When people talk about how they work, they usually gravitate toward tools and workflows. Those things matter, but they are downstream of something more important: understanding the conditions that make you effective.
A productivity system is not a collection of apps. It is a set of decisions about how you spend attention. If you do not know when you need depth, when you need motion, and when you need to be responsive, the tools will only help you move faster in the wrong direction.
This week, I want to share how I approach work, the modes I use during the week, and a few prompts for developing your own way of working.
The way you work should fit the conditions around you. Your role, level, team rituals, company culture, and personal life all shape what kind of system will actually hold up.
I am in an executive role leading a significant part of a design organization. In addition to my responsibilities for my team, I work across the company and externally. The company I work at is distributed, with offices around the world. We do not have set days in the office, so people can choose the environment where they do their best work.
I also have other work outside of my day job, including this newsletter. And that is still only work. I have a personal life to protect, relationships to foster, and enough non-work context that I do not want my calendar to become the only source of truth for my life.
From those conditions, I have learned a few things about how I need to work:
I need to push the tempo of the week. To have time, I need to own the calendar, not have the calendar own me.
I have to context switch a lot and cannot rely on every week being predictable.
I need to be responsive, but I cannot let responsiveness become my default state.
For maker time and craft work, I cannot multitask. It does not work for me.
Your conditions may be different. A founder, designer, manager, student, or independent worker will all have different constraints. The point is not to copy someone else’s system. The point is to understand what your work is asking of you.
Based on my conditions, I think about my work in three modes: Push, Triage, and Focus.
I try to keep these modes in blocks as much as possible. Multitasking does not work for me personally. If I am constantly switching between Slack, meetings, writing, strategy, and deep design work, I may be busy, but I am not doing my best work.
I am a “just enough” planner. The work I do requires room for serendipity and a bit of chaos. Instead of trying to plan every detail, I try to push work forward early and often.
This is not push in the form of aggression. It is about creating momentum for the people and agents I work with. A good push gives someone else enough context to keep moving without waiting on me.
There are a few techniques I use:
I pre-write messages that can be scheduled or sent later. This lets the right information move without waiting for me to get out of meetings.
I create contextual pass-downs. With AI workflows, not everything has to be perfectly drafted. Sometimes a Loom video, a messy outline, or a voice note is enough to move the work along.
I try to make decisions legible. If someone understands why a decision was made, they can usually make the next one without asking for permission.
The further I can push, the less I need to triage later. But reacting and responding is inevitable, especially in leadership roles.
There is no avoiding triage. Regardless of your role, some level of reacting and responding comes with the job. For managers, this happens constantly: internally with the team, cross-functionally with peers, and externally with the market.
One of the tricks I have developed is a better way to combat Slack. Most companies have chaotic messaging behaviors because priorities move faster than the communication systems around them. What I do is connect my Slack bookmarks to Trello. When I bookmark something, a card is created for me to review later. That gives me a way to capture the signal without letting every message interrupt the moment I am in.
Triaging is not only about responding to things pushed to you. There is a pull mechanic as well. You have to pull the right information out of your systems before it becomes urgent: the meeting that needs prep, the decision that is stuck, the person who needs a follow-up, the project that is drifting.
I try to treat triage as a mode, not a mood. If I am in triage mode, I am intentionally clearing loops and creating motion. If I let triage leak into the whole day, I end up living inside other people’s priorities.
Focus mode is my sacred deep work time. It is when I work on the most important things: writing, strategy, design, prototyping, and the kind of thinking that needs a clear mind.
Doing Push and Triage mode well is the only way I can carve out Focus work. The paradox is that deep work requires preparation. You cannot simply declare a block of time sacred if every loose thread is still pulling at you.
For meaningful deep work, I need at least a four-hour block. Anything shorter than that usually does not give me the depth I seek. I protect my mornings for this whenever I can. It is a cognitive workout and sets the tempo for the day.
If I wait until the end of the day or week, I may not have enough energy or inspiration left. Whether it is mornings, calendar blocks, nights, or weekends, find the pocket of time where it is just you and your tools.
Even executives and leaders have to make time to build right now. In addition to building, this time is reserved for reflection and inspiration. For me, Focus mode is the origin of the loop that helps me do my best work. It needs to be open-ended and self-directed. It is the time where I dictate the conditions.
If you want to develop your own way of working, start with the conditions instead of the tools.
A few questions I would ask:
What parts of your work do you have the ability to design?
What are the non-negotiable conditions you have to work around?
Where are you the bottleneck?
What work requires depth, and what work only requires motion?
Where are you being responsive because it is useful, and where are you being responsive because it feels productive?
What rituals help you transition between modes?
Finding your personal way of working takes time. Eventually, you develop a style that can travel with you from team to team. But it is still important to honor the working agreements and rituals of the team you are on. Your system should help you contribute better to the group, not become a private religion no one else can understand.
The good news is that workflows are condensing. AI, automation, and better tools make it easier to create leverage around the edges of the day. The opportunity is not to do more busywork. It is to protect the conditions where your best work can actually happen.