Michael Lopp

MID-TO-LATE-FEBRUARY. Last week, you took the concern, worry, or obstruction and you shared it with an important someone else. How’d that go? What did you expect to learn? What did you unexpectedly learn? DO THIS. RIGHT NOW. We’ve been noodling this situation for a bit,

MID-FEBRUARY. Last week, you took the first step toward solving a significant concern, worry, or obstruction in your mind about yourself or your team. The goal was to choose a direction, not a solution. How'd it go? You realize that I'm making these tasks so

Good morning, it's February 2nd. EARLY FEBRUARY. In your toolkit, you now have two short documents. A quick assessment of the team and a quick assessment of yourself. Go re-read those if you did them, and if you didn’t, here are the instructions for both. It’

Good morning, it’s January 26th. LATE JANUARY. The calm of the holidays is becoming a distant memory. Last week, we did a super-fast assessment of your team. Not a performance review, nothing formal, just a temperature check. The practice I’m encouraging is a cache refresh. I want

Good morning, it’s January 19th. JANUARY. Most performance reviews have a strong recency bias. You remember the successes and failures from the last three months and use that as the foundation for the report card. This is unfair. Your team members have likely forgotten or rebranded their failures, but,

I vividly remember where I was standing when someone explained the knowledge pyramid to me. It’s called the DIKW (data, information, knowledge, wisdom) pyramid over here on Wikipedia, but when Laurie the PM scribbled it on the white board, I thought she was thinking out loud, and IT BLEW

I’m writing a draft of this piece just for the newsletter this morning. Happy Thanksgiving. Try the Pinot — it’s excellent. Sorry about the typos. January 1st is a reset. What was late in the year — cold and dark December — transforms into a fresh new beginning in January. Resolutions,

Pretty proud of this one. It was written at a time of great stress and was a therapy piece. It was a rare circumstance when the words just showed up. As a writer, this is your goal state. It’s why you spend all that time writing garbage. You’re