🥁 The OffBeat #92: Lead Sheet | Leadership Digest
Something to read, something to think about, something else
This is The OffBeat, where music meets leadership. I’m Allison Stadd—jazz drummer, marketing leader, and very tired/highly caffeinated mom of two—and each week I deliver a fresh take on work, creativity, and connection, like how to hire like Duke Ellington. It’s like HBR, but with better taste in music.
Lead Sheet is The OffBeat’s every-other-week roundup of links, recs, and quotes. Like a lead sheet in music (just the essentials: melody, harmony, lyrics), it always has something to read, something to think about, and something else—all within the themes of leadership cues from music, cultural curiosity, and personal/professional balance.
Opening Note | A track that captures the vibe of this edition of The OffBeat:
Patient, spacious, and quietly powerful, this track is from the album often cited as one of the earliest examples of jazz fusion. It has a stacked lineup of musicians (Wayne Shorter! Chick Corea! Herbie Hancock! Tony Williams!).
The full OffBeat playlist
Corporate America’s long-running war for talent sounds more like a war on the talent these days | WSJ
Thinking out loud: how to use your voice in knowledge work | Ness Labs
704 ideas for using ChatGPT to improve your life | LinkedIn
Why millennials are embracing polyworking | Forbes
Approach technology like the Amish | Cal Newport
Instead of asking yourself what you’re passionate about, use these 4 territories to guide your career design decisions | Around the Bonfire— Brand, marketing, creativity
LOVED chatting with
for on all things marketing, brand, and jazz (duh).
“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.” — Tim Kreider
In The Book of Moods, Lauren Martin (creator of Words of Women) writes that controlling your willpower comes down to eliminating the number of choices you make each day. Like how Obama only wore gray or blue suits to stave off decision fatigue.
Anything that saps too much mental energy, minimize and simplify so it takes up less real estate in your brain.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about this as minimizing my mental browser tabs. I use brain dumps (brain dump template here) to reduce cognitive load. But during chaotic seasons, a tidy to-do list isn’t enough; you need a strategy to triage attention.
Here are five approaches working for me right now for mental browser tab minimization:
Meal planning:
Make a list of 5-10 go-to meals, set a recurring calendar invite on Fridays to make your meal plan and grocery list for the upcoming week, then pull from the list to plot meals for each evening.
Food delivery:
Instead of constantly debating over what to order in, pick 3-5 restaurants and rotate between them.
Birthday party gifts:
Pick a default gift for each relevant age group (e.g. the age of your kids whose friends’ birthday parties they’re getting invited to this year, or the age of most of your friends’ kids, etc.) and buy a few of each to keep on hand.
Default calendar “Yes”s and “No”s:
Set some personal meeting policies like:
I always say yes to 1-1s with my direct reports
I always say no to back-to-back Fridays
I never schedule big presentations on Monday mornings
Cheat sheet:
Keep a pinned doc or note with the key facts and data points you need to reference regularly (your company’s key annual goals and their year-over-year change, recent high-level campaign results, etc.) so you don’t have to tax your brain to dredge them up.
For double the reading recommendations, including how to use AI to ease your post-PTO anxiety and the deal with mini-retirements and “vibes hiring”, plus 5 fascinating things to listen to / watch, keep reading.