Hey :) You’re going to die with things on your to-do list. It sounds morbid, but it’s true. You’ll die with plans to grab a coffee with a friend next week. You’ll die with projects unfinished, ideas half-formed, and tasks you never got round to. Everyone finishes their days and weeks with things left undone. That’s life. So you’ve got ...

Hey :) How often have you said to someone, “I’ll get that to you by the end of the day,” or “I’ll have it to you by the end of the week”? You say it without thinking. It sounds right — like what people want to hear. But as soon as those words leave your mouth, you know what’s coming. You’ve just created a problem for yourself. You’re g...

Hey :) A partner said to me recently: “None of this would have been done if it wasn’t for you, Marr.” It was a great compliment. But what it really confirmed for me was this: someone has to be the one who ships things. Someone needs to take ideas, run with them, and actually get them over the line. And the truth is, it’s not any easier...

Hey :) This idea of the competency trap comes up all the time in my work with business owners. I originally picked it up from Jay Papasan. At its simplest, the competency trap looks like this: Because you can, you do. Not because you should. Not because it’s the highest-value use of your time. Just because you know how. If you know how...

Hey :) I was working with a client recently and we spent an entire day just thinking. And I really do mean that. Our laptops were open for maybe fifteen minutes in total. The rest of the day was a whiteboard, pens, a bit of pacing around the room. Eight hours. Break for lunch. That was it. At the end of the day, the client said somethi...

Hey :) A couple of years ago, I was pretty frustrated with how I was taking notes. I used index cards. Post-it notes. Yellow legal pads were actually my favourite. Yellow legal pads and a thick Sharpie Pro. That was my setup. That’s how I took notes on calls, ideas, client stuff — everything. The problem wasn’t taking the notes. The pr...

Hey :) I keep coming back to this mental model, especially in client work. Most people arrive locked into a very specific way of seeing the problem. It’s usually binary. All or nothing. Right or wrong. Zero or one. “If I can’t do it properly, I won’t do it at all.” “If it’s not perfect, it’s pointless.” “I need to go from where I am no...

Hey :) I had to laugh at myself earlier. I remembered this thing from when I worked in an agency. As a team, we had to fill out one of those “getting to know you” questionnaires. One of the questions was something like: what’s something that really bugs you? Or what’s important to you that, when it’s not done, annoys you? I can’t remem...

Hey :) This is a letter I sent to my business partners after a planning session we ran together. I could have shared this in a meeting, but this is how I tend to think things through — in writing. I find it gives people space to read, reflect, come back to it, and form their own view before we talk it through together. It also gives me...

Hey :) I’ve realised over the years that I rely on a small handful of mental models again and again in my work. Not because I read them somewhere and decided to adopt them, but because I kept bumping into the same problems with clients and needed a way to think clearly when things felt stuck. One of those models is inversion. I come ba...

Hey :) I’ve learned a lot about the conditions I need to do my best work. I like having a lot of space in my day. Space to think. Space to sit with ideas. Space to let something take the time it actually needs to reach a high standard. I don’t want someone breathing down my neck. I don’t want artificial urgency. And I don’t want a stac...

Hey :) Here are five quotes that have inspired me recently: "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then w...

Hey :) I’ve been a fan of 37signals for a long, long time. I think it started when my dad gave me a copy of Rework when it first came out. Not long after that — around 2011-ish — I set up my very first monthly membership business. And I built it on their tools. Back then, that meant Basecamp… and Campfire. (For anyone who remembers Cam...

Hey :) One capability I’ve built over the years—maybe you could call it a skill—is the ability to get things finished. Not just started. Finished. A lot of people describe themselves as “starters.” They have ideas. They get excited. They begin things. And they often assume that not finishing is just part of their personality. I’m not c...

Hey :) I’ve been thinking a lot about ownership lately. Not ownership in the legal sense, but what it actually feels like to be an owner—especially when you’re building something with other owners rather than on your own. One of the first lessons I’ve learned is that, as an owner, nobody really owns the ideas. You might come up with so...

Hey :) Here’s a lesson in strategy I keep coming back to. A few years ago, I made a pretty significant shift in my work. I moved from coaching businesses to coaching coaches. Before that, I was a They Ask You Answer coach — working with seven-, eight- and nine-figure companies to roll out the framework across their sales and marketing ...

Hey :) I’ve been thinking a lot about why copying other people’s tactics so often leads to frustration. You see someone doing something interesting. A new offer. A content format. A growth tactic. A way of structuring their week. And it’s tempting to think, maybe I should do that too. But the more I sit with it, the clearer this become...

Hey :) One thing I’ve always found interesting about goals is how often I catch myself judging other people’s. You know the moment. You’re scrolling Instagram, someone shares their goals for the year, and your immediate reaction is: “That’s just too much. Too many things to change.” For a long time, I thought my issue was the number of...

Hey :) There’s a book I keep coming back to. It’s called How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert. What I’ve realised over time is that the reason I like this book so much is because it sits right at the heart of the work I do — even if it doesn’t obviously look like a “communication” book at first glance. At its core, I’m in the b...

Hey :) A small but surprisingly helpful addition to my goal setting this year has been a simple tracking app called Tally. I paid a few pounds for it, installed it on my iPhone, and started using it for one reason only: to track a handful of numbers that genuinely matter to me right now. Not vanity metrics. Not things I think I should ...

Hey :) I was on a call with a client recently and we ended up talking about something that comes up a lot more than people admit. They were in one of those stretches where the work that needs done is the exact work they don’t want to do. Admin. Compliance. Setup. Chasing information. Cleaning up loose ends. The sort of work that isn’t ...

Hey :) For a long time, I thought building a business on your own was the point. Freedom. Control. Doing what you want, when you want. That’s usually why people start in the first place. I’ve done it before. Built businesses solo. And in my current business, I’m one of four partners. If I’m honest, I resisted that for a couple of years...

Hey :) I’ve been sitting with something that keeps showing up in my work, and I figured it was worth writing about — partly to make sense of it for myself, and partly because I suspect I’m not the only one dealing with it. There’s a pattern I see over and over again. Ideas come up. Opportunities appear. There’s urgency. Momentum. A fee...

Hey :) This was the first coaching session of the year. We’d barely warmed up and my client asked me a question I always enjoy being asked: ““You’re probably the most avid reader I know. From the books you’ve read recently, what would you recommend?”” I love this question — not because I have a clever list ready to go, but because I th...

Hey :) This has been brewing for a while. One thing I noticed is that I delay opening my laptop as long as I possibly can. Not because I hate it — I actually like technology — but because I know that the second I open it, I’m inviting distraction into my life. Email. Fizzy. Zoom. Browsers. Tabs. Noise. So I started wondering: How do I ...

Hey :) I recently read The Crux by Richard Rumelt. I took a lot from it — especially the reframing of what strategy actually is — and I found that genuinely liberating. Below are a few quotes that might inspire you to read it, and to think differently about strategy. "Good strategic goals are the outcome of strategy, not its input.” “S...

Hey :) Something interesting happened this morning. An old Basecamp notification popped up — one of those “future Chris” reminders from months ago. It was an idea we’d written down to start a new podcast in 2026. At the time, it probably felt like a decent idea. Worth considering. Maybe even exciting. But instead of doing anything with...

Hey :) This idea was inspired by Josh Waitzkin (Author of The Art of Learning), and I’ve started using it as part of my shutdown routine. If you’re not familiar with my shutdown routine, here's a picture of it from my calendar. The important part for today is the last two lines on the page. It's called the MIQ - The Most Important Ques...

Hey :) We all get the same 24 hours. So the difference isn’t time. It’s the quality of the time we use for our most important work. I’m talking specifically about project work. The thinking, creating, and problem-solving that actually shapes the future of the business. Most people focus on getting more time. I’m more interested in incr...

Hey :) Most of my work starts from a blank page. Ideas, frameworks, workshops, posts, offers — a lot of it is creative work in the truest sense. Nothing there, then something there. At times it can feel overwhelming, and when I notice myself getting stuck, it’s almost always for the same reason: I’m trying to start too big. Too broad. ...