August is full of mixed messages. Go into any store at the moment and you’ll see beach balls, swimsuits, and coolers competing for shelf space with notebooks, backpacks, and back-to-school supplies. August […]
Business
Is It Time to Rethink Your Routines?
Use the 4Rs Framework for Your Routines Audit Routines. We all have them, both for work/business and for personal life. While we spend a lot of time at PF talking about projects, […]
Launching Better Team Habits on Substack
I’m equal parts excited and trepidatious to announce that I’ve started a new publication on Substack called Better Team Habits. As I mentioned in my first post there, the intent is to […]
Does Your Team Really Need a Daily Stand-Up Meeting?
Most daily stand-up meetings make whatever they’re trying to solve worse as a result of eating up team time and focus. First, let’s look at real meeting math. The daily stand-up isn’t […]
Change Work Is Strategic Work
How much time do you spend each week working through the important, deep, and future-building work? How much time could have been spent on the significant, strategic change work that often gets […]
What to Do When Work Intensity Is the Problem
A client recently wanted to problem-solve for working four days a week, but when she started explaining the problem, it wasn’t about the load of her days or how many days a […]
Self-Worth and the Floors and Ceilings Metaphor
I’d like to float the idea that self-worth is a fundamentally different thing from self-esteem or confidence. People talk about these ideas as if they were each one and the same. But […]
How to Focus on What’s Most Important
Recently I joined my friend Eric Zimmer on his podcast, The One You Feed, to discuss how to focus our lives on what’s most important to us, and what blocks us from […]
Careful What You Wish For: Company Goals Create Company Culture
Business owners and managers know they’re supposed to set challenging goals to motivate themselves and their teams. Most often, business goals prioritize sales targets, profit margins, and productivity. And as a business […]
May 2022 Planning Tips: Clear the Decks for Summer
May has always felt like a month of transitions for me. Growing up in Michigan, it was the first month we were pretty sure winter wouldn’t dump snow one last time in […]
Let the Process Be a Process — And Don’t Forget to Play
When people come to me for advice, certain themes tend to come up time and again from different voices, across livelihoods, and types of projects. Whether it be business thought leaders, writers, […]
How to Improve Employee Experience by Using Your “i’s”
Gone are the days where you can treat your employees like replaceable cogs that don’t have other options. Let me rephrase: Gone are the days where there are no visible consequences for […]
Unleash Yourself: How To Make Your Next Interview Your Best Interview
All too often, we make ourselves fit available options rather than making options fit us. It’s true of job-searching, partner-seeking, or life-building. I believe that we are better served when we flip […]
Three Delegation Skills to Get Your New Hires Contributing Right Away
After weeks — or maybe even months — of sifting through candidates, methodically hosting interview after interview, and finally narrowing your search down to the one right person, you’ve found your new […]
Scale Back or Burn Out
I was hit with a hard truth last week. I’d had hints of this hard truth surfacing over the last month or more; however, every time the whisper came I quickly buried […]
6 Ways to Level Up Your Leadership
There comes a point during your work for a company — one that you know you want to stick with and grow with — when you feel prepared to take on more […]
The Difference Between Being Ready and Being Prepared
When we think about what the next step is that needs to be done to level up our work, our teams, or our business, we often think of if we are — […]
3 Ways to Overcome Business-Owner Burnout
Does your business look different than it did a year ago? How about two years ago? And, does it look different than it did six months ago? What about just a quarter […]