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✅ Today's Checklist:
7 rules to stop lying to your calendar The confidence trick Joanna learned at 10 Recipe of the week: Iced Strawberry Milk Matcha Latte
🤔 Trivia: The April full moon has a traditional springtime name. What is it? Find out.
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Stop Lying to Your Calendar (And 6 Other Time Blocking Rules)
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Time blocking fails for most of us because we lie to our calendars. We schedule eight-hour focus blocks we couldn't hit on our best day. We accept "quick syncs" that never are. We set Slack statuses we ignore the second a notification pops. These seven rules are what time blocking looks like in the real world, built for how your brain and your job actually work.
Rule #1: Time blocking isn't for the faint of heart.
Do you feel guilty ignoring Slack pings during your focus time? Do you check email "just in case" something is urgent? Do you accept a 3pm meeting request because saying no feels rude?
If yes to any of them, you have two paths:
Stop feeling guilty. Don't try time blocking.
For this to work, your blocked time has to be sacred, which means no distractions, check-ins, or debilitating guilt.
Rule #2: Do one thing. That's the whole rule.
The golden rule is stupidly simple: one task, one block.
Most people can't sustain deep focus on more than one thing anyway. Batching three low-stakes tasks into a focus block is how you finish zero of them in 90 minutes.
Pick the one, and do the one. Everything else waits.
Rule #3: Block your priorities. Skip everything else.
Your priorities fit in a day. Your priorities plus the five "quick things" people pinged you about this morning do not.
Pick the two or three priorities for the day. Block them first. Whatever's left after that is a "maybe" or a "tomorrow."
If that feels brutal, it means it’s working. Time blocking is pragmatic by design. Optimism is not a planning method.
Rule #4: Block in 90-minute chunks. 3 to 4 hours a day, cap.
For real work, 25 minutes is barely warm-up. Most cognitive research points to 90 minutes as the sweet spot: long enough to reach flow, short enough to still have focus when you finish. After 90, take a real break—walk, eat something, get away from a screen.
And cap your "deep work" at 3 to 4 hours total per day. Blocking 8 hours of focus is a lie you're telling your calendar. Most people can do 3 to 4 hours of genuine cognitive work before quality collapses. Fill the rest of the day with admin, meetings, and reactive work.
Your calendar looks less impressive, but your output is noticeably better. That’s a trade worth making.
Rule #5: Tell people. Loudly.
Silent time blocking is a fantasy.
Put it on your team calendar with a clear label: "FOCUS: Q3 strategy doc, no meetings, no Slack." Post your focus windows in your team channel weekly. Set your Slack status to "Heads down until 2pm" and actually mean it.
When someone pings anyway, here's the script:
"I'm in focus time until 2. I'll get back to you then." "Is this urgent enough to break a focus block? If not, I'll have an answer by EOD." "I can't do a meeting at 3. I can do 4." "This is exactly the thing I'm blocking time for. Let me get it done and I'll send it over at 3."
Boundaries without warmth get labeled cold. Boundaries with warmth get respected.
Rule #6: Do the worst thing first.
The hardest, most-avoided task on your list goes in your first block of the day (aka Eat The Frog).
You have the most willpower in the morning. You have the fewest interruptions early. And once the thing that's been haunting you for three days is done, the rest of the day feels like a downhill ride.
If you schedule it for "later," later will fill with everything else, and the hard thing will move to tomorrow (again).
Rule #7: The right system is the one you'll run tomorrow.
There are forty time-blocking frameworks on the internet. The one that matters is the one you'll actually execute at 9am Monday.
Track what you finish. Tweak what didn't work. Give it two weeks before you decide it's broken.
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DISCRIMINATION PREVENTION
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Discrimination Law Just Changed. Your Managers Probably Don't Know How.
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Your managers are about to get questions they've never been trained for.
Recent Executive Orders and updated EEOC and DOJ guidance rewrote big parts of workplace discrimination law. They'll show up as questions about DEI, religious accommodation, gender identity, and "reverse" discrimination.
Most training from a few years ago doesn't cover any of it.
Traliant's Discrimination Prevention for Managers is a 20-minute scenario-based course built for the new landscape.
Why it works:
Updated in real time by Traliant's in-house legal team Scenario-based, so it sticks 20 minutes, so rollout is easy Gives HR documented proof of good-faith training
See what's covered in the 20-minute course.
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The Confidence Trick I Learned When I Was 10
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I was about ten years old, running around a KB Toy Store with my older sister Natasha, probably hyper off of something I shouldn't have been eating. A woman stopped us. She introduced herself as a talent agent, guessed we were locals without us telling her, and said I had "the energy and spark" they look for in the acting world.
It was an odd pitch, but I was the shy kid who didn't raise her hand in class, and still, something in me lit up. I auditioned, got into acting classes, and stumbled into the thing that would shape the rest of my life.
Performing didn't scare me because the girl onstage was a character, and her insecurities weren't mine. Later, when I joined a band and stepped up as lead singer, the same trick worked. Joanna couldn't have done that job, but the front-woman version of me had no problem with it.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I had figured out what psychologists now call psychological distance: the tiny mental step of becoming someone slightly different from yourself before walking into a hard moment.
The most famous study on this comes from Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan. In what's now called the Batman Effect, children who pretended to be Batman while completing a long, boring task worked significantly longer and stayed more focused than children who stayed themselves.
Dr. Todd Herman, a performance coach to Olympic athletes and Fortune 500 executives, built an entire methodology on the same idea in his book The Alter Ego Effect. Herminia Ibarra at London Business School has spent decades studying what she calls "provisional selves," showing that effective leaders grow into new roles by trying on different versions of themselves first.
The neuroscience word is state-shifting. You're giving yourself a cleaner processor to run the moment on. Your alter ego doesn't carry your imposter syndrome, doesn't remember the time your boss embarrassed you in 2019, and hasn't been up three nights with a sick kid. They're a clean slate, and you can build them in about ten minutes.
That trick has carried me through many high-stakes moments of my career: addressing a sales summit of 1,000+ people at my last company, speaking at a newsletter conference, sitting through difficult co-founder conversations, and pitching to people who intimidated me. I put on a different name for the hour, and the scared version of me stays in the hallway.
Beyoncé performs as Sasha Fierce. Kobe played as the Black Mamba. Adele invented Sasha Carter to survive her Wembley shows. The tool is available to all of us.
Here's how to build your own:
Name them. First name only. When you hear the name in your head, they should feel slightly bigger than you. Pick three traits from the version of you who shows up on your very best days. Calm, decisive, warm. Direct, curious, unshakeable. Whatever clicks. Build a 30-second activation ritual. Amy Cuddy's research on body posture showed physical cues measurably change your internal state, so go physical. A specific blazer. A song you queue up. A phrase you say in the third person, like "Alex is ready for this." Kross's follow-up work on self-distanced self-talk found that single shift lowers anxiety in high-stakes moments. Deploy them on demand. When your chest tightens before a meeting, run the ritual, leave the scared version of yourself in the hallway, and walk in as them.
Confidence was never a personality trait. Every confident-seeming person you've ever admired either got lucky with temperament or figured out, somewhere along the way, how to summon the state when they needed it.
The version of you who handles the hardest moments at work already exists inside you. They've just been waiting for a door to walk through.
Build the door 🤗.
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P.S. Reply and tell me your alter-ago & traits so we can share them in a future edition :D!
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The Snack Delivery 5,137 Companies Switched To. Try It and Earn Up to $200 in Amazon GCs.
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If your office snack drawer has been the same beige box of granola bars since 2020, your team has noticed.
Simpalo is better-for-you snack and fresh fruit delivery, curated by people whose whole job is hunting down the ones that actually taste good. Over 5,137 companies send Simpalo to their teams, and 500,000+ employees are on the receiving end.
Why teams love it:
Curated boxes of better-for-you snacks plus fresh fruit delivery Your choice: pre-curated, fully custom, or let the team pick their own Flexible frequency (one-time, monthly, whatever works for your rhythm) Personal message included with every box
Plus: Simpalo is offering new customers an Amazon gift card (up to $200) for trying a box. The exact amount depends on the order.
👉 See the snacks, pricing, and gift card offer
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Stuff We’re Loving This Week
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📆 TOMORROW: Learn everything you need to lead your company’s AI transformation. Free on 4/23. RSVP Now.
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😎 If the news cycle is crushing your soul, Positive DONUT is a free weekly hit of warm fuzzies.
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👉 Update my subscriber preferences here.
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