An inconvenient update

I’ve been a bit quiet lately.

Which is frustrating, because until a couple of months ago I was on a roll.

I was probably healthier than I’d been for years. I was writing, working, cycling, and had several books buzzing around in my head.

Then I got sick.

I’ve had atrial fibrillation four times in the last year. It’s a common ailment, and, in my case, not particularly scary. But this latest episode has been stubborn, and I’ll probably need a minor operation to sort it out.

The biggest impact has been my get-up-and-go.

It has - as the old saying goes - got-up-and-gone, though it is nearly all back.

For a while, the number of hours I could devote to high-energy work each day easily halved.

So I stopped writing books.

Stopped LinkedIn.

Stopped marketing.

Stopped trying to be terribly productive.

(And, to be honest, there was something rather enjoyable about having a legitimate excuse not to do all that stuff!)

But I kept delivering for my clients. That was the one thing that mattered. Everything else could wait.

And now that my energy is returning, I’ve realised something rather funny.

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Earlier this year I wrote about Cognitive Crush.

My argument is that AI is removing more and more of the easy work, leaving leaders with the hard stuff. Decisions. Trade-offs. Problems that require real thought.

Eventually, the scarce resource - the bottleneck - becomes the leaders’ brains.

I reckon I’ve just experienced a version of Cognitive Crush - but it wasn’t caused by AI.

It was caused by getting sick.

Turns out the cause doesn’t matter, because the solution is exactly the same.

When your brain is the bottleneck, don’t try to squeeze more out of it. Protect it.

Specifically, protect it by prioritising ruthlessly and saying no to all but the most important things

As you may recall, I call this the Motorcade Method.

And it’s almost always the first thing I have to run when I start working with a new client.

→ When the presidential motorcade moves through a city, it doesn’t sit patiently in traffic. The roads get cleared and only the motorcade’s lights get turned to green.

Pick the one thing that matters most. Clear the road. Get it through.

For the last couple of months, that one thing has been my client work.

Everything else waited.

I paced myself

It turns out I’ve been taking my own medicine.

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And now that my energy is coming back, I’ve immediately got another problem.

Books. LinkedIn. YouTube. Marketing. Cognitive Crush.

All good ideas!

Trying to do all of them would be idiotic 🤦‍♂️

So today, while sitting in a hot bath, I talked through my ridiculous pile of todos with ChatGPT, and turned most of them into to-don’ts.

And eventually I realised what should get the motorcade next:

• One small thing …

• Something useful I want (or have) to say …

• Something I could finish without using up all the energy that’s finally coming back …

This newsletter.

And now I’ve written it.

I hope it’s as useful as it was to me. It turns out that I crave a little dopamine and push send gives me that!

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Enough about me, how r u?

President Clarke - 🟢🟢🟢

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P.s. I wrote this over about 2 hours, with the help of ChatGPT and Claude, a load of too-ing annd fro-ing, and a whole lot of rewriting. The AI did the boring stuff. I did the thinking stuff. I’m sharing this because substack’s built in AI detector (pangram - which you keep hearing a lot about these days, apparently it’s very good) says it’s “100% human”.