Home alone, with seven tools and no off switch

I have discovered a powerful productivity technique.

Leave me at home, remove adult supervision and stand well back.

Annie is away in Africa with Bridge2Aid, and I’m home alone. I miss her. My to-do list, however, has never had it so good.

Looking back over the week, I appear to have mistaken an empty house for permission to open a branch office of absolutely everything.

There have been financial reviews, coaching replies, client meetings, podcasting, workshop rehearsals and more tinkering with AI. Somewhere in that lot, I have also been advising other people about the dangers of doing too much.

The irony has not escaped me.

The coaching week covered cash flow, recruitment, associate pay, management capacity and the economics of adding clinicians. The familiar questions keep coming: where has the money gone, who is going to do the work, and why do three reports describing the same challenges and solutions appear to have applied to equally to different practices?

It is satisfying work. Helping someone turn a complicated problem into a sensible next step still gives me a tremendous buzz.

Meanwhile, my Q4 workshop, The Implementation Gap, has been through three substantial rehearsals ahead of Belfast.

Yes, three.

After all these years, I still get nervous before delivering new material. Experience means I recognise the butterflies. It doesn’t mean they’ve agreed to sit down and behave.

The accompanying interactive workshop planner is finished, taking the Extreme Business Financial Analysis dashboard to seven tools. At this rate, I’ll need a calculator to count the calculators.

I’ve also created and tested systems for briefing me before meetings and writing up what happened afterwards. My digital support (ChatGPT) is expanding its scope of practice nicely. Its pension arrangements remain admirably straightforward.

The 2027 Extreme Business recruitment campaign is progressing, and I’m developing the idea of a single weekly digest for members. Fewer separate announcements, more useful information in one place. Naturally, the challenge is to avoid announcing the reduction in announcements through a series of announcements.

There is, however, a small catch with all this productivity.

An empty house makes it very easy for work to occupy every available corner of the day. Running, cycling, keeping in touch with Annie and actually stopping cannot become optional extras.

So my instruction to myself for the coming week is simple: finish Monday’s final rehearsal, stop editing and deliver two excellent workshops in Belfast.

The audience needs something practical they can use. They do not need the complete contents of my head, with supplementary appendices. Even I would struggle to stay awake for the extended director’s cut.

Plenty done. Plenty enjoyed. A healthy dose of nerves.

And a useful reminder that being able to carry on working is not always a compelling reason to do so.

I’d better practise that last bit before Annie gets home.