Jason Brubaker - I DONE THIS

How To Be An Effective Team Manager In 2024

January 22, 2024January 2, 2024 by Jason Brubaker

Do you know how to lead a team well? If people working for you don’t like your management style, they are probably looking for a new job. A study by Gallup says that half of the workers leave their jobs because of their boss. If your business keeps losing workers, you must learn better team … Read more

The Power of the Done List

January 2, 2024January 1, 2024 by Jason Brubaker

Have you ever felt that traditional to-do lists don’t work for you? If you’re running your own business, leading a team, or just trying to get through your day, seeing a bunch of un-done tasks first thing in the morning can make it feel like you’re starting the day already falling behind. But what if … Read more

How to Set Team Finance Goals that Don’t Suck

November 1, 2023 by Jason Brubaker

Goals are the glue that holds a company together. Setting the right business goals help all the people in a company—from customer support to sales—align around making progress and moving forward to a shared vision.

They don’t just help a company’s bottom line either. Research shows that goals help increase the drive and persistence of the people who are trying to achieve them.

Goals give your company the capacity to incentivize and motivate your team toward specific action.

For a finance department, though, setting team goals can be extremely tricky. Other teams in a company often have clear goals to drive the business forward: “Decrease churn by 20%” for your product team, or “Increase user sign-ups by 4x” for marketing. Within a finance department, it isn’t always clear how specific goals connect to the growth of the business—they’re often more focused around managing cash flow or containing costs.

For goals to succeed, you have to be able to connect them to the broader trajectory of what your company’s trying to do. You have to connect the dots between the bigger strategic goal of your company, the operational goals of your team, and the individual goals of your people.

Peter Thiel’s Philosophy of Extreme Manager Focus: The Power of “One Thing”

September 21, 2023September 18, 2023 by Jason Brubaker

Table of Contents The Problem with Multiple Priorities You’ve been there. Monday morning team meetings where the question floats around: “What are your top three priorities for the week?” It’s an age-old managerial tactic designed to help us define our goals and align our efforts. But does it really? Here’s the thing. When you have … Read more

The Science Behind Why Better Energy Management is the Key to Peak Productivity

October 19, 2012 by Jason Brubaker

We live in a culture that seems obsessed with being productive.

While increasing our output and doing more with our time is certainly an admirable goal, according to Tony Schwartz, author of Be Excellent at Anything, that misguided approach is actually liable to hurt your productivity.

How so?

Without real restoration and rejuvenation throughout the day, people (knowingly) hold themselves back because they are worried about “pacing” their energy to make it through the day.

This is incredibly damaging to your potential, because it distributes your efforts at 25% across your whole work day instead of reaching 90% output at the moments that correspond with your body’s naturally productive rhythms of alertness. The result is that you aren’t able to do your best work and you aren’t getting the rest you need to rejuvenate yourself either.

I know I’ve fallen into the trap of conventional thinking that to be productive, I just need to work harder. I spend more and more hours at the desk, but when I look back, I’m not sure where the time went.

To Schwartz, not being able to push yourself to 90% output without worry is the biggest impediment holding you back from being truly productive and producing your best work. True productivity is determined by better energy management rather than simply cranking out more hours at your desk.