[Journal] 26 June 26

Hey 🙂

I was over in the States recently. Part of my job as CEO now is to organise these ‘off-site sessions’, so I planned and facilitated four days of strategic discussions with my business partners.

Four days is a long time to sit in a room and think about a business. But the same pattern shows up every time, and I think it’s just human nature. One of those patterns being: we want to do everything at once.

There’s an illusion that creeps in, especially when you’ve got business partners. Because there are four of you, it feels like you can take on four times as much. You can’t. With that illusion, what happens is you split up, everyone goes off and does their own thing, and you end up with four businesses instead of one really good one.

So one of the core messages I kept coming back to, over and over across those four days, was this: do things sequentially. Pick the most important project. The one key priority. Then go. One thing at a time, done better. Quality over quantity — better clients, better processes, better work, all of it. I’d rather have the four of us pointed at one thing than scattered across four.

We tend overestimate what we can do in a month and underestimate what we can do in a year. I’ve been turning that over for my own situation. We overestimate what we can get done in three months, and underestimate what we could do in the three years we’ve got ahead of us.

Anyway…I wanted to hand this over to you, because wherever you are, I think it’s a question worth asking.

So here’s your prompt for the weekend:

If I paused everything right now and laid it all out — every project, every half-started thing, every “we should also do this” — what could I honestly admit can wait? And of what’s left, what’s the one thing that, done really well, would make most of the rest easier?

If you want to sit with it a bit longer, a few prompts that will help you go deeper:

• Where am I mistaking movement for progress?
• What am I running in parallel that would actually be better done in sequence?
• What am I overestimating I’ll finish this week — and underestimating I could finish in three months?

I’m going to journal on this myself this weekend.

As always, email me [chris@chrismarr.co.uk] and let me know where you land.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.