OG Tuesday Issue #303

✈️ The only packing list you need, by trip type.

🧭 What women leaders should know as talent strategy becomes leadership strategy.

🗣 How leadership language shifted from 2016 to now.

🧩 Gen AI boosts your output but leaves your motivation running on empty.

Half the team’s out, Slack’s basically tumbleweeds, and coasting until September is right there for the taking.

Resist. (After your own PTO, obviously. Take it, go, we’re not monsters.)

Here’s why: 61% of workers get less done in summer. So while everyone else is running on beach brain, you’ve got the one thing that never shows up in Q1: a wide-open, nobody’s-pinging-you calendar. It’s one of the most useful stretches of your year, and most people let it slip by.

So before the August flood, here’s how to actually use it:

3 takeaways:

• Finish the thing rotting in your “someday” pile. You know the one. The project you keep sliding to next month because there’s never a clean runway. This is the runway. Block two-hour mornings, mute non-urgent Slack (every bounce back to your inbox tanks your focus), and actually ship it before August.
• Build the thing that buys you time later. The playbook, the org doc, the process you’ve explained for the hundredth time, the proposal that’s been a bullet in your Notes app since March. Three weeks of focus now saves you a year of scramble.
• Rally the troops who are in-office. Collaborate with those who aren’t on vacation. Work on tasks or projects that otherwise wouldn’t get your time together. Some of the best ideas come from the people you never usually get blocked time with. This is the runway for that.
• Then say it out loud. Grinding away in secret and hoping someone notices is how great work goes invisible. Tell your boss: “I’m using this slower stretch to finally ship X.” Being seen doing the deep work counts almost as much as doing it.

Come August, everyone else will be clawing out of their inbox. You’ll already be three steps ahead.

Every hiring conversation, accommodation request, and disciplinary action carries legal weight. Most managers don’t know that until something has already gone wrong.

Join Traliant for a free live webinar on Wednesday, July 22 from 2-3 p.m. ET: The Future of Employment Law Learning, a demonstration of their redesigned Employment Law Fundamentals Program, built to help managers recognize legal risks before they become claims.

What you’ll see:

• Where managers most often make costly employment law mistakes
• How cinematic, TV-style learning improves retention and real-world judgment
• Realistic scenarios covering hiring, leave, accommodations, and discipline
• Ways to reinforce legal decision-making year-round

Led by employment law attorneys.

Save your free seat.

P.S. Earn SHRM and HRCI credit for attending.

“Basically my biggest hurdles are time management & energy. I am an educated law enforcement retiree in my fifties that refuses to sit still. I am also a mom and a wife. Sometimes everything feels like a challenge. I want to believe I’m still relevant.” — Christina M.

Christina, you spent a career in a job that handed you your priorities the second you clocked in. Now you’re home, still wired to move, and everything — the family, the house, the projects, the question of what’s next — shows up at the same volume all day, with nobody triaging it for you.

That’s exhausting, and, no, it isn’t a discipline problem. Take a high-capacity person, pull out the structure she ran on for decades, and this is exactly what you get.

So let’s rebuild the structure, and let’s talk about the word sitting underneath all of it: relevant.

Spend your energy on purpose

You can’t add hours to the day, but you can rebuild your energy, and that’s what’s worth managing. Energy breaks down into four sources: your body, your emotions, your mind, and your focus, each one you can refill with the right habits. In your fifties, that energy is finite and worth guarding.

For one week, notice when you’re sharpest, and put the thing that matters most right there. Save the email and the laundry for the hours when your brain’s already coasting.

Choose your two or three

A calendar that never fits is usually a prioritization problem in disguise. You don’t need a decade plan.

Pick two or three things that matter this season: one for you, one for the family, one you’re curious about, and let those win when everything competes.

When a new “yes” shows up, hold it against those three. If it doesn’t serve one of them, it’s a “not right now,” and that’s a complete sentence.

Relevance isn’t a volume setting

This is the part worth sitting with. You wrote that you want to believe you’re still relevant, and we’d bet you’ve started measuring that by how much you’re doing.

Staying busy to feel relevant burns the exact energy you need for the things that actually make you feel it.

Think about what you bring to a room: staying calm when everyone else is losing it, reading people in five seconds, making a hard call and standing behind it. The badge never created that steadiness. You did, and you still have it.

That’s not luck, either: emotion regulation actually sharpens with age, which is why the people who’ve been through the most are so often the calmest ones standing. Point that experience wherever you want now: a cause, a second act, the people who need exactly your kind of steady.

And if you want a reason beyond how it feels, a strong sense of purpose is linked to living longer, especially for adults over 50.

Rest is part of the plan

You don’t have to earn rest by emptying the list. Saying no to what drains you is how you protect the energy for what’s genuinely yours to carry. Build the downtime in on purpose, the way you’d schedule anything that matters.

You spent a career being the person everyone counted on in the worst moments. You’re still her. The only thing that’s changed is that now you get to decide where all that steadiness goes.

The reading list never shrinks. The tabs keep piling up. And somewhere between the headlines and the hot takes, the actual story gets lost (along with another 30 minutes of your morning).

1440 is a free daily newsletter that cuts through all of it: the day’s most important stories from 100+ sources distilled into one clean five-minute read covering business, politics, tech, science, and culture, fact-based and free. It’s the habit that finally sticks because it actually fits into a real morning.

Subscribe to 1440 for free.

📧 1.5 million readers can’t be wrong… The Hustle covers the companies and ideas your boss hasn’t caught up to yet.

👉 Build an AI Chief of Staff that digs through your inbox and prioritizes for you. Learn how for free.

⬆️ Upgrade to Slack Pro for searchable history, unlimited integrations, and huddles for the whole team.

📈 If your next pitch needs to hold up with lenders, this business plan builder uses real research and financials to get you there.

 Upcoming Events

• Thurs 7/16 @ 10AM PT: The Decision Default with Laura Weldy (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Fri 7/17 @ 8AM PT: AI Workflow Implementation Sprint: Week 3 Live Session (AI Cohort Only)
• Fri 7/17 @ 9AM PT: AI and Your Money: The New Financial Skill Nobody Taught You with Tess Waresmith (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Mon 7/20 @ 1PM PT: Watch Me Work: Creating Social Media Content with Claude (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)

* Smart Girl Society is our private community for women who want deeper conversations, accountability, and tools that actually make life easier. Join the waitlist to get in the next round.

 Work Wisdom of the Week: [

“Busy doesn’t equal effective. When priorities pile up, don’t speed up — simplify. Focus on what matters most and execute with excellence. High-quality work scales; low-quality work compounds problems.” — Patricia Sotiryadis (AVP of Operations)

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