Leaders Read#118
- Lars Christensen
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
👋 Hello everyone,
Greg McKeown said, “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”
Here are a few resources you might have missed:
📚 Book Summary:
This week's book is "Rituals Roadmap" by Erica Keswin.
We can use rituals to begin something and to wrap something up. Think about ways to kick off your workday or end it. In a world where work follows us everywhere, rituals offer a practical way to create boundaries and be fully present with the people who matter most.
One of my favorite takeaways from the book is this:
Gwen Moran writes in a Fast Company article, "Rituals signal to us that it's time for a specific mindset or activity. They act as triggers to more effortlessly get us ready for what we need to do." Rituals are great preparation, and they can help us wrap things up, too. After all, the end of one thing is the beginning of another. These days, with our jobs chasing after us, pinging from our pockets at all hours of every day if we let them, taking time off is a mindset that needs our attention more than ever. Put another way: If we don't take charge of our schedules, our devices will happily do it for us. We can harness rituals at the beginning and end of everything we do, and we can ensure we include our technology, leveraging what we love about it while also putting it in its place.
✅ Actionable advice:
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, describes habit stacking—as attaching a new habit to an existing one —a discipline many high-performing leaders instinctively use to start their day well. You may even follow the discipline of deciding tomorrow's priorities the night before. But the end of the workday is where most leaders lose control by lacking a deliberate shutdown routine. Use an already existing habit, like reading your child a bedtime story, and use that moment as a clear boundary to stop attending to the pinging from your pocket. This will become a strategic signal to yourself that you—not your technology—decide when work ends, and recovery begins.
Have a great week!