A health crisis at home took away forty percent of my work days. Five down to three. The work didn't shrink to match.
I tried the obvious things first, and they didn't work. Waking up earlier just made me tired. Working faster produced worse output. Cutting corners showed. What finally changed things wasn't a productivity system. It was getting ruthless about which work genuinely required me, and then building a way to get through the rest in a fraction of the time.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
That's the method I teach now. Not because I read about it, but because I needed it to keep my business alive on three days a week, and it did. I've since trained more than 8,000 professionals in it, most of them in nonprofits, banks, and credit unions, where the work has rules and mistakes have consequences.
I spent twenty years leading teams before any of this was a job title. I know what a board packet costs you. That's why the training is about the work rather than the technology.