Productive Reads from Summer 2026

Productive Reads from Summer 2026

On meeting design, irreversible prioritization, and team operating manuals

Mike Stein

Sep 22, 2026

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None are traditional beach reads, but here are the articles that I learned the most from this summer:

So You Want to Fix Your All Hands

Rands

is a thinker with whom I briefly crossed career paths over a decade ago but whose prolific writing I only recently discovered. I’ve been enjoying exploring the vast trove of excellent advice on management and organizational design in his

archives

, and

my favorite recent piece is

So You Want to Fix Your All Hands

:

A regular All Hands meeting is inoculation. You are inoculating your team with quality information. This information will be used to disassemble gossip, rumors, and lies. This information will answer questions before they are asked. This information will remove noise so the human can focus on why they are there — to build.

This article focuses on the challenging case of a large all-hands but is

instructive on much of broader meeting design

: focus on how to get the most important information to the people who most need to hear it, deliver it in a way that involves and engages them, and design the agenda in a way that elevates other people.

A 90-minute meeting is indeed a lot of time, and the only thing I’d add is that I’ve seen 45-to-60-minute sizes of similar shapes (a two-”Act” version of his model, in cases when the heart of the matter can be reached quickly) be effective for medium-sized teams. When you do have to go big, it really should feel like an event, and Rands’ meeting structure here has a beautiful balance of informational concision and attendance-summoning intrigue.

Honorable Mention

to his May article

Barely Treading Water

which is

the best framework I’ve ever read on when and why certain tasks should be delegated

; not as

a passing of the buck for urgent but unimportant tasks

but as a way to grow your teammates’ skills by empowering them with the urgent but overflowing tasks on your plate:

The act of delegation is a leap of faith. Yes, chances are they are not ready for it, but:

They get to learn,

You get to coach them,

You demonstrate trust by giving them work you know is beyond their means.

And, oh yeah, something more than nothing will occur. Bonus!

Stop Asking What’s Urgent. Ask What’s Irreversible

Anshul Kumar

is back on my list again with a clever and useful perspective on another axis to look at alongside the urgency of the tasks on your plate:

irreversibility

.

Calm Productivity

Stop Asking What’s Urgent. Ask What’s Irreversible

Which fire is actually going to burn the building down…

Read more

4 months ago · 16 likes · 7 comments · Anshul Kumar

Here’s the problem with urgency as a filter.

It measures volume, not consequence.

The customer who emails in all caps isn’t automatically more important than the one who’s gone quiet.

The loud thing isn’t automatically the expensive thing. Some of what looks urgent can wait a full week at zero cost. And some of what looks perfectly fine to ignore today is quietly, permanently, turning into something you can’t undo.

That’s the actual filter. Not urgent. Irreversible.

His driving question for triaging this –

If I do nothing about this today, what cannot be undone?

– makes his “irreversibility” a close cousin of the standard “importance”, but also a complement to it. I agree that irreversibility is an easy natural filter to trust your gut on, much like urgency screams in your ear and pulls at your animal brain, and that irreversibility is a much better filter than picking the loudest task if you had to pick one.

I’d say that a tight-but-rigorous assessment of importance still deserves attention as a secondary filter, as there are plenty of loudly urgent irreversible tasks that

aren’t

the right thing: all sales conversations and prospects are not of equal upside and it will usually be impossible or suboptimal to try to pursue them all, even when the choice of which ones to invest your energy pursuing is irreversible. Similarly, there are reversible, noncompounding tasks (his “tier three”) that can be of high enough value to warrant prioritizing, such as evergreen business development prospects (e.g. developing a new product) or longer-term sales prospects that aren’t going away if you wait on them.

But no simple model could be perfect, and it’s a compelling angle to have in your toolbelt. I’ll be looking to try it out.

My 13 Rules For Operators

My former colleague Dan Rickert shared his version of an important part of any team’s onboarding –

a team operating manual that sets mutual expectations

– and really knocked it out of the park:

This isn’t a values poster or a culture deck. It’s a guide for how I expect a person to bring themselves to their work. More importantly, it’s the fastest way I can compress months of “figuring out how your manager thinks” into a 15-minute read.

It’s a tightly-distilled list that covers all of the bases of effectively contributing to a team

, from communication to operating methods to feedback to balancing work against family life. I really dig the throughlines of honesty, clarity and mitigating downside risk. (Molly Graham’s

Give Away Your Legos

, which Dan plugs, is another key principle worth a read.)

If I were to add one more operating principle onto Dan’s list, I’d add:

Be transparent in your prioritization.

Open up your task tracker and calendar to your team as much as possible. Let people

know when you do your most effective work

and

what your time portfolio looks like

, and trust in how others protect their time. Share what you’re

not

doing by

discussing and defending the urgent tasks you see as unimportant

, as you’ll start useful discussions and learn from the perspectives of others.

While, as Dan notes, many of these ideas are simple, and perhaps some are even obvious, it’d be a mistake to use that as an excuse to not talk about these. If anything, that makes it a higher return-on-investment document to write. Every team, organization and manager should have their operating norms and values defined, and once they’re defined, writing them up and making them part of onboarding saves time and effort from your new teammates trying to infer them.

This is the type of practice that should be normalized across all industries, not just military or engineering. Starting a new work relationship with clear communications and expectation-setting is always a good move.

I’ve organized my archives into a recommended reading order. You can learn more about this “book”

here

or hop to the next or previous “chapter” via the links below.

Previous chapter:

Productive Reads from Spring 2026

Mike Stein

·

Jun 23

Here are the ideas that stuck with me the most over the past three months:

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