grinder”, it suggested. “You drink coffee every morning”.

So now the jar is there. Subscribe and Save is set up.

This is what I call a Minimum Viable Change: small enough to survive real life, useful enough to matter.

Will one Brazil nut change my life? Of course not.

(By the way, before eating them, it is worth checking your selenium status via blood/urine test. Many multi-vitamins contain selenium. So don’t eat the nuts after reading this, check first. Too much selenium is toxic.)

My point here is habit design. AI connected the thing I wanted to do with a thing I already do. 1% better.

This matters beyond nutrition.

I recently discovered that medication non-adherence is a major problem in healthcare. Until then, I had dismissed my own forgetfulness with medicine as a one-off. Turns out, approximately 50% of patients with chronic illnesses do not take their medication as prescribed. A friend had side effects from a statin. She stopped taking it and doesn’t go to the doctor who prescribed it because “he will tell me off”.

What if, in addition to the regular medical care, you could have a non-judging AI coach who doesn’t need to rush to the next patient, knows your medical history and your life context and can help you iterate on the habits until they actually work for your life? It may only take 10 minutes to create it.

If you have an elderly parent taking several medications, send them this post as an idea. Maybe this is something that can significantly improve their quality of life and help them discuss this with their doctor. I have included an example prompt in the Google Doc prompts at the bottom of this post.

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The pattern I could not see

Avocado. Nuts. Salmon. Olive oil. All healthy foods. Also, all fat-heavy. My AI coach flagged a pattern it called “fat stacking”. (I didn’t have them in a single meal, in case you are wondering.) We split fats into two buckets: strategic fats and watchlist.

My worst day since tracking had four strategic fats and six watchlist ones. (Why are you asking me. This was an unusual Saturday. I would not do that on a normal Saturday. Don’t ask me any more questions.)

Now I am aiming to keep the watchlist ones to one or two a day. I would not have spotted this without someone seeing the whole picture.

Our shopping list has shifted towards lean protein. Chickens, beware.

No judgement

Last week I was craving something sweet. I told my AI coach. It suggested banana and pointed out the obvious context: we spent the afternoon in the emergency room with my youngest. Head injury. He is fine now.

My body was asking for carbs after a cortisol spike. I now know that. I can plan for it.

I can tell the AI coach everything. The brownie. The Sunday sausage. The piece of bread with peanut butter. With a human, these things become evidence of my failing. With AI, they are data points to analyse.

It may be the biggest AI unlock: accountability without judgement. It drives self-awareness. I have learnt more about my nutrition habits in three weeks than in the year before.

***

I do not have a perfect system.

I have an ideal, or what we call a “North Star” at work. The North Star is there to guide you, but you may not actually ever reach it.

After reading David Sinclair’s Lifespan my nutrition North Star is having dinners of just steamed broccoli. Caloric deficit for longevity, you know. I have not told my husband. His ideal dinner is steak with creamy mushroom sauce and a glass of red wine. If I present the broccoli vision as our new family operating model, I suspect the implementation plan would encounter resistance.

In any case, the ideal is not compatible with our current life where pasta and wraps appear every week, because, you know, children.

But I can take baby steps.

Before this experiment I felt like I was stagnating. Now I am moving again.

That’s why I am sharing the prompts, in case you are in the same boat: not looking for a crazy lifestyle overhaul, Tim Ferris style, but would like a nudge here and there that moves you in the right direction.

I am tracking my own biomarkers (body fat percentage, HOMA-IR, cholesterol, omega-3 index). I will report back in six months.

What I can say for now: we were at a kids’ rugby tournament a week ago — early wake-ups, late dinners, constant logistics. Normally, that kind of weekend drains me. This time, I was still running around full of energy in the afternoon. I have not felt this strong for years.

How this looks in practice

I put my weekly mega-prompt (shared below) into the AI chat, and give it a sensible name, like “Nutrition analysis - week 1”.

Then I dictate my meals into the chat as I go.

When I remember I ate something, I open the same chat and log it. If I feel hungry, low on energy or unsure what to eat next, I ask the coach.

I tested this with both ChatGPT and Claude. I have paid subscriptions to both, but I also tried it briefly with a free account, and it worked. I have not tested the free version for a full week, so I cannot promise the same result. If you try it, let me know. I will update the post.

The prompts: take them and make them yours

I have put the prompts in a Google Doc.

Inside you will find five tabs:

1. The interview prompt

It asks about your goals, context, routines, constraints, and creates a personalised nutrition coach prompt.

2. The Week 1 logging prompt

Use this if you want to start today with only small edits.

3. The Week 1 review prompt

This consolidates what you learned and improves the prompt for week two.

4. My current prompt after three weeks

This is longer and more personalised. I included it to show how the system evolves.

5. A medication and supplement audit prompt

This helps someone map what they take, when they take it, where adherence breaks down, and what to discuss with a doctor or pharmacist.

Disclaimer: this is not medical advice. Do not change medication, supplements, or treatment based only on AI output. Speak to your doctor or pharmacist before making medical changes. AI can be useful. It can also be wrong.

Use these prompts and adjust them for your own goals, be it weight loss, body recomposition, energy management, longevity, training recovery, micronutrients, or just better defaults around food. Do not optimize everything. Pick one or two goals. Try it for one day or one week. Not for perfection. For pattern detection.

And if you do try it, I would love to hear what it catches that you had been missing.

I gave him a printout and said:

“I came across this framework on executive promotions. I’d value your perspective. What dimensions matter in your experience, and where should I improve in order, one day, to be considered for the next level?”

He laughed. “Polina, there is no checklist for these things”.

I was a Principal Product Manager at the time, my second L7 role at Amazon. Director (L8) was one level up, but the gap was a chasm. But, as Napoleon used to say, every soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.

I nodded. “I know there is no checklist. I am not doing this to come back to you in six months with all the boxes ticked. I want to find my blind spots and work on them. This framework is just a tool”.

He took my printout and started reading.

The biggest misconception I see from senior operators is that promotion is a reward for strong performance.

It isn’t.

Promotion is a selection process. From a pool of strong performers, the organization picks those most likely to succeed at the next level.

Once you realise this, you start seeing this process differently. It is not a “smash the targets” competition. It is a selection from a pool of strong candidates, based on their future potential.

Having been promoted, sat in promo panels, and written dozens of promotion documents, I have noticed a few patterns.

Dear reader, before we continue, let me warn you. You are stepping on the hard path. You will hear the feedback you don’t like. You will fail at things that do not come naturally. You will compare yourself to others and the comparison will not be in your favour.

This process takes the fun out of your work. For many, it leads to burnout and disillusionment. It can also lead to growth and wisdom.

In the end, the reward for hard work is more hard work.

Consider yourself warned.

Four big promo questions

Four questions to ask yourself if you’re aiming for the next level:

1. How big is the pool of positions available at the next level?

2. What are the unspoken selection criteria for the next level, apart from the known ones?

3. Where do I stand right now on these criteria?

4. Who is in the decision room?

Q1 - Availability of roles at the next level

The Big Tech companies are shrinking right now. So there are fewer promotions. I see my colleagues looking inward: “I should have already been promoted. I am not good enough”. Not true. Sometimes the only thing missing is a seat at the table, not your capability.

And the inverse: in a growing company, the next level is easier to reach. If you can join a rocket ship, do it.

The environment matters. Many people forget to assess this, before they start striving.

💭 Before optimizing yourself, ask: is there actually room at the next level?

Q2 - Unspoken selection criteria

The more senior you get, the more opaque the criteria to get to the next level become.

First, executive roles are about judgment. Judgment in ambiguity is hard to reduce to a checklist.

Second, any definition is a proxy of the underlying quality. And proxies are subjective. Take executive presence. Ask three senior leaders about what it is and you will get three different answers. But you notice it when it’s there: when McKinsey was hiring my MBA peers, candidates who got offers had one thing in common. When they walked into a room, you felt: I can trust you in a crisis.

Finally, there are usually a few candidates in the running. And they may all be good, but one is just better.

So you would never get a clean checklist.

The framework I am about to share gives you a vocabulary for what is being assessed. It helps you ask better questions and anchor feedback. It comes from The Unwritten Rules by John Beeson, former HR Director and advisor on hundreds of executive placements. It is US-centric, so adapt for non-American companies.

You need to adapt this framework to your level. When you are a senior IC, senior manager, leader-of-leaders and so on, the translation of these factors will be different. Save this post and come back to it when you’re having your next feedback conversation.

For example, #9, “Build a strong management team” reads as manage and hire well. Table stakes at the manager level. But at the leader-of-leaders level it’s whether your managers can build strong teams, a generation removed.

Or take #10, “Manage implementation”. At the level below executive, being operational and detail-involved is expected. It is how you prove you can deliver. At the executive level, being in the details backfires. So does pure hands-off. The real work is management by exception: building the leaders and mechanisms so you stay out of the way most of the time, and step in with enough context, on the few occasions when you must.

Some principles are universal. Take #3: Drive to lead. A common blind spot is silence. You assume your ambition is obvious. Or you’ve learnt the hard way not to voice it. Or, perhaps, you are seen complaining about the work expected at the next level. “I don’t like politics”. If you want to progress, say it. Then behave accordingly.

At the manager’s and leader-of-leaders one common trap is #7 “Narrow view of the business”. The leaders are so focused on delivering their teams’ goals that they have blinders on. This backfires in the long-term.

When I joined Amazon retail 14 years ago, our director warned us about “addiction to discounts”. Many UK retail bankruptcies followed that path.

A category manager misses revenue targets → runs a promotion → closes the gap and attracts new customers to the business. Win-win. Next quarter, targets rise → she runs another promotion.

It works again. Until it doesn’t.

Regular sales drop. Customers wait for discounts. You trained them to do so.

#11 “Work across organizational boundaries” is a common blind spot prior to executive level. Senior managers see themselves as an evangeliser and defender of their team vs an integral part of the whole org. They are loyal to their team, not to their peers. It was the right thing to do in order to advance to this level - and then it becomes an impediment. They are deemed “difficult to work with” and get stuck.

If any of these factors made you uncomfortable, that’s the one to read Beeson’s book for.

Q3 - Where you stand against these criteria

Getting the unwritten rules is hard. Getting honest feedback is harder.

In many big organizations, there is a process of giving every employee the structured feedback every 6-12 months. But even if you are getting this feedback regularly, it is not surfacing where you are against the promotional criteria. Organizations discuss succession planning in detail. You hear none of it.

Say, your boss discussed their 5 direct reports in such a meeting, got the feedback, identified the most promising person for honing for that executive promotion - and that person is not you. For you, they got some feedback that was a bit vague. So they will focus on your peer, reviewing their scope, making sure they have the right visibility, projects, etc.

If they tell you, you will ask for specifics. Dates, names, actions. It’s easier for them to tell you that everything is fine. Your boss doesn’t want to discourage you and lose you. Unless you ask in the right way, you will never find out.

There are two ways of getting this feedback.

The first one is hiring a coach who conducts confidential interviews with you and your key senior stakeholders, shares the findings with you and often helps you with working on it. Big companies often do this for their top performers approaching executive ranks. I have seen this at Amazon and this is where Beeson’s own experience comes from.

The second one is DIY. You need to go to about 4-6 people who are all both senior and close to your work: e.g. your boss, your skip level, former managers, mentors, sponsors, senior stakeholders. Ask in the right way and stay non-defensive.

✅ Bring something concrete: a framework, a job description for the next level, a competency list, even this post. Anchor on the artefact, not on yourself. Open with what you already accept: there is no checklist, it’s nuanced, you’re not asking for a roadmap. You are asking for help finding blind spots. Shift from “how do I get promoted?” to “what can’t I see?”

Optional, but very helpful stakeholder is HR. They may not be open to sharing specific feedback from behind closed doors. However, you can tell them what you have heard from other sources and they may then precise it or confirm it.

Be ready for the feedback to hurt. There is a fundamental attribution error at play: you know why you were defensive in that meeting. They saw someone closed to new ideas. Your instinct is to explain the reasons. But let me tell you - no one cares.

My boss drilled this into me: “Perception is reality.”

You are managing perception. That’s what makes it difficult.

Some years ago, I took over a team where my direct report was on the promo track. I asked him for his senior leader feedback providers. He gave me three names. One of the leaders responded to me straight away with “Absolutely supportive, tell me the date you need the feedback by”. Great start. Two leaders didn’t respond. After I chased, they told me: “I don’t have enough exposure to this individual”.

He was upset. “I’ve worked so hard, how could they not notice!”. The gap was bigger than he had realised.

Which brings me to my last point.

Q4 - Decision-makers

Many people wrongly believe that in order to get promoted they need to get visibility with senior stakeholders. So they set up 1:1s and send flash updates.

The truth: you need to make a small number of key people exceedingly happy by delivering something they value.

You need advocates in the room. When there are 2-3 senior people who are willing to fight on your behalf, the process becomes noticeably easier.

Exceedingly happy stakeholders are a trump card.

What about detractors? Having a detractor doesn’t mean your case will not get approved. Handling conflict is a key skill, especially at senior levels. The fact that you held your ground vs someone more senior, may be seen as the right trait. It depends on the nature of the conflict. Some of the fastest-rising leaders I’ve worked with were marmite leaders, beloved by some, disliked by others.

Some years ago, I sat on a promo panel reviewing five cases. Three were a clear yes. One was a no. Then we got to the last one.

The document had strong achievements. The usual panel questions got answered. After the questions, there is usually a pause. This time, nobody stepped into it. Nobody said: “Oh, and here is something else I know about this person”. In a panel, that one extra story, good or bad, tends to swing the decision. But here, the scale was balanced and the silence stretched.

The senior leader chairing the panel started probing. Have we seen enough track record? Long enough? Would we bet the house on this candidate?

The consensus was to give it another six months.

That employee got promoted next cycle. But the silence cost them six months. No advocacy is almost as costly as opposition.

💭 Reflect: if your promotion depended on three people in a room, who would fight on your behalf today?

In conclusion

In the end, I had a great conversation with my boss. He gave me tough feedback and kept giving it. I worked on it. As I did, I got more: more responsibility, a bigger team, promotion to senior manager, then to leader-of-leaders. And of course, more hard work.

If you are early in the climb to the next level, start with the first question: how many roles exist. If you’re close, focus on the fourth: who is in the room, and have you made them exceedingly happy.

If someone you manage is in between, send them this. It will give them a view “from the other side”, they wouldn’t otherwise get.

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P.S. I am writing a book with a working title How To Be A Top Performer aimed at employees who want to be top performers and managers who want high performing teams. It will be a short and practical. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations (like, what topics you would like me to cover). If you’d like to help shape the book, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

I always knew I would be a working mum. I had role models: my mother and grandmother. In Soviet society this was a default: adults worked, state raised the children. As I grew up, the world changed. Being a stay-at-home mum became a possibility. But it didn’t change my thinking. Why choose just motherhood when I could have both family and career?

When I got pregnant, my question was not if I would return to work, but how fast.

Amazon was growing fast, needed senior leaders and was investing in growing people from within. We were in London, but Luxembourg kept coming up: European headquarters, more variety of senior roles. We decided to roll the dice - my husband and I both applied, both got offers, and, before we knew it, were crossing the Channel. We found the house and half unpacked. He went to work. I had a month of maternity leave left to finish unpacking and sort out the childcare.

I approached this project thoroughly. Some people would call it overkill. I did lots of research and shortlisted seven creches based on location, colleagues’ recommendations and available spots. I visited and interviewed all seven (I still have the list of questions). One creche was on the flight path to the airport and had an impressive collection of horrible plastic toys. One kept kids inside on a sunny day because “the grass was a little wet this morning”. One had a very German headmaster I didn’t gel with: “What do you mean, how we zettle zem for a nap? We put zem down, we go out and zen we close ze door”.

In the end, I chose the one closest to my ideal. They had a consistent caregiver model, an understatedly Montessori approach, and children who returned from the forest covered in mud. This felt like a good sign.

I did a settling week - leaving my son progressively longer each day to learn the people and the environment. The settling week went fine.

When I dropped him off for the first real week, there were a few babies crying in the creche that morning and he started crying too. I hugged him and left quickly as I was told.

Then I sat in the car and cried myself. It was like the floodgates bursting. I did not expect such intensity of emotions and guilt. I felt as if someone tore out my heart and left it in the creche building.

What was fine a few minutes before now felt not fine at all. What was going on?

Sitting there, one thought kept repeating: What if I am screwing up my son by putting him in the childcare?

Up until that moment, I could go back. Take him out, look after him. Now this choice was gone. I made a promise to my company and now these two commitments were tearing me apart. The guilt was crushing: what if I made a terrible error? Should I just call this off, take him home and keep him by my side? My heart was telling me that I should, should, should.

Instead, I told myself: “It is harder for you right now than it is for him. He probably stopped crying already. Get yourself together, you have work to go to. You can make a decision later”.

I wiped my tears and dragged myself away to the Welcome Day training. The work week that I was looking forward to suddenly felt impossibly long.

Later that night

In the evening, after my son fell asleep - he went out like a light which made my guilt worse - I sat down to figure out what was actually happening. Was I making a terrible mistake?

First, I found out that the brain of every mother gets rewired during pregnancy and birth to make us better caregivers to our children. The “me” who went on maternity leave and “me” who was returning were different. Apart from the brain itself, there are strong hormones, namely oxytocin. I knew it as the bonding and breastfeeding hormone. What I didn’t know is that we also get a jolt of it during separation. Mother Nature is not subtle about this.

My brain chemistry didn’t know that I had carefully chosen a good creche. It reacted to my son’s cry as if I left him alone in the forest. It flooded me with hormones to go back.

The barrel hoop squeezing my chest loosened a bit. Now I could understand what was happening to me.

But was I hurting him by leaving him in the creche?

I knew about separation anxiety. His crying when I left was a sign of a healthy attachment. All securely attached babies past 7-8 months will cry when their main caregiver leaves. He would build a bond with his creche carer over time. The settling week was not long enough for this to happen. But humans are remarkably adaptable.

I found out that even in modern hunter-gatherer societies, mothers provide only about half of direct infant care. The rest falls to dads, grandmothers, aunts, older siblings. This share increases as babies start eating solid foods and become mobile. Which makes sense. The tribe needs to maximize the calories it gets, so some adults range further to bring in food, while others share the work of caring for babies. Turns out, the idea of a mother caring for her baby 24/7 is a relatively recent development, enabled by modern living conditions, not a biological necessity.

I breathed more deeply. Good news: little humans evolved to be cared for by others.

Still, I wanted to know if there was any research around how much time a mother should spend with her child.

I found a UCLA study looking at kids from 0-5 years that measured both total time spent with the child and active time spent, when mother actively engaged with her child. Interestingly, while total time was understandably high for non-working mothers, the active time spent was not that different. Non-working, part-time working and fully employed mothers spent 34, 32 and 26 hours per week, respectively, actively engaging with their children.

What mattered more than time was mother’s verbal proficiency. For mothers in the top 30% of verbal proficiency, more time with the child improved the child’s cognitive test scores later. So while it clearly mattered whether the highly verbal mother worked full-time or stayed at home, it also nudged me to increase my own verbal proficiency and maximize the active hours I could spend with my son, given other constraints.

My work calendar was already filling with meetings across timezones. “I’ll just spend more time” was not a real option. I couldn’t try ten new ideas, I needed something workable.

The first rule made me set the work boundaries: no work 6-9pm on weekdays and no work on holidays (I wrote more on this here). The second one felt unnatural and required some getting used to. The bedtime reading outlasted them all.

I also found research on the long-term outcomes: children of working mums fared no worse than children of the stay-at-home mums. It matched my own life experience, but it’s nice to have a Harvard professor back you up. As adults, they were just as happy. The sons tended to have employed wives, hold more egalitarian views in the workplace and spend an extra 50 minutes each week caring for family members. The daughters were 1.3 times more likely to be supervisors, earned on average $2K more per year and spent an hour less on housework.

Not a life-changing difference, but my son will be a better husband and colleague while my daughter will earn more. I’ll take it.

My conclusion from all this research was: I didn’t need to make drastic life changes. I needed to be intentional with the time I had.

Fast forward 11 years

My “overkill” of a search for the creche paid off. My son thrived there. They worked through all his quirks. Held him for 40 minutes when he struggled to fall asleep. Fed him normal food from the older group when spoon-feeding didn’t work. His educatrice, “Marrrrhie!”, became his favourite person. In a few months he would run to her happily every morning.

The bedtime reading got better with time. At 1, it was “Where is Spot?” every night. The same pages. Over and over again. (What is it with toddlers and repetition?). But even baby steps compound. At 12, he still asks me to read to him sometimes, because this is “mummy special time”. These days, it is Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality. I am not convinced he would get through it on his own yet. Together, we manage.

I have had two more children since then. When the time came to put them in creche, the guilt didn’t ambush me the same way. I knew how this would go. They would cry. Then they would adapt. And life would go on.

If you are sitting in your car right now, wondering if you are going to hurt your child by going back to work, you are not. Humans are built to be cared for by more than one person. Your feelings are real. But they are not evidence.

Your child doesn’t need you all the time. They need you - consistently, and with intention. Twelve years and three children taught me that.

If you know a mum who is about to go back to work, send this piece to her.

I’m writing a book with a working title Working Mother Survival Guide. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations for the book. If you’re a working mum and want to help shape it, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

One day I noticed a pattern. When I showed up without an agenda, I left with more work. I was giving her a blank canvas and she filled it. So I started preparing. Not to impress. To control the inflow. It worked. I kept doing it.

Years later, after thousands of 1:1s, I see what top performers do differently. They treat their 1:1 like the highest-leverage meeting of the week.

They bring the energy. They use the time well. They execute faster afterwards. And it’s not magic. Just a few simple patterns, applied consistently. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

As a manager, I kept asking myself: why doesn’t everyone do this?

There is plenty of advice for managers on how to run 1:1s. Andy Grove wrote about it in High Output Management. Ben Horowitz and Julie Zhuo expanded on it. They all say: “The 1:1 is owned by the employee”. And then they explain what managers should do.

Great.

But who teaches the employee what to do?

As a manager, I feel slightly awkward telling my team: “You own this” and then “But let me tell you how to do it exactly”. I wish someone else wrote a guide that I could share.

So here it is.

If you are an IC, this guide is for you.

Setting the stage

What I wish my first manager had told me:

My goal in our 1:1 is to help you build judgement. The only way to do that is for you to use it. My role is to coach you.

Bring me problems. But think first:

• Can you solve it yourself? Do it. Tell me what you did and what you learned.

• Can someone else help? Go to them. If you can solve the problem without me, that’s great.

As you handle more complex problems, I will trust you more. You will get more interesting work.

That’s how you grow. In fact, that’s how I grow. If you take on more, I can take on more. My manager can take on more. The company moves faster. And yes, your career moves faster too.

What not to do in a 1:1

1. Don’t show up unprepared

Unprepared 1:1 means death by a thousand follow-ups.

Monday: Great chat.
Tuesday: “Quick question…”
Wednesday: “One more thing…”
Thursday: “Sorry, forgot to ask…”

Or worse: your manager discovers a problem you should have flagged earlier.

✅ Review your topics beforehand. If there’s nothing, give the time back to your manager. They will remember it.

2. Do not use 1:1 as therapy

Your manager should support you. That’s part of their job. But your 1:1 is not a weekly emotional debrief.

If something is bothering you, translate it:

🚫 “This project is a mess and the partner team is impossible to work with!”
✅ “I am blocked on X because of partner team Y. I am frustrated and not sure what to do. Can you help?”

Same issue. Now it is solvable.

3. Don’t turn your 1:1 into a status update

There are two types of 1:1s: useful ones and hostage situations.

The second one goes like this.

You spend five minutes walking your manager through project minutiae. They listen politely, waiting for you to land the plane.

Manager: “So… what do you need from me?”
You: “Oh, nothing. Just keeping you updated.”

Congrats, you just increased their cognitive load for no reason.

✅ Status updates belong in tools and project meetings. Use the 1:1 for decisions, direction, and unblocking.

4. Don’t write an essay

Your prep should take less time than the meeting. If it takes longer, you’re overdoing it. If your manager needs five minutes to read before speaking, you’ve lost them.

✅ Use bullets. Short phrases. Make it scannable.

5. Don’t give your manager action items

There is a brief moment of joy when your manager leaves 1:1 with an action item instead of you. This joy doesn’t last. You’ve just created a bottleneck. Every task you push up slows everything down.

✅ When tempted to give your manager an action item, triage:

• Someone else can do it → ask your teammate for a favour (example: launch announcement pre-read)

• You can do 95% of it → prepare the draft (example: escalation email)

• They must do it → ask them to block dedicated time for it (example: major proposal they are on the line for)

Keep your manager as action-free as possible.

Ingredients of a good 1:1

1. Exec summary

You want your manager to understand the meeting agenda in the first 30 seconds.

✅ “I need your input on three topics today: X, Y, Z. Anything from your side?”

I prefer putting the agenda in a shared file. It gives visibility, allows async edits, and keeps history. You can also add FYIs without discussion:

FYI: Vendor meeting Thursday. Flying Wednesday 5pm. (Translation: I’ll be offline then.)

2. Decisions

Need a decision? Ask for it.

1️⃣ Can you approve this request? (link)

2️⃣ Can I take three weeks off in December?

3️⃣ Can we make this offer to the candidate?

3. Blockers

Anything slowing you down: gatekeeper not responding, partner team ignoring follow-ups, no resources available. Even if you’re doing the right things to unblock yourself, flag it. This is a classic leverage moment when five minutes from your manager can save you five hours. This is where your manager can help most.

4. Judgement check

You are moving fast and making decisions. Good. But check alignment.

You: “We’re launching this feature to all our customers next week.”
Manager: “Did we pilot it?”
You: “No, but it’s been live in another market for six months.”
Manager: “Let’s start with 10% pilot.”
You: “That will add two weeks to the launch schedule.”
Manager: “Worth it. I want us to “test and learn” rather than to “move fast and break things.”

This is how strategy gets calibrated in real time. It’s also how you learn how your manager thinks.

5. No surprises

You want your manager to hear bad news from you first. Partner team decommitting, client at risk, legal delay. Tell them early. Bad news does not age well.

Also flag anything that may bubble up later. They should hear your version first and be ready to provide aircover.

6. This week’s priorities

My favourite. I always list my Top 5 priorities that I will be working on before the next 1:1 with my manager. In priority order.

It serves as a forcing function to get my ducks in a row. (They rarely line up on their own). It gives the manager visibility on the big stuff. They can spot if their task is missing from the list. They can ask to drop what’s no longer important. This alone saves weeks of effort.

But most importantly, it allows both sides to negotiate the workload.

Manager: “I need you to do this one other thing…”
You: “Great, I will start after priority #1.”
Manager: “It’s really urgent.”
You: “Got it. I’ll get on it straight away. But this means I will need to delay priority #3. The review is next Monday, and I will need to push it further.”
Manager: “It’s fine. Let’s switch review to an email update and do it by the end of next week.”

You are not asking for permission. You are negotiating trade-offs. At the end priorities are explicit and aligned.

7. Sort the 1:1 topics by importance

Imagine your manager gets an urgent call halfway through. Can the rest wait till the next 1:1 - or are you still blocked?

Also, don’t save the “I am planning to switch teams” conversation till the last five minutes.

How to earn the brownie points

We have covered what not to do and what to do. Here are a few optional extras you can use from time to time.

1. Good news

Managers are human. Humans like good news. Share something that moves the needle:

🌟 “The client who was at risk last month just renewed.”

🌟 “That idea you suggested last week worked.”

🌟 “I spoke to the partner team directly and unblocked this.”

Momentum is contagious. Bring some into the room. If they leave with more energy than they came in with, you did well.

2. Prep for the meeting a day in advance

Prepare the agenda one day in advance. Run the conversation in your head. What would they advise? Do it. You walk into the actual meeting one step ahead. It’s like having two 1:1s for the price of one.

3. Ask them “What else is happening?”

One of my managers taught me this. Ask your manager: “What else is happening?”

It moves you from a task-taker to operating partner. You get context, priorities, and signal. (“Oh, this report that I am procrastinating on, came from your boss? Shoot, let me finish it today.” True story. Not my proudest productivity moment, but a useful one.)

This is a high-gain question. Especially in skip-level meetings.

***

If you apply this guide to your 1:1s consistently, you will stand out. Most people don’t do this. Which is good news for you.

ICs (individual contributors): keep this as your edge. Don’t share with anyone.

Managers: remove that edge and send it to your team.

P.S. I am writing a book with a working title How To Be A Top Performer aimed at employees who want to be top performers and managers who want high performing teams. It will be a short and practical. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations (like, what topics you would like me to cover). If you’d like to help shape the book, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

Those three steps — write it down, sleep on it, trust your gut — have served me well. I came from a developing country with no name university and unknown small companies to building an international career in big tech. But as I described the process out loud, it felt lacking. Why did it work? How can I make it better?

So I started looking for ways to improve how I make decisions.

I am writing this from a career perspective. With layoffs and slower growth in big tech, many of my colleagues now stand at a crossroads — and I like making my posts immediately practical. But the same principles apply to many high-stakes decisions: which degree to pursue, whether to move countries, buy or rent a house, or how to invest your savings. During my reading I came across several ideas that significantly improved how I think about decisions. I’ll share three of them below.

You cannot judge a decision by its outcome

I used to believe that if a decision turned out well, it must have been a good one.

In Thinking in Bets, calls this bias “resulting”. Resulting means judging the quality of a decision purely by its outcome.

Outcomes are shaped by two forces: luck and skill. Luck is outside our control. Skill is not.

Skill lives in the decision process. Improve the process and the quality of decisions improves over time, even when luck occasionally goes against you.

Good decisions do not come from good luck. They come from good decision architecture.

I know. The phrase improving the process can make eyelids droop. But stick with me. A few simple elements in a decision process can dramatically improve outcomes.

Step 1: Define the real problem

The first insight comes from AlphaBrain by Stephen Duneier, a hedge fund manager and decision-science practitioner.

When Duneier taught decision-making to engineering students at UCSB, he noticed something interesting: they consistently skipped the first step. Our brains want to save energy and jump straight to evaluating options. Anything before that feels like wasted effort. But before evaluating options, we need to answer a more fundamental question:

What problem are you actually trying to solve?

Even a simple decision like “Should I stay in my current role or take a new one?” can mask very different underlying problems.

It might mean:

• What is the best way to get promoted?

• What is the best way to improve financial stability?

• What is the best way to stay relevant in a changing industry?

Each problem definition may lead to a different decision.

I experienced this firsthand while remortgaging our house.

Our bank offered us a variable interest rate and several fixed options. We had already shopped around, so we knew the offer was competitive. The variable rate was cheaper. My brain decided instantly: take the variable rate. Save money now and keep the options open. My second thought was — wait a second, let me apply the learnings from the book.

So I paused and asked: what problem are we trying to solve?

As we discussed, it turned out that the problem was not saving the last cent. It was predictability and avoiding financial surprises.

Once we framed the problem correctly, the decision changed. We mapped several scenarios and chose a fixed rate.

Your career decision may start with someone tapping you on the shoulder for a coffee chat. But the real decision is rarely “Do I take this role?”. The real decision is: what problem are you trying to solve in your career right now?

Do not skip the first step. Your decision outcome will be much better.

Step 2: Reduce Decision Errors

Another useful idea from Duneier is that great decision-makers do not chase brilliant decisions. They focus on reducing errors.

In his TEDx talk Duneier uses an example of Novak Djokovic improving his point win rate from 49% to 52% and then to 55%. That six percentage points improvement moved him from the 680th in the world to number one.

Small improvements can make a huge difference.

This logic is very familiar inside Amazon. Much of the company’s execution strength comes from improving key metrics from X% to Y%. The process is always the same: define the gap between current and ideal, find the largest defect, fix it, repeat.

Decision-making works the same way.

Most decision-making errors come from biases.

Jumping to conclusions, like I did with the mortgage, is one of them. Charlie Munger famously catalogued 25 tendencies of human misjudgment. Sunk cost fallacy, social proof, ego, and loss aversion all distort our thinking. But simply knowing about the biases does not eliminate them. What helps is designing a decision process that forces you to confront them.

In career decisions, common traps include rushing, overweighting recent events, following the crowd, and ignoring downside risk. To address them, I created a set of seven questions that I now use when making career decisions. The goal is not perfection. It is to reduce the most damaging errors. Less heroics, more systems. Fixing even one or two recurring mistakes can materially improve the quality of your decisions.

Step 3: Add a Bar Raiser

Another way to improve decisions is to add accountability to the process.

To avoid resulting, it helps to have someone evaluate your reasoning before the outcome is known. A sales team can review the process without knowing whether the client bought. An investment committee can review the reasoning before knowing the result.

The same approach works for career decisions.

Chris North (), in his advice on executive job search, suggests finding a high-judgment friend who can act as your “Bar Raiser” for major career moves. So when you are facing a high-stakes call, like “Should I take this role that may define my career for the next few years, or pass and look for a better one?”, they can hold you accountable to the criteria you set at the start.

Annie Duke used a similar idea during her poker career. She was part of a small “learning pod” that reviewed decisions together. One of their rules was a strict loss limit: once losses reached $600, you had to stop playing. Duke recalls that after leaving a losing game, she could ease some of the sting by imagining the conversation in which her pod would approve of her decision to quit.

Most of us do not have a ready-made decision pod. But we can build our own version. A trusted colleague, mentor, friend, or partner can play that role. Even AI tools can help stress-test your reasoning. Recently, I used ’ AI executive career coach to challenge my thinking on a few career decisions (paid ChatGPT subscription required). It asked questions I had not considered.

A Career Decision Tool

Based on these ideas, I created a simple Career Decision Accelerator. It walks you through seven questions designed to slow down your thinking, clarify the problem, and expose common biases. If you are currently evaluating your next career move, run your decision through the tool and then discuss it with your own Bar Raiser. Download the PDF file below:

Career Decision Accelerator

90.2KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I would love your feedback and will use it to improve the tool. Let me know any suggestions!

Everything I have described here applies beyond career decisions. A small tweak to the process can make each decision marginally better. Over time, those gains compound. That is a good return on a small amount of extra mental effort.

Other sources on decision-making:

• Chris North on decision-making, with a useful reading list at the end

• Annie Duke interview on why smart people make bad decisions

• Wikipedia overview of decision analysis

• Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow

P.S. I am writing a book with a working title How To Be A Top Performer aimed at employees who want to be top performers and managers who want high performing teams. It will be a short and practical. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations (like, what topics you would like me to cover). If you’d like to help shape the book, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

Work hours go up. Children demand more of your time. Paperwork piles up. The household still needs clean socks and dinner every night.

There aren’t enough hours. Something has to give.

, a Wharton economist, calls this period “The Squeeze” in her book Having It All. For couples in their 30s, it is the season when work hours rise as careers accelerate, while childcare and housework spike too (see the graph from the book below).

Image credit: Having It All by Corinne Low

Surviving this period requires a deliberate redesign. In a household with one earner and one homemaker, the squeeze can be absorbed. In a dual-career household, the math simply doesn’t work. Left alone, the pressure builds into friction, burnout, stalled careers, and, sometimes, divorce.

I write from a woman’s experience, but redesign takes two adults. The squeeze is temporary, while two careers that stay on track will strengthen the family for decades. And redesign doesn’t always mean spending more. Sometimes it means lowering your standards. Sometimes it means making a hard trade-off.

Two Squeezes

There are actually two squeezes: time and money. You need to invest on every front, yet there is no spare cash. The mortgage, childcare, and a basic financial buffer eat it all.

What nobody tells you is that earning potential rises with time spent employed. Women’s income grows. Household income grows faster. There will come a time when money will be less tight. You can borrow from that future and ease the pressure today. This is not lifestyle inflation. This is capital allocation.

I can see it from where I am now. I did not realise it 8 years ago – I wish someone would have told me.

A friend without family support hired a night nanny for the first weeks after her newborn arrived. She needed to return to work fast, so she invested in adults’ sleep. As a bonus, the baby kept good sleep habits after the nanny left.

Many women struggle because we’re still running an old blueprint. Our mothers stayed home or worked part-time. They absorbed the volatility. We kept their domestic standards and added full careers on top. Most households run that inherited blueprint without ever questioning it. It’s time to design a new one.

Look in the Mirror First

Before you redesign anything, run a time audit. Outside work and sleep, the largest bucket is… screen time.

U.S. time-use data shows that an average adult in a two working parents household watches 11.8 hours of TV per week - actively watching, not a background noise (see Table 8B here for 2024 data). This is active watching, not having TV on in the background. I don’t own a TV, but I spend hours scrolling Substack. Pick your poison.

This is 590 hours per year. It’s the biggest reservoir of time we have - and it costs nothing to reclaim.

Attack the Biggest Household Buckets

Next, let’s look at the time spent on household activities. The three most time-consuming household categories are food preparation and cleanup (10.4 hours a week per household), cleaning and laundry (7.6 hours), and shopping (4.3 hours).

That’s 22.3 hours a week, but the split is not even. Women in dual-career households spend an average of five more hours on housework than their partners. The gap is rarely intentional. It’s usually the result of drift. Even couples who mean to share equally find that women end up picking up the loose ends.

I’m writing this in the evening, staring at the mess my kids left in the living room. I can nag them to clean it, clean it myself, or let it sit for days. The archaeological record suggests I have tried all of the approaches. I’ve chosen to lower my standards to what I deem “acceptable cleanliness level”. Otherwise, you’d never read this post.

Five hours a week is 250 hours per year. What if you redirected them to learning a new skill, interviewing for a higher paying job, leading a highly visible project at work? Or, dare I say, sleeping and simply feeling less exhausted? Compound that over years. It adds up.

Instead of splitting chores 50/50, give one person full ownership of a domain. The cognitive load for the other partner disappears entirely. In our family, my husband owns cooking. I help with cleanup and occasionally throw a salad together, but the rest is his domain.

Cooking and cleaning are the obvious candidates for outsourcing. Women hesitate. It feels expensive. Finding someone, testing them, managing them - it is also work. And frankly, I don’t like strangers in my house. My mother managed without help, so why can’t I?

That’s the old blueprint talking. We save money for assets, experiences, kids education. Set a new blueprint instead: save money to buy the only non-renewable resource you have: time.

Even if it feels like a luxury, you are borrowing from a more financially comfortable future self. If means allow, test outsourcing for three months. And to be clear: I’m not saying the wife manages all of this. The husband can own an area, say, cleaning 100%. Find the service, manage them, pay the bill. Treat this as a business experiment. Measure your energy, career impact, family atmosphere. If nothing changes, stop.

Not All Childcare is Quality Time

People without kids assume parents always want more time with their children. Up to a point, that’s true. But quantity isn’t quality.

A child under three needs an adult keeping an eye on them at all times - the “keep them alive” stage. Two parents tag-team, handing the child off so each can grab some time alone. Add a second kid, and that personal time shrinks - taking one kid to football practice on Saturday no longer gives the other parent a break. With three kids, you realise two was easy.

You have to create that time deliberately.

When we go on holiday, we sometimes return a day early, put the kids in childcare, and keep one full day for ourselves. A luxurious holiday inside the holiday. We use it to read a book with a cup of coffee while it is still hot, have lunch where we do not need to stand up mid-bite and fetch something for the n-th time, and to complete a thought - any thought - from its beginning to its natural end, without being interrupted to resolve a dispute about whether “nincompoop” is a bad word.

If you have a grandparent or a sibling nearby who is willing to help, that’s a significant advantage. Many of us don’t - our parents live far away or are still working, and can only help occasionally. Some couples hire an au pair. Corinne Low couldn’t afford one while living in New York, but when she moved to Philadelphia - same income, cheaper childcare, lower rent - she suddenly could.

You don’t need money to get creative. Our family carpools with other parents for activities. It genuinely takes a village.

All three of my kids play rugby - it’s a great outdoor sport, it builds character, and, crucially, it happens on the same field at the same time. I wish my daughter could do ballet instead. She has expressed no interest in ballet whatsoever, which I choose to see as a sign of her excellent judgment.

Once kids hit four or so, their friends become your allies. We host a lot of playdates. With friends around, kids entertain each other. (Note to self: replenish the healthy snack supply).

If you are exhausted in a dual-career household, stop trying to power through. Share this with your partner and have the conversation. Redesign deliberately. Buy time when you can. Lower your standards. Build a village.

Two careers are an asset, but only if your household is designed to support them.

I’m writing a book with a working title Working Mother Survival Guide. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations for the book. If you’re a working mum and want to help shape it, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

None of them saved me time. Most consumed time: install, learn, debug, then switch to the next thing three months later. I stopped looking for time savings. AI might enhance my work, but it wouldn’t give me hours back.

Two simple habits changed that: dictation and a work context document.

Unlock #1: I Stopped Typing and Started Dictating

I used to type into AI chat windows. I crafted structured, clean prompts.

Then I tried dictation.

Dictation is not a voice mode when you chat with AI back-and-forth. I don’t use live chat much: AI tends to respond while I pause to re-formulate my thoughts. When I dictate, I speak for as long as I need to, it transcribes, then I edit and submit.

The difference is speed and context. When you type, you edit your thoughts before they reach the page. When you dictate, the AI gets the full texture of your thinking.

Speaking is also three to four times faster than typing. It feels effortless. The AI gets more to work with, faster, and the output improves. It feels like magic.

We are rediscovering something managers used decades ago. They dictated letters to secretaries instead of typing them. Now dictation is available again, to anyone with a microphone. All it requires is breaking the typing habit.

Unlock #2: I created the Work Context Document

Personal AI tools remember context - at least my paid ChatGPT does - and every interaction feels like an ongoing conversation. AI at work does not. Every new chat starts with a blank slate. It’s like Groundhog Day.

So I created a work context document: a single file that captures who I am, what I work on, my goals, my team, my stakeholders, how I collaborate with them and the challenges I face.

Five pages. Yes, I know. My inner minimalist wept. But I didn’t type it! I asked AI to interview me and create it for me. It took less than an hour.

Attaching the work context to every chat drastically improved the output.

When I drafted annual feedback for my stakeholders, AI connected partner team contributions to the annual goals and surfaced quantified examples I had forgotten about. The feedback became sharper. It is probably the best feedback I have ever written. The AI knew what mattered because the context document told it.

A colleague took this further. He embedded “challenge me to think bigger” directly in his context document. Now when he drafts proposals, AI pushes back if his thinking is too incremental. He is practicing the muscle he wants to develop in every interaction.

The AI response is no longer generic. It knows my work. It spots misalignment, surfaces gaps, and holds me accountable to goals that I set months ago. That initial hour has paid itself back dozens of times.

What Worked at Scale: The Bootcamp

How did I discover these two habits?

In early December Amazon rolled out an eight-week AI bootcamp for senior leaders. Not a training. A bootcamp. Weekly lessons with homework assignments. Instant assessment of the proficiency level. A leaderboard. Support hours. A shared chat where people traded tips and tricks.

This format worked for busy senior leaders because it forced repetition and delivered immediate value. You couldn’t watch a video and check a box. You had to do the work until the habits stuck. Turns out the secret to learning is the same thing we’ve known since primary school: do your homework. We just needed someone to assign it and hold us accountable.

Both habits came from the first week of that bootcamp. I was skeptical at first, but now I am a convert. They saved me time, energy, and helped me produce better work. If you want your team to actually adopt AI, skip the training. Build a bootcamp. Yes, it takes more effort. It also actually works.

That’s it for this week!

Try dictation for your next AI conversation. Or build a context document next week. If these two habits save you time like they saved me time, hit restack and help someone else discover them. 🙂

It isn’t.

Josh Waitzkin writes about the world he knows well: competitive chess and martial arts, but his lessons apply well beyond these sports.

Despite years of reading, practicing and observing high performers under pressure, a few ideas in this book changed my thinking.

Principle 1: Constraints create advantage

When competing in one of the kung fu championships, a competitor broke Waitzkin’s right hand. Given a complex fracture, the doctor advised complete rest, which meant that Waitzkin would have to skip the Nationals scheduled seven weeks later.

Sensible advice. I give the same to my own children when they get injured.

Waitzkin ignored it. He trained with a cast.

Forced to rely on his weaker left side, he learned to control his opponent’s two limbs with one arm. That discovery became one of the staples in his fighting style. Later, when his right hand recovered, it was free to do decisive damage. This advantage would never have emerged without the constraint.

Waitzkin explains that non-athletes treat injury as downtime. Athletes cannot. If he sat out every injury, he would spend most of the year on the couch. Instead, he learned to train through limitation and extract value from it.

Constraints don’t slow high performers down. They force advantages that would never appear otherwise.

Early in my career, I was selling document-management software. I arrived at a large bank for the first round of a formal tender. The woman who showed me in looked worried.

“Is it just you?” she asked. “Your competitor brought two senior guys with beards. And even they struggled.”

Great. I had already wondered whether people did not take me seriously due to my age.

When the decision-maker walked in, polished and confident, I made a judgement call. I decided not try impress him with the product. I did not even move past the first screen of the demo. Instead, I asked him about their problems and listened.

And he talked and talked. Man, this guy loved to talk.

Later that day, the same woman called me. “He was very impressed by your presentation,” she said.

I chuckled to myself. The lack of beard was not a disadvantage after all.

The constraint was perceived lack of status. I stopped trying to prove myself, put him on the pedestal, and let him admire his own thinking.

Once you embrace the constraint, you can often walk straight through it.

Principle 2: Practice makes perfect

One of Waitzkin’s central ideas is “study numbers to leave numbers”.

I sometimes refer to it as the study of numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form. A basic example of this process, which applies to any discipline, can easily be illustrated through chess: A chess student must initially become immersed in the fundamentals in order to have any potential to reach a high level of skill. He or she will learn the principles of endgame, middlegame, and opening play. Initially one or two critical themes will be considered at once, but over time the intuition learns to integrate more and more principles into a sense of flow. Eventually the foundation is so deeply internalized that it is no longer consciously considered, but is lived. This process continuously cycles along as deeper layers of the art are soaked in.

-Josh Waitzkin

The same progression appears in martial arts. A novice executes techniques step by step. An expert moves as one integrated pattern.

In cognitive terms, this is the shift from System Two to System One, as described by Daniel Kahneman. System Two is slow and deliberate. System One is fast and automatic. Most world-class performance happens in System One. There is no such thing as a slow world champion.

Waitzkin makes two points. First, if you want speed, you must rely on System One. Second, System One is trainable. Feed it good data. Give it many repetitions. Over time, effort translates into flow.

Flow is not talent. It is accumulated practice.

This is exactly how Amazon’s Bar Raiser program works. Candidates go through interview after interview, shadowed by experienced mentors who provide them feedback. Reps and feedback. Reps and feedback. It often takes a year or more to complete the program. By graduation, most Bar Raisers have conducted over 200 interviews.

Early in my own training, I shadowed a very experienced Bar Raiser. Her interview was a masterclass. She put the candidate at ease within minutes. She asked a single question, then unpacked the story until she had everything she needed. It felt effortless and authentic. All three of us enjoyed it. Watching her was like watching Joshua Bell perform. Pure flow. Years of practice.

Principle 3: Handling pressure is an acquired skill

Being able to handle pressure is not a personality trait. It is a skillset.

For senior leaders, pressure shows up everywhere. A boss gives you two weeks to fix a failing initiative. A weekly high-stakes review demands crisp answers and sound judgment. Decisions stack up through the day faster than your brain can recover.

Waitzkin describes two skills that matter most.

The first is stopping the downward spiral.

The initial mistake is rarely fatal. What causes damage is the second, third, and fourth mistakes that follow, once you realise what you’ve done.

Experienced performers learn to catch themselves early and reset.

I can spot an experienced Amazonian in a big review by how they handle a question they cannot answer. New Amazonians often try to hand-wave their way through, because that worked elsewhere. They get pressed until the gap is obvious. Experienced Amazonians say, “I don’t know,” and take a follow-up. They know they are in a hole, so they don’t dig.

The second skill is the recovery routine. High performance requires sustained energy. In championships, it is match after match. At work, it is meeting after meeting.

Generic advice like “take a deep breath” rarely works on its own. Athletes build deliberate recovery routines. At first, these routines can take 30 or 45 minutes.

Snack. Meditation. Stretching. Music.

Over months of repetition, the routine is compressed until it produces the same effect in seconds.

Waitzkin trained himself to recover with a single deep inhalation and release. The “deep breath” works for him because he earned it.

All in all, it is an excellent book. It also made me want to try tai chi. Maybe one day.🙂

That’s it for today! Thank you for reading. If you know someone who operates under pressure for a living, share this newsletter with them. Your support keeps me writing.

P.S. I am writing a book with a working title How To Be A Top Performer aimed at employees who want to be top performers and managers who want high performing teams. It will be a short and practical. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations (like, what topics you would like me to cover). If you’d like to help shape the book, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

I didn’t believe it either.

Turns out, people who set meaningful goals tend to be happier than those who don’t. There is research behind this [1, 2], but you don’t need a meta-analysis to see why it works.

If you aim at something that matters and make progress, you feel in control.

If you miss it, you learn how to adjust and try again.

Either way, you are moving.

But, let me tell you a secret: achieving the goal is not the main point. The dopamine fades quickly. What lasts is the belief that you can figure things out. This belief compounds. Over time, it changes what you attempt and how you live.

Failure is part of life. You will fail on some (or even all) of your goals. As Randy Pausch said, brick walls exist to show how badly we want something. Sometimes they make us push harder. Sometimes they make us rethink.

Sometimes failure means doubling down. I know couples who endured years of IVF and loss to have a child.

Sometimes it means stepping back. I know someone who worked relentlessly for a promotion, got it, and died a month later. Not every goal is worth the cost.

This is why goal setting is really a process of self-discovery.

It helps you figure out what would make you flourish, not what you need to get approval from your parents.

You can start with someone else’s system. I did. Over time, adapt it to make it your own.

My system is deliberately simple. Complex processes bore the hell out of me, and bored people do not follow through.

Once a year, late December or early January, I set aside half a day to reflect and plan. Below is the minimum viable version of the process I use.

Step one: reflect on the past year

Open a blank document and write: What went well this year?
List everything that comes to mind. Think not only of achievements, but also of trends. Keep going until you are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Then write: What didn’t go well?
Be honest. This is not for publishing.

Once you exhaust your memory, look at your calendar. We forget more than we realise.

Pro-tip: I do my review in a Google spreadsheet (here is the template I use - feel free to copy). Two reasons: tracking the history year after year and ease of access from anywhere.

Step two: reflect on your life

Answer these five questions:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with the life you are living?

Reflections from Step One will help you get to the number that feels right.

2. What would improve your satisfaction to N+1?

If you answered “10 out of 10” to the previous question (congrats!), you can change this to “What would make it even better?”. There are often a couple of needle movers here.

3. Are all of your important relationships in harmony?

According to Harvard’s 85-year study on adult development, the single biggest predictor of long-term happiness are strong, positive relationships. This question is a litmus test and if your answer is anything but “yes”, set a goal to address the gaps next year.

4. Do you have any big, unfulfilled dreams?

As mentioned above, this is not for publishing, so write down all the crazy dreams you have. Sometimes you don’t realise until you vocalize.

5. What is your legacy project?

Some people know this, some don’t. It’s OK not to know. It is worth figuring this out in the long run - maybe next year.

These last 4 questions will feature in the next step, when you plan your future goals.

Step three: plan the year ahead

I use four categories for my goals: Health, Wealth, Personal Growth, Relationships.

When I started, I had more categories which I simplified over time. For instance, Career goals fit into Wealth and Personal Growth; Travel goals fit under Relationships (since travel mostly revolves around building fun memories with my husband and kids). I found that less is more.

But if you need a fifth category, add one.

Write down every goal that you want to work on next year. This can be a “one off” goal, like “Climb Kilimanjaro”, learning goal like “Do Agentic AI course”, or habit forming goal, like “Meditate for 15 minutes daily”.

A good rule of thumb is to have 2 to 5 goals in each category. My problem is that I end up with 15 or more. I am like a kid in a sweets shop. First time, don’t aim for perfection, if it is 15, let is be 15 🙂.

Then make each goal SAM: Specific, Actionable, Measurable. For instance, “Learn about meditation” is not measurable. “Meditate daily for 1 month with the help of a meditation app” is. The former is meh, the latter is calling my name.

Pro-tip: account for “bad weeks”. Life will provide them generously.

Now go back to your answers from Step Two. Do your goals reflect what would improve your life, repair important relationships, honour your dreams, and move you toward a legacy you care about?

Do not skip this check.

Step four: review monthly

Set a monthly reminder. Keep it simple. Most people abandon New Year goals by February. A reminder in March is often enough to start again.

Pro-tip: You are allowed to delete goals. (I know, sacreligious!)

Last year I set a goal to do a long road trip with my kids.
After a four-hour “test drive” full of arguments, tantrums, constant snacks and complaints about music, I crossed it out and wrote: Not ready yet. I still consider this progress.

Is monthly goal review enough? In my experience, yes. As a working parent, I optimise for systems that survive real life. A monthly reminder allows me to scan through the goals, remember the ones I forgot and set up quick next steps for the ones that got off track.

And that’s the end of the goal setting process.

Optional tips & tricks

1. Set your north star vision in every goal category and your overall life mission

This year, I pondered on both “what” and “how” of my goals. As a result, I have come up with my north star vision for each goal category, e.g. vision for Health, Wealth, Personal Growth, and Relationships. Once I had this, I pruned my 15 goals per category down to four or five. It keeps them aligned and grounded. It is also a bit scary, because I have nowhere to hide now 🙂.

2. Use AI thinking partner to analyse and re-work your goals

I put my mission, vision and goals into an AI thinking partner prompt. It gave me good feedback. Regardless of how I modified my prompt, AI told me that “Hit 10K subscribers by the end of the year” is a vanity goal and I should not set it. It said I should just write good content instead. So here I am, with the content goal for next year.

If you want my prompt - see the footnote1

If you have any tips that worked well for you in goal setting, please add them in the comments! And of course, please like, subscribe and share 😉

Share

A few ideas I borrowed from others:

• Chris Guillebeau for original annual goal setting process

• Stephen Duneier for inspiration to achieve ambitious goals

• Jesse Itzer for adding more fun through his Big A## Calendar idea

P.S. I am writing a book with a working title How To Be A Top Performer aimed at employees who want to be top performers and managers who want high performing teams. It will be a short and practical. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations (like, what topics you would like me to cover). If you’d like to help shape the book, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

8:59: Have you checked with Daniela?
8:59: Her eta was yesterday. Why no update?
9:00: Inform Bill. Keep Jaideep on cc.

You exhale. At least today he is not too bad.
You fire off an explanation and a couple of chaser emails.
On the way to the coffee machine, you promise yourself that when you are a manager, you will never behave like this. Who cares about a one day delay?

Your boss is a micromanager.

There is a pattern that repeats across nearly every micromanagement story I have seen. The people who escape it do one thing: they remove uncertainty for their manager before the manager comes asking.

You can turn it into a game: start Monday with 20 points. For each ping or question your boss has initiated towards you, subtract a point. How many points do you have left by the end of the week?

There is a simple trick that will help you keep most of your points.

Over-communicate.

You can stop reading now and go do it 🙂

If you are still reading, let me tell you three stories about three different micromanagers. The details are changed to protect the innocent, but the patterns repeat with eerie consistency.

Jenny - new and anxious manager

Jenny had just been promoted to lead a team of twenty people delivering client work. If they delivered well, there would be repeat business and referrals. If they failed, the client would walk and jobs could be at risk. With this weight on her shoulders, Jenny hovered over everything. She edited every client email, pushed for aggressive estimates and then pressured the team to hit them. She pinged people all day with the same question: “Is this finished yet?”

Her team rolled their eyes behind her back. She had been fun before the promotion, but now she was draining everyone’s patience.

Omer joined the team and disliked the constant pings. If he did not reply within five minutes, Jenny would appear behind his chair. So he asked himself a simple question: “How can I stay ahead of her?”

He created a daily status report.

Here is what I am working on.
Here is my progress today, on track for date X.
Here is a risk I spotted and what I am doing about it.

And the magic happened. Jenny left Omer alone. She knew the update would come daily at four o’clock and she could wait.

Two weeks later, she praised Omer’s updates in front of the team. Others adopted the same habit, and soon the flow of pings reversed direction. Almost overnight, the micromanagement stopped.

Jenny was new and under pressure. Maybe her boss said “We need to get this one right”. Maybe she felt the sudden weight of twenty salaries on her shoulders. Maybe she simply wanted to succeed in her first management role.

She did not yet know where she needed to audit and where she could trust. Some managers begin by not auditing at all and deal with problems as they pile up. Others audit everything and work themselves to the brink. Both learn in time.

When you work for a manager like this, understand the source of their anxiety and give them tools to ease it. The answer is almost always more communication. Find the channel and cadence that work for them and deliver it consistently.

Daily reports? Copying them on every email? Yes, it can feel absurd. But it does not need to last forever. Once they learn that you are reliable, they will give you space. A weekly update may be enough. Trust shrinks the need for oversight.

Omer saw this clearly because he was new. The nineteen colleagues who had known Jenny before the promotion were stuck in old habits and waited for her to change. But you cannot change someone else’s behaviour. You can only change your own.

Learning one: overcommunication beats undercommunication.
Learning two: when you get a new manager, ask yourself: what update rhythm would ease their load before they ask for it?

Jill - perfectionist

Jill was experienced and senior. She was also a perfectionist. Her organisation delivered the strongest results and the cleanest thought leadership. Everything she touched met the standard required for the CEO table. And because she was trusted at that level, she guarded her bar carefully. To avoid burning out her team, she gave each new direct report a “how to manage me” rulebook.

1. My first principle is “Be paranoid”. If I have not heard from you, I assume things are going wrong. Check in with me every morning and again every evening.

2. I care about X, Y and Z. These topics must be done my way. No deviations. I will update this list as things evolve.

3. Other areas are yours. You and your team decide how to run them, as long as you do not drop the ball.

This may not sound great, but a self-aware boss who hands you a rulebook is often a gift. It saves you from the painful experiences your predecessors lived through. When boundaries are clear, the relationship works for both sides. Re-read the rulebook until you know it by heart.

Not every micromanager provides one. But experienced managers know their quirks. One of your early conversations with your new boss should cover working style (check out my post on Starting and Succeeding in a Senior Role).

If they do not give you guidance, ask around. One tough manager I knew didn’t write their own rulebook, but their team wrote one on their behalf. That rulebook outlasted the entire original crew.

Learning three: clear boundaries prevent many problems.
Learning four: joint suffering builds camaraderie.

JP - sudden micromanager

Dave joined a new company and thought he had hit the jackpot. The work was interesting, his team was seasoned and his manager, JP, let him get on with things. JP asked Dave for advice and praised his expertise. Everything looked golden.

Until one day it wasn’t.

JP began joining every meeting Dave attended and asked piercing questions. Their one to ones turned from collaborative discussions into painful feedback sessions. Dave pushed back. At the next meeting he was handed a performance improvement plan. His time at the company was over.

The backstory was that Dave had put his foot in his mouth in front of JP’s boss. The boss asked JP “Who is this joker?” JP did not know Dave well enough to defend him, so he started auditing his work. The audits confirmed his worst fear: he had hired the wrong person.

I hope you would never find yourself in Dave’s shoes, and would rise in a straight line from good to great. But if you are taking bigger risks, one day you may discover yourself lying in the dust wondering what hit you.

Maybe you took a stretch role that did not play to your strengths.

Maybe your sponsor left and there was no one to vouch for you in a critical discussion.

When your manager suddenly becomes a micromanager, ask yourself whether the issue is them or you. Are they doing it to everyone or only you? If it is everyone, they probably received feedback to audit more. If it is only you, focus on the feedback. Get clarity on what you need to improve and move fast.

The mistake most people make is trying to prove the manager wrong. The right move is to take the feedback and fall forward with it. Show rapid improvement.

Lesson five: when your boss suddenly starts micromanaging, take the feedback seriously and raise your game.

***

You may be wishing your manager fit into one of the above categories. They look like angels compared to the boss you have.

He blocks decisions, reviews everything with painful scrutiny and even small approvals drag on for days. He raises his voice in meetings. He sends your deck back at 6pm with two hundred comments and expects a new version by morning.

You have tried over-communicating.

You have tried setting boundaries.

You have taken advice.

Nothing works.

Some situations cannot be fixed from your side. Either their manager steps in or you step out. Some walls are not worth banging your head on, unless you enjoy the sensation.

Working for any micromanager is tough. But there is upside. Adversity matures you. You learn to anticipate fires. You build communication systems. You drive clarity because vague boundaries backfire. You feel the pain and promise yourself never to inflict it on others. And in your next role, you soar.

Turning pain into power is a path to excellence. Just listen to Imagine Dragons 🙂

Have a friend who is complaining about their manager? Send them this piece.

And if you are new here, subscribe for more career wisdom.

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Additional resources:

• 15 principles for managing up

• The magic loop (interview on Lenny’s podcast)

• How to manage a micromanager

P.S. I am writing a book with a working title How To Be A Top Performer aimed at employees who want to be top performers and managers who want high performing teams. It will be a short and practical. I have a few spots for exploratory reader conversations (like, what topics you would like me to cover). If you’d like to help shape the book, book a slot through my Cal or send me an email.

“This product does not ship to Switzerland”.

I was running the Swiss marketplace business at Amazon. The business was not performing the way we wanted. Conversion was soft and customers were not buying as much as in other countries. The working theory in the cross-border team was that we needed faster shipping. That sounded plausible. Fast shipping increased conversion and our delivery to Switzerland was the slowest of all the European countries. We were working hard to solve this issue.

Still, something in that message pulled at me. Remember a time when you spot the perfect sofa, only to notice a small sign saying it is reserved for someone else?

I clicked on a few more products. They looked fine. Then a few more. I saw the same message again.

Most senior leaders are taught to manage by exception. We dive into the red areas and focus on fixing the problems we know. But there is a danger in that rhythm. It blinds us to problems we have not yet discovered.

A category leader once told me he did a weekly deep dive into a random part of his business. No crisis. Just curiosity on a schedule. He said he always found something worth fixing. It kept his team attentive and kept him grounded in reality.

Walk-the-Store is the retail version of diving deep. In brick and mortar shops, managers walk the aisles every day. Online, it means clicking through your own website as if you were a customer. It sounds obvious. It is amazing how much you find.

That morning, I asked the cross-border team whether this “does not ship” issue was tracked anywhere. A few years earlier they had a metric called “invalid glance views”: cases where customers viewed a product that looked promising, but for some reason could not be shipped to their country. The number had been small, around two percent, and the report was retired.

What I was seeing did not look like two percent.

At Amazon you cannot ask a tech team to drop everything based on a suspicion. Every fix competes for scarce developer time. You need data, sizing and prioritization. So I asked my team to get me the numbers.

When the report arrived, I had to read it twice.

Invalid glance views for Swiss customers were twenty-three percent.

One in four product pages showed items that could not be shipped to customers. That meant that customers were falling in love with products they were never allowed to buy. No amount of faster shipping would fix that.

We made this our top priority. It took multiple teams and far more effort than you might expect, but once solved, the customer experience improved immediately.

Managing by exception is necessary, but not sufficient. You need to manage by inspection as well.

A few simple practices to do this:

1. Once a week, pick an area that is not performing and do a deep dive beyond the existing narrative.
2. Alternate between customer walks and mechanism walks. One week behave like a customer. Another week behave like the person running the process.
3. Ask yourself the uncomfortable question. Are we solving the right problem or the convenient one?

If you never look beyond the familiar problems, you miss the invisible ones.

When was the last time you checked an area that was “doing fine”?

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Finally, a productivity book written by a working mom!

I’ll happily learn from professors or young Youtubers about productivity hacks, but it’s just not the same when the author is a mom juggling a family and a career. Vanderkam, a journalist, fills her book with stories of real people. She opens with Theresa Daytner, a mother of six (including 8-year-old twins), and owner of the business employing 12 people, who besides this, still finds time for solitary hikes, reading novels and organising surprise parties for her husband.

After reading that, you know this isn’t a book about ordinary mortals. And yet, it makes you believe you might become a little more like them.

The first hurdle is keeping a time log and tracking where you spend your time for one week.

Still reading? All right. You are destined for greatness. 🙂

I, too, dismissed the idea. It sounded painfully boring. Who wants to record life in 15-minute chunks for seven days straight? There is a reason I am not a lawyer.

But as I read on, my curiosity was piqued.

Vanderkam says that when people do these logs, they discover that their time doesn’t go where they think it does.

• Most people overestimate how much they work by about 25%. Think you’re doing 60 hours a week? It’s probably closer to 48. (One of my old Amazon bosses used to say that too. He was well loved - but not for this statement.)

• Devices are eating our time. An average adult spends 3.2 hours a day on their phone. You can easily check your own tally, just Google how.

• And while many of us happily pay for childcare, we hesitate to outsource housework, even as we say we want “more quality time with the kids”.

This last one rings a bell. There is a lot of time in my household spent on grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning up. Some of it is deliberate - my husband lists “cooking” as one of his hobbies and we all enjoy wholesome home-cooked dinners. But some of it is a habit. Both my husband and I grew up in families where parents did everything themselves. Outsourcing still feels… wrong. Somehow you are not “good enough” if you are ordering a take-out or loading a dryer instead of hand-drying your washing.

When I picture outsourcing chores, I imagine a 19th century butler gliding silently around a mansion, something only the very rich could afford. But there’s a middle ground.

In the book, Vanderkam tells a story of Sid Savara, who discovered he spent 15 hours on food-related chores. He hired a personal chef for $60/week plus the cost of groceries (book was published in 2010, so prices may have gone up). Not only did he reclaim 15 hours, but his grocery bill reduced. How? The chef bought in bulk and cooked for many clients at once, hence creating economies of scale. Savara himself was never in the store and hence also skipped the impulse buys.

Another chapter is called “Don’t Do Your Own Laundry”. Surely, I thought, laundry is easy - we have machines. I grew up in a communist country and we had to wash everything by hand (yes, this is my version of “uphill both ways” story for my children). But with six people in the house, even with a washer and a dryer, laundry feels like a full-time job. There’s always a load running, one waiting to dry, another to fold. And I’ve yet to meet anyone who claims that washing is their hobby.

Vanderkam uses a wash-and-fold service in New York for about $2.50 a kilo. I doubted such luxuries existed in Luxembourg, but decided to run an experiment. ChatGPT gave me a few options. The first service we booked never showed up, but the second one did. They charge €9 per kilo (quite different from $2.5!) and bedsheets cost a ton, yet the peace at home over the last three weeks has been priceless.

And if anyone wants to start a reasonably priced laundry service for busy parents in Luxembourg, there’s a clear gap in the market. 🙂

I can already hear the protests: Just listen to a podcast while folding! Or Make it a family chore and build grit with kids! Fair points. Pairing chores with something pleasant is one kind of productivity. But given a choice, I’d rather use that hour to write, read with my kids, or dream up a side project.

If I put a price tag on my time: one hour of chores equals minimum wage. Chores while listening to Invest Like the Best? Maybe 3x. One hour spent creating, learning, or truly connecting with my family? That’s worth hundreds.

So what did I learn from my own time study?

As Vanderkam predicted, I worked fewer hours than it felt like. My week was busy: a few evenings, some weekend work, but the total came to 42 hours. I’m happy with that; it’s where I want my boundaries to be.

Exercise, on the other hand, fell short: 3.5 hours over four sessions. As I was tallying this on a Sunday, I grabbed my swimsuit and headed to the pool to make up for it. I have now set longer goals for my swimming sessions.

On the plus side, I logged 37 hours of family time, 20 of them were quality time. The average for quality time is just three, so apparently we are doing better than I thought.

Admin work surprised me too. I thought it would be 15 hours a week; the tally showed only 4. I suspect it’s because I fold it into family time (doing it with my husband) or leisure (listening to podcasts). Those moments don’t feel like admin anymore.

In fact, reframing time is powerful.

I remember an Amazon VP telling us he spent 30% of his time “growing people”. When someone asked how that was possible with his back-to-back meetings, he said: I go into every meeting with the intention of raising the next generation of leaders. Teaching, coaching, listening — that was his mental bucket.

Since doing this exercise, I have become more deliberate about labelling my time. When I change the mental bucket, I stop “laying bricks” and move to “building a cathedral”. And I feel less rushed, more in control. Same work has more meaning.

You can do a time study and find what your hours look like. It may sound boring - and it may also change your life.

Thanks for reading! If this resonated with you, send it to a busy parent who deserves a guilt-free hour back. And if you are new here, subscribe - every other week I share an idea or learning that makes our work and life just a little bit better.

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UPD: You might like my other post on two-career household and how to survive the early years: The Modern Family Wasn’t Designed for Two Careers.