I nearly turned my own summer into the cautionary tale. The thing that saved me was a last-minute week in the Swedish mountains.

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I came home with a small number of clear thoughts about my business that I couldn't have produced at my desk, and they fade fast once you're back. This episode is for anyone heading back into work in the next fortnight, because how we come back in late August shapes the rest of the year more than almost anything else in September.

Real intent goes in on day one. The stack gets attacked head on. Two or three weeks later, we're extremely busy and have moved nothing forward.

There's a spaceflight analogy in here about why the most dangerous part of any return is the descent, and the one small decision that sets the angle for everything after it. Most of us come in too steep, and the queue gets to decide what matters so we don't have to. The cost is specific: the decisions only you could have made never surface, because they're never the loudest thing in the queue. There's a practical exercise at the end.

You'll Learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[2:05] The summer move that nearly made me the cautionary tale

[4:16] How spacecraft reentry explains a bad return to work

[6:52] Why late August beats January for real resolutions

[9:36] Career trains every leader to choose the steep angle

[10:52] Heavy first week is the friction doing its job

[12:37] Naming your own re-entry angle before the queue decides

[17:14] A controlled re-entry playbook in four steps

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