March is the last month of Q1, and something interesting happens around this time every year: we start to feel the friction.
Not the big, obvious obstacles. The subtler ones. The project that's been hovering at almost-done for longer than you'd like to admit. The day when you check off task after task and still arrive at the end of it feeling like nothing actually moved. The team process that technically works but somehow always takes longer than it should.
This friction isn't necessarily a sign that something is broken. It's a sign that something is worth looking at, because unnecessary drag spends the time, energy, and attention you'd rather put toward work that actually matters.
This month, both our Leadership Strategy Session and Monthly Momentum Call explore what's getting in the way and how to address it without squeezing the life out of how you work.
We hope to see you in March! (Details below 👇🏽)
For leaders navigating team dynamics, organizational priorities, and the challenge of maintaining sustainable momentum while delivering results.
Last month, we looked at whether your team had what it needed to execute. This month, we're looking at what might be slowing them down even when those things are in place.
In almost every team, there are patterns of waste hiding in plain sight: work that stalls because someone is waiting on a response, projects that get touched too many times before they ship, outputs that require rework because something wasn't clear upstream. These aren't signs of a bad team. They're signs of a system with friction that no one has named yet.
In this session, we'll use TIMWOOD to identify where the drag is coming from and what to address first. We'll focus on the patterns most common in knowledge work and creative teams:
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Where wait times are building up, and who or what is causing the bottleneck
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Where overprocessing is holding things back instead of making them better
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Where overproduction creates drag — multiple versions of the same thing, work that gets created but never used, reinventing from scratch when a template would do
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How defects (rework, miscommunication, unclear handoffs) ripple through a team and eat capacity
The goal isn't to turn your team into a machine. It's to clear the friction that's making good work harder than it needs to be before the Q2 ramp-up adds more to everyone's plate.
Join us for our next Leadership Strategy Session on March 4, 2026, 11am PST
Bring questions about: Bottlenecks you've noticed but haven't been able to name, decisions or deliverables that keep getting recycled instead of shipped, how to talk to your team about friction without it feeling like criticism, and how to create better conditions for your team's best work in Q2.
For anyone looking to focus on what matters most, clarify goals, and make meaningful progress on what's important to you.
Heads up: North America shifts to daylight saving time on March 8. If you're joining from outside North America, we recommend checking your local time before joining.
We talk a lot about doing our best work. But what about the things that quietly make it harder?
There's the project sitting at almost-done that you keep not finishing. The focus block that evaporates before you've gotten anywhere. The day when you've checked everything off your list and still feel, by the end of it, as if nothing important moved.
Some of what looks like wasted time isn't waste at all — the walk where the idea finally arrives, the afternoon that looked unproductive but gave you exactly what you needed to move forward. We are not robots, and we shouldn't try to be.
But there's a real difference between the space that restores you and the friction that just drains you. This month, we're looking at the latter: the patterns that keep showing up, the places where you lose momentum, not because the work is hard but because something keeps snagging you on the way to it.
We'll explore:
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Where you're spending energy on motion that isn't actually moving your projects forward
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When “getting it right” tips into overprocessing, and what it costs you
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How to clear the friction that's making your best work harder to reach, without stripping out the space that makes it possible
Join us for our next Monthly Momentum Call on March 18, 2026 at 11am PDT
Bring questions about: Projects that have been stuck longer than they should be, the difference between productive stepping back and stalling, getting to “good enough” when perfectionism is the drag point, and how to set yourself up for a strong Q2 without grinding through the end of Q1.
These monthly calls are part of a paid/premium subscription to Productive Flourishing.
If you're not a premium subscriber yet, we encourage you to upgrade your subscription and join us in February for one or both of these calls.
