A few years back, I got completely sucked into the business and self improvement book genre, reading basically everything I could find of value. My favorites?

Rework, Anything You Want, the Lean Startup, Let My People Go Surfing.

But at some point, I started hitting a rut. Maybe it was the retreading of popular anecdotes. Or the fact that many books ended up leaning on the same tired and outdated examples to draw their conclusions. The process of reading started to feel like a chore, and I found I wasn’t retaining much from the books I was reading. I ended up taking a break from reading for most of a year.

Once I got the urge to start reading again, I decided to focus entirely on reading for pleasure. Initially I thought this would mean a lot of fiction, but the reality is that I was especially drawn to non-fiction, namely history.

The more eclectic my reading got – whether I was reading a book about Theodore Roosevelt or the environmentalism movement, I was drawing connections and analogies to my everyday work.

As someone who works in a highly specialized and technical field, being able to clearly convey complex ideas to non-technical audiences is a big part of my role. And the value of my eclectic reading has paid off in helpful anecdotes and analogies alone, not to mention expansion of my worldview.

I do still read plenty of business and marketing books – but I feel less inclined to guide my reading by what I “should” read, and instead what genuinely sparks my interest at the time. Chances are, if I’m absorbed by the reading, I’ll find a way to apply the material in some useful way in my life. But there’s no need to try and force it.

Early in my career, I made a few enemies. Mostly because a disagreement in my mind turned into an attitude of “they’re out to get me”. I created these enemies myself, and the animosity I held towards them lasted for years.

Looking back on those times is embarrassing – disagreement & conflict are natural parts of the workplace, but I had let it get much more personal than that.

These days I think I’m a lot more cool headed and ambivalent about conflict and disagreement at work. It can be frustrating at times. It’s still easy to interpret disagreement as a sign of a personal slight. But the difference today is that I rarely let these feelings evoke a response.

Whenever I speak to people just starting their careers, I always try and emphasis this point. The easy choice is to let our emotions get the better of us. To treat conflict at work as if it’s theater. But the reality is usually far less interesting, and the consequences of behaving that way just don’t work out well for you in the end.

The perfect feature set. The perfect structure. The perfect circumstances. We never quite seem to reach any of them.

It’s worth knowing where perfect lies for getting your bearings, but endlessly chasing it is like trying to catch your shadow. Settle for “good enough for now” instead.

When CD burning first became popular, I was obsessed with getting a burner of my own. How cool would it be to make my own CDs? I could have my own mixes for car rides, and give them out to my friends.

That year for Christmas, my parents got me a CD burner. I hooked up the bulky beige box to our family computer, installed the software, and then realized – I had nothing to put on my new CDs.

I was so distracted by the idea of burning a CD, yet hadn’t really considered the circumstances – that I wasn’t really in a place to make use of such a tool. In fact, my first few CDs were basically wasted on a bunch of free .WAV sound loops I found online. My first few CDs were basically tracklists of Powerpoint sound effects.

Eventually I got some music and figured out how to use the thing, but it was an early lesson in the difference between expectation and reality.

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of a new piece of technology and the possibilities it affords. But if you’re not equipped to make use of that technology now—If you don’t have a specific problem to solve or use case to pursue—then it’s not worth devoting many mental cycles to thinking about any further. Buying technology for “What if” is a pretty quick way to end up in integration purgatory, and a finance team questioning your budget decisions.

Or, to put it another way, you have no use for a spindle of blank CDs if you have nothing to put on them.

The daily vitamin/pill reminder may seem like a mundane, boring product, but it’s in fact the perfect habit forming tool.

To borrow the framework set forth by James Clear in Atomic Habits, the steps to design good habits are:

• Make it obvious: Simply setting out your vitamin reminder on the counter you pass every morning will do the trick here.
• Make it attractive: Your daily vitamin is typically something you take with food. So taking your vitamin = time to eat a tasty breakfast
• Make it easy: You’ve already done the legwork of laying out exactly the pills you need to take — all you need to do is swallow them.
• Make it satisfying: The weekly pill reminder is its own checklist — the empty segments mean another day you successfully completed. And who doesn’t love to cross off an item on a list?

Daily vitamins solved, surely there must be other areas of life solved with a similarly simple and elegant solution.

A little while back I wrote about the lessons I’ve learned from remote work, and the experience of working from home full time over the last year has been a net-positive for me. In fact, I love remote work—It’d be hard for me to adjust back to an in-office life again.

But there is one big downside I’ve been forced to reckon with: Isolation.

This is perhaps obvious, yet something I ultimately underestimated. It’s hard to appreciate the value of the social dynamic of an in-person work environment until you no longer have it to fall back on. Even for introverts like myself, isolation and the lack of that face to face experience can make the dynamics and communication styles in a workplace challenging at times.

Video conferencing helps immensely here, but even it is not a perfect substitute.

When an issue arises, or a problem needs to be escalated, it can be challenging to convey meaning and get everyone on the same page when emotions are raw. There’s something about sitting down face to face to resolve a dispute that technology just hasn’t quite solved yet.

The solution here, oddly, is more meetings. It’s easy to try and burn the candle from both ends—striving to be both a distributed team and embracing a meeting-light culture, but at least in the beginning, and especially with new team members, face to face time, whether virtual or in-person is crucial.

I’m typically up before the sun is, 5-5:30 AM, and this is the time when I’m most productive and creative. I’m an early bird.

But I’ve been reading Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep and early on, he mentions that early birds and night owls are genetically determined—chronotypes. Some of us simply are wired differently for sleep.

Living in a society that views and encourages “normal” as waking early and starting at 8 or 9am, I feel right at home. But the night owls in our society really get a raw deal. Not only are they expected, both through cultural norms and company policies, to adhere to an unnatural schedule, they’re at a distinct disadvantage in how their success is measured. For a night owl that does their best work in the evenings, the expectation of creative excellence at 9am is a tall order.

So it’s no surprise that there’s a rise of non-traditional schedules and organizations with flexible work hours to help address this. But I think we’re a long way from an even playing field. Remote roles and distributed companies feel like the perfect fit to solving this issue. If you can work from anywhere, and rely on asynchronous tools to stay in touch – where’s the problem in keeping different schedules?

Economics may have set the early-rising mentality of the workforce early on, but as sleep science advances, and workplace options diversify, the traditional, clock-punching, 9-5 companies lose a lot of their power. Adapt or get left behind.

A few years ago, I read about Jerry Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain” method of productivity. Meanwhile, my wife and I were trying to build a better exercise ethic, and I decided to apply the method that Seinfeld popularized.

I went to the hardware store, bought one of those big panels of blackboard material, cut it to size, and mounted it on a wall in the hallway of our house. I drew out a grid of 12 columns and 31 rows – enough to cover every day of the year. Then I assigned my wife and I each a color of chalk, and for each day we did a focused exercise, we got to cross off our half of the checkbox.

Almost immediately, this process turned into a post-workout reward. Like a fighter pilot that paints their kills onto the side of their plane, it felt like we had found a physical way to show our progress, and we both started working out a whole lot more. So much that we ran our first race this year – the Ragnar Northwest Passage.

The difference was making the progress highly visible every day. A checkbox in a notebook wouldn’t have been enough. An app or digital tracker lacked the tangible satisfaction. Instead it’s a giant, can’t-miss board that we see every morning when we wake up, and every evening when we go to bed.

There’s obviously more to building strong habits than using a habit tracker, but this small step has had a clear impact on us building a habit that lasts.

P.S. I just finished reading Atomic Habits which reinforced a lot of the lessons I’ve learned on habit formation. If you’re trying to build a new habit, or ditch an undesirable one, I highly recommend giving it a read.

At least once a month I find, in the mail or in my inbox, an offer:

Hop on a 15 minute sales call, and get a $5 Starbucks gift card.

Really? That’s the best you can do? If you knew me at all, you’d know I don’t even like Starbucks, and $5 seems like a rather cheap estimate of the value of my time. But I’d feel the same about $15, or even $30.

These offers are some of the least creative, most overused in the business, and yet seem as popular as ever. To be clear – I’m not against incentive-based offers – I just think brands need to put more effort behind them.

And of course you see much more creative examples in the margins. Whether it’s a fully custom direct mail campaign with personally chosen gifts, or automated solutions like Alyce that offer a bit more variety, it is possible to do meaningful work here.

Just be careful – no personalization is better than lazy personalization. If you’re sending your prospect a yoga gift card, you better make damn sure it’s yoga they’re actually interested in, and not pilates, or marathon running. Tailor the message to the market – or don’t say anything at all.

I’m sure we’d all prefer the work get done if we simply ask. But somehow it rarely works out like that. Other priorities come into play. There isn’t clear alignment on what needs to get done.

The fact is, you’ve always got to keep your foot on the gas if there’s important work to be done and you can’t do it yourself. This sometimes translates to being the squeaky wheel—not needlessly pestering—but stepping in when work is stalled, and getting things moving again.

It’s convenient to think about your role as purely the architects designing a home, while leaving the building to the builders. But when construction isn’t going to plan, often you’re the best person to step in and right the ship.