The boring thing that unlocked everything

I was scrolling LinkedIn the other morning when I saw an Alex Hormozi post that made me stop mid-scroll. He said something like: "Automate 95% of meals that aren't special so you can enjoy the 5% that are." Cook the same boring food almost every day. Save your energy and attention for the meals that actually matter. He was talking about self-improvement. But sitting there with my coffee, my mind did that thing it does — grabbed the idea and ran somewhere completely different with it.

First it went to Zuckerberg wearing the same grey t-shirt every day. Then to Atomic Habits, a book that changed more about how I think than most business books combined. Then to a memory from 2015, when my agency was on fire and I did the most obvious thing in the world to fix it.

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The hire that made things worse

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After surviving a brutal 2014, I was drowning in daily operations. Every decision ran through me. Every problem landed on my desk. I was answering questions, checking work, putting out fires from morning until I couldn't see straight. The obvious solution: hire people. Promote from within. Get managers into leadership positions so I could finally step back and think strategically.

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So I did. And… it got worse.

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That sounds wrong, I know. More hands should mean less load. That's the logic. That's what every piece of advice says. You're the bottleneck — hire, delegate, step back. So I promoted people into leadership roles. Brought on managers. Finally, I thought, I'll have space to breathe. Space to think about strategy instead of chasing fires.

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Now I found that instead of doing things myself — where at least I understood what was happening and why — I now spent my days checking what other people did, correcting mistakes they made because they didn't have the full context, re-explaining things I thought were obvious, and redoing work that came back not quite right. I'd handed off the tasks but kept all the worry. The tasks just had an extra round trip now. More people, more management overhead, same bottleneck. Me.

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Around the same time, I'd read "Atomic Habits." The core idea stuck: small habits that become automatic free up cognitive energy for the things that actually require thought.  And I thought: what if the problem isn't that I need more people? What if I need the company itself to develop those habits?

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Not big or dramatic changes. Not a new org chart or a management framework. A habit. The way brushing your teeth is a habit — something so automatic that skipping it feels wrong.

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Friday reports

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The first one I tried was embarrassingly simple. Every Friday, every department lead writes a status update. By email. Copied to me and anyone else who needs to see it. What happened this week. What went well. What didn't. What's next. What's stuck.

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I remember the pushback. One of the leads said: "Can't I just write it in Slack?" And I get it — writing a structured email on a Friday afternoon when you're already tired feels like homework. Slack feels easier. A quick message, done.

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Sure — then I'll read it when I get to it, if I find it between sixty other messages. And the people who need to see it won't, because they're not in that channel. And next month, when we need to look back at what happened, nobody will find it. "Can't we just talk about it on Monday?" We can talk about what's in the report on Monday. But the report comes first. Because writing it forces you to stop, look back, and think — before you show up to a meeting and wing it. You have to look back at your week and actually evaluate it. What did I do? Did it matter? What fell through? What am I going to do about it? That ten or fifteen minutes of writing isn't bureaucracy — it's the only moment in the entire week where someone stops running and actually thinks about where they've been and where they're going.

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I fought for this one small thing harder than I've fought for most big things. Made it non-negotiable. And within a few months, something shifted that no hire had been able to produce. I stopped chasing people, stopped walking up to desks asking "what are you working on?" or sending random messages checking on project status. All of it — gone. Because every Friday evening, the answers were sitting in my inbox. Written by the people closest to the work. Thought through. Structured. I could read them, comment where needed, and walk into Monday's leadership call knowing exactly what to discuss and what to decide. The fifteen minutes each lead spent writing that email saved me hours of anxiety and interruption. Every single week.

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Why AI shouldn't write it

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And here's the part that keeps coming back to me now, ten years later. Hormozi's post about boring food isn't really about food. It's about what happens when you stop spending energy on things that should be automatic — and suddenly have that energy available for things that actually need your brain. I know what a lot of people are thinking. In 2026, you could have an AI agent pull data from your project management tool, summarize it, and send a beautiful report without anyone lifting a finger.

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Don't.

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I'll die on this hill: the report must be written by a human. By the person responsible for that work. Not because AI can't summarize data — it absolutely can. But because the act of writing the report IS the point. When a project manager sits down on Friday afternoon and writes "this project is behind because the client hasn't responded to our last two emails" — she's not just reporting. She's processing. She's connecting dots. She's thinking about what she's going to do about it next week. She's taking ownership of the situation by putting her name on a description of it.

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When AI writes it, all of that disappears. The numbers might be accurate. But the thinking — the human stopping to reflect, to take responsibility, to plan — that's gone. And that thinking is what makes the rhythm valuable, not the document it produces.

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The heartbeat

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And something surprising happened to our Friday reports over the years. They became the heartbeat. Boring, repetitive, same format every week. Nobody gets excited about writing them. Nobody ever will. But when I look back at what actually unlocked our growth — not which hire, not which client, not which tool — it was this. This stupid, boring, weekly email that nobody wanted to write.

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Six months ago, after a significant personal change, the first thing I rebuilt wasn't a business plan or a strategy. It was my daily and weekly rhythm. When I go to the gym. When I write. When I take calls. When I cook. When I think. It took a few iterations. Some things didn't stick. Some blocks had to move. But within three or four months, the anxiety that comes from uncertainty — what am I doing tomorrow, am I falling behind, is anything working — started to fade. Not because everything was going perfectly. The rhythm itself became a kind of ground under my feet.

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A business works the same way. Friday reports are a heartbeat. When the heart beats steadily, blood reaches every part of the body. When it skips — one week missed, then two, then "we'll get back to it" — things start going dark in the places furthest from the founder's attention. One skipped Friday is nothing. A pattern of skipped Fridays is an arrhythmia. And by the time you notice the symptoms, the damage is already done.

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Something to try this week:

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Before you hire another manager or bring in an operations person to "fix the chaos" — ask yourself: do we have a single weekly rhythm that runs without exception?

If not, start one. Friday status updates from whoever leads work in your company — even if that's just you and two other people. Written, not verbal. Structured: what happened, what's stuck, what's next.

Give it four weeks. See what changes — not just in the information you receive, but in how your team starts thinking about their own work.

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So here's my question: what's the one rhythm in your business that never gets skipped, no matter what? And if you can't name one — what would happen if you built it this month?