Category: time management

How to Move Quickly in 2026

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

My 2026 started with a blanket of snow: six inches of unexpected, fresh powder in the Vermont mountains.

I was there on a surprise 3-day snowboarding trip with my 14-year-old daughter. We braved single-digit (F) temperatures, ignoring the impacts of an ice storm that had blanketed (read: ruined) the mountain just a few days prior.

The half a foot of snow was dumb luck—a ‘dusting’ was expected—and it was amazing.

We were on the first lift at 8:01am, in 5 degree weather, and had the most perfect four hours to start off 2026.

2025 was not an easy year for so many of us. So many things that we took for granted shifted or disappeared, and I, at least, spent a tremendous amount of energy fighting to stand still.

The good news is: we are here today, stronger for what we have endured, and more confident in our resilience for having made it through 2025.

The snow that started this year is a fresh, clean, undisturbed canvas.

It’s not a canvas that lasts forever. And, yes, that sheet of hard, unforgiving ice might be just below the surface.

But we can allow ourselves the space to start again, and we can believe in the possibility of renewal and new possibility.

My friend Abby Falik writes a newsletter called Taking Flight. In her most recent post, she poses the question:

Sometimes, when I’m running late, I play an inner game: Can I move quickly without rushing?  The grip loosens. Breath returns. A possibility cracks open and I’m more likely to arrive present.

I have no illusion of approaching 2026 in low gear, no pretense that it won’t be challenging and intense.

Rather than hiding from that, my goal is to pull strength from the knowledge of what I achieved in 2025—despite all the challenges—coupled with a commitment, thanks to Abby’s nudge, to move quickly without rushing.

I remind myself: the speed and quantity of what I do can be high without the frenzy that comes from rushing. I can be fast and thoughtful, speedy and intentional, and grounded throughout.

So can you.

Happy 2026.

What Are We More Afraid to Miss?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Which scares us more:

  • Missing something, or
  • Not devoting enough time to the important things.

To explore this question, here’s a short parable of modern work life: how I manage my Inbox.

Starting 15 years ago, I established my current approach to my Inbox. It is based on the philosophy that there are two kinds of emails:

  1. Ones I need to act on
  2. Ones I don’t need to act on

The approach is brutally simple:

  1. The first group is unread
  2. The second is read.

No filing of any kind. Search works great. Zero inbox is meaningless; zero unreads is not. Voila!

This approach, plus ruthless use of the “mark as spam / block sender” functionality in my Gmail interface, has served me well for years.

Last week, for the first time in ages, I decided I needed to adjust my system.

I think it’s because of an explosion of workflow-related emails: Calendar updates, Calendly updates, Zoom meeting updates, Docusign updates, Box updates, AI recording updates, etc.

Combine this with the general flotsam of subscriptions of varying degrees of usefulness, and the ratio of must read:optional to read emails in my Inbox had gotten out of whack.

My solution to this is that I caved in to using filters in Gmail (I’m sure there are many better solutions (Superhuman, etc.).

What’s interesting is the experience of setting up those filters: it’s the task of taking every nonessential but interesting email and putting it somewhere other than my Inbox—the only part of my email world that I’ve looked at consistently for more than a decade.

The feeling is the same one I have when there’s an “internal meeting I could join but maybe don’t have to join.” You know the one: the content is important, you will probably learn something and maybe will make the meeting a little better. But do you absolutely need to be there?

The same goes for the Slack channel that’s been there forever that I rarely read; the client call that might be helpful to join even though someone else is running the meeting; the conference that I always attend, even though I can’t show concrete business results.

Most of us feel short on time—including time to be unproductive. We ache for open space, time to be generative, time to do the things that matter most… “once all this stuff is out of the way.” We tell ourselves that there’s no real way to create this kind of space.

One way to explore if this is true is to experience the fear of missing something: that essential email, that meeting where a wrong decision gets made, that photo op at the conference….

Perhaps that fear is justified, and the consequences would be significant.. Maybe success is defined by you getting to everything right on time; you being present to optimize each and every decision; you seeing all the edge cases and fixing them immediately. That might be what we need most from you.

Or it might be that there’s more resilience in the system than you expect.

That the cost of tracking and sifting through everything is real.

That setting a different bar for “what requires me” would create such a seismic, structural shift in your days and your weeks that it would be a little bit, or even a lot, disorienting.

This is what the sixth stage of Kevin Kelly is all about: “finding those things to which you are uniquely suited, and doing only those things.”

Not the places you can add value, not the things you are best at. The things that only you can do.

It’s a really high bar, and it cuts against the culture in most organizations.

It’s also worth exploring.

Decreasing Time on Task

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

So much talk about productivity is about how we block out our time.

Not getting distracted too easily by the constant influx of pings that tear our attention away.

Creating dedicated space for deep work.

Managing to do lists, prioritization, deadlines.

And all of this is essential.

We also have the option to create more time in the way we complete our tasks, by finding our own path to efficiency on the things we do often.

Do we type 30 or 60 or 120 words a minute?

Do we spend 15 minutes debating with ourselves before mustering the courage to share our point of view with a colleague?

Does a simple email response to a client question take us 3 minutes to write? 10? 20?

Do our standing meetings last 15 minutes, 30 or 60?

Have we learned both how to listen to the relevant points of view and also to keep meetings moving forward?

These sorts of shifts are easy to describe, but we’re often more comfortable with some than with others. It might help to think of them in four distinct categories, and use these categories to diagnose which types of changes we find easier / harder to make:

  1. Skills: typing speed is just one example. There are tons of tasks we engage in as knowledge workers, many of them repetitive (e.g. switching between applications on our computers). Do we invest the time to learn to do these well AND quickly?
  2. Indecision: ultimately, our day is full of hundreds of decisions big and small. If we hand-wring over too many of these, our day will be gone before we know it.
  3. Emotions: the primary one that gets in our way is fear, the kind that paralyzes us to inaction.
  4. Structure: how long our meetings are, what days we have them, which tasks we do first thing in the morning, how we block our time.

When seen this way, it’s clear how much space we can create in our days and in our weeks, by accelerating the time from start to finish of our important, oft-repeated tasks.

I’d estimate that each of us has at least 10 hours a week we could “find” by taking this all on.