Stop Grinding, Start Winning: 5 Micro-Fixes You Can Deploy Tomorrow

Last time we built the foundation. Today we go tactical — five fast fixes you can implement before lunch tomorrow. These aren't the strategic, thought-provoking stuff we'll get into later. These are the easy wins. Pick one, commit it to your planner, and go.

1. The five-sentence email rule.

Never write or respond to an email longer than five sentences. Ever. It forces clarity and brevity, it saves your reader, and it saves future you from trying to decode what past you meant. Follow the what / why / when / ask / thanks structure and you're done.

I take it further. When people send me information, I ask for five bullet points or less. If you're sending me 17 sentences across three paragraphs, I'm honest with you: I'm not going to read the whole thing, and even if I do, I'll understand half of it. (I have dysgraphia — my ADHD brain literally skips and invents letters because it's moving too fast.) "Just send me the five things, yes/no, yes/no" isn't rude. It's an accommodation, and people are almost always happy to give it once you ask.

2. Unsubscribe by default.

This is my all-time favorite rule. Create a folder called "Read Later." Then build one email rule: anything containing the word unsubscribe gets auto-filtered into it. That's it. You just deleted 50 newsletter emails a day from your actual inbox — all the stuff you maybe signed up for but definitely don't need to see in real time. Then, while you're stuck waiting for a flight or sitting through something not-super-exciting, you batch through that folder and clear it.

Quick upgrade for the over-thinkers: if a forwarded email keeps getting caught by the rule because of the unsubscribe footer, just add "unless it's forwarded" to the rule. Done.

3. Turn off all your alerts. Then opt back in — selectively.

Notifications are mostly just other people's hooks to yank you out of your own flow. I turn everything off, then very intentionally turn a few back on: my wife, my kids, the chairman of my board. Everything else stays dark by default. (I also routinely grab my kids' phones when they're not looking and kill their alerts. You're welcome, future productive teenagers.)

4. Add friction to your time-sucks.

Use the digital wellbeing/screen-time tools already on your phone. I put hard limits on the apps that doom-scroll my hours away — Instagram, Facebook — set to about ten minutes. It doesn't lock me out so much as tap me on the shoulder and say, "Hey, weren't you going to do something productive?" The goal isn't restriction. It's a little speed bump between you and the void.

5. Buy back your ads.

I've done this for 25 years: I always pay for the ad-free tier. Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, all of it. Two reasons. One, the ads are awful and I don't need any of those medical products. Two, do the math — watching a two-hour movie in 120 minutes instead of 140 is a real, recurring time gain. Whatever the premium costs, it's a long-term win.

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That's five. And here's the part people miss: you don't have to do all five. Pick one. Get the easy one done and move on. If you're feeling like a superstar, grab a second. But don't sit there stressed because I handed you five and you only did one — that's missing the entire point.

Because here's what happens. You get the unsubscribe rule running, and suddenly you've got more breathing room. That breathing room makes the next fix easier. Which makes the next one easier. It cascades. Success begets success.

One bonus mindset shift while we're here, since it came up: I used to treat anyone who canceled a meeting on me as dead to me — never speak to them again. A coach finally asked, "Is it possible they had a real reason? A sick kid? A dying relative? A huge deal to close?" Yeah. Obviously. They weren't saying I'm not important. They were saying I'm not important right now. I wrote the whole story down, lit the paper on fire — there's actual neuroscience behind that release — and 15 years later, people can reschedule on me all day and I don't even flinch.

Some grinding is just old programming. Start winning by clearing it out.

Disruption with a side of humor —
Kirk Drake