Welcome to the Action Digest, where procrastination fades faster than a Peaky Blinder’s haircut.

A glimpse at the action we’re bringing you this week:

• 🌎 We expose the invisible force that will make or break your project (and that almost destroyed a global multi-billion dollar enterprise!).

• 📪 A bestselling productivity author explains how to take Amazon’s new efficiency initiative to the next level.

• 💰 A former leader at Stripe shares a technique for identifying where we should focus our time and effort.

P.s., you can check out editions 1-36 here in case you missed them, including insights such as the mindset that helped an entrepreneur build seven different billion-dollar companies, how Steve Jobs cultivated great creative taste, and a brainstorming strategy recommended by Stanford professors.

Seriously, there are some gems you’ll appreciate in these earlier editions ;-)

1. Keep one eye on the digging and one eye on the dirt.

The idea to build the Panama Canal was about as genius as it was naive. 

Because if you wanted to sail between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans prior to 1914 then you had to suffer a months-long voyage around the tip of South America.

But a Panamanian Canal would allow ships to simply cut through Central America. 

The shortcut would make many of the world's most popular trade routes three times faster which would unlock a boom of global economic growth.

That was the genius part. 

It was the French who first discovered the naive part the hard way. 

That’s because France had just completed the Suez Canal in Egypt and so they waltzed into the Panama challenge with a cool confidence. 

There was just one problem.  

The Panamanian rainforest was nothing like the Egyptian desert. 

“There is too much water, the rocks are exceedingly hard, the soil is very hilly and the climate is deadly. The country is literally poisoned,” one senior French engineer lamented.

Seven painful years later and the project had shredded through $300 million dollars and was no where close to completion. The French admitted defeat and offered to sell the rights to America. 

Despite furious protests from congress, President Theodore Roosevelt agreed to take over the project, and became a fierce champion for its cause. 

But fast forward two years and Roosevelt seemed to have fallen into the same trap of naivety.

Little progress had been made, the lead engineer was fired, and America now too was burning millions of dollars on what critics saw as a giant, useless, ditch in a far flung country. 

Irritated yet undeterred, Roosevelt attempted to find the best engineer in all of America to take up the challenge. Everyone agreed that that was John Stevens. And to Roosevelt’s relief, Stevens agreed to head down to the Panama construction site to see if he could salvage the operation. 

But when Stevens arrived, he did something that surprised everyone. 

He just watched. 

He studied the flow of the construction site, he interrogated the workers, and inspected the equipment. 

And through his observation, Stevens saw something that no one else had seen. 

The issue that was thwarting the Canal’s completion was one of process. 

Everyone knew that the primary challenge in constructing the Canal was digging up the 200 million cubic yards of dirt along its path.

So naturally everyone was focused on digging—but no one was focused on the dirt. 

Once you’ve dug up the dirt, Stevens reasoned, you need to move it elsewhere.

But dirt was often just dumped near the hole from which it was dug… where the next storm would wash it right back into the hole again. The trucks used to move dirt were old and not designed for their purpose and so dirt often toppled off the tops and caused disruption. Moreover, there weren’t enough trucks, so diggers often sat around doing nothing while waiting for the logjam to clear. 

By ignoring what happened after the dirt was dug up, everyone missed how much the dug-dirt was slowing down the process of digging more.

Pile on the additional challenges of disease, poor working conditions, and a sluggish bureaucratic approval process, and progress was rendered impossible. 

In light of his pivotal realization, Stevens ordered the whole site to cease digging immediately and began implementing a new system to handle the dug-dirt more efficiently. 

This included designing a whole new railroad where trains would travel uphill when they were empty and then leverage gravity on the way down once they were full. 

“When they got to a place to dump the spoil,” one historian describes, “another simple but brilliant idea. The new trucks were open-ended, bridged by flat panels with only one side, so they formed a single long surface on which the mud was piled. The steam engine then dragged a three-ton plough along that flat surface, sweeping all the mud off the open side.” “It took just ten minutes to empty a twenty-truck train, far quicker than the old French system of men shoveling mud from each truck by hand.”

While work was underway on this critical part of the process—Stevens got to work on others. 

As the account above continues, “Helping Gorgas attack the mosquitoes, laying water pipes, sewage systems, storm drains, constructing better houses for themselves, building kitchens, bakeries, mess halls, even baseball fields. Life in Panama slowly got better.”

As for the bureaucratic committee members that were frustrating progress? Stevens simply bypassed them by seeking approval from Roosevelt directly. 

As Steven’s operation rumbled into motion, progress that once took weeks happened in days. The Canal steadily cut deeper and wider through the jungle, its progress as relentless as the workers who finally believed in its completion.

An expert on the Canal’s construction described Steven’s operation as “fantastically skillful and intricate, like the assembly line in one of the new, mechanized US factories, but also engineering at its simplest and most brilliant.”

What’s even more remarkable is that Stevens predicted exactly how long it would take to complete the Canal once his system was up and running: 8 years. Not only was he spot on with this estimate, he didn’t even need to stick around to see it through. 

The leader who was tasked with taking over reported that “Mr. Stevens has perfected such an organization that, so far as the R.R. part of the proposition is concerned, there is nothing left for us to do but to just have the organization continue in the good work it has done and is doing.”

So what lessons can we draw from Steven’s success with the Panama Canal for our own work and lives? 

Some of the most popular productivity advice goes something like “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” This principle is essential but it’s also insufficient. The “main thing” for building the Panama Canal was digging. 

But while it’s true that the Canal wouldn’t exist if everyone was too busy doing trivial busywork to dig—you can’t be so focused on the main activity that you become blind to all of the systems and supporting activities that feed into it. 

You have to keep one eye on the digging and one eye on the dirt. 

You have to keep one eye on the main activity, and one eye on everything that feeds into the main activity. 

We can apply Steven’s approach to any goal, whether that’s writing a book, building a software feature, or getting a child ready for school:

1. Identify the main task

2. Go one layer deeper and note everything that supports or frustrates the main task

3. Brainstorm ideas for streamlining the supporting activities and reducing the friction of bottlenecks and frustrations

Sometimes making faster progress on your core activity means taking a step back to identify and refine all of the supporting processes that surround it.

In addition to making your own observations, you can crowdsource the process…

_{Source: Roosevelt and the Renegade} 

2. Unnecessary and excessive process or rules should be called out and extinguished

Two months ago, Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, sent a memo to employees about some upcoming changes at the company. 

In an attempt to accelerate Amazon’s speed of progress, “we’re asking each [senior] team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025,” Jassy announced. “Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today. If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day.”

In addition to adjusting the management ratio, Jassy also enlisted the whole company to help identify bottlenecks. “[By the way, I’ve created a ‘Bureaucracy Mailbox,’” Jassy adds, “for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary process that’s crept in and we can root out… to be clear, companies need process to run effectively, and process does not equal bureaucracy, but unnecessary and excessive process or rules should be called out and extinguished. I will read these emails and action them accordingly.]” 

Jassy has reportedly received more than 500 emails and the company has acted on about 150 of them.

One of the world’s most prominent productivity thought leaders celebrated Jassy’s mailbox but offered an interesting riff on the idea…

3. Process tends to be invisible unless you explicitly pay attention to it

Professor Cal Newport is the author of chart topping books like Deep Work and Slow Productivity. 

“I like this idea,” Newport said in response to Jassy’s mailbox, “Here’s the change I would make though. In a lot of organizations, especially that aren’t as big as Amazon, the issue is not bureaucracy. The issue is not the hoops they have to jump through. The issue I always point out is attention destruction. These unnecessary context shifts. What are the things that happen during the day that require me to change my attention from what I’m working on to other things? What are the things that happen during the day that reduce my ability to do the two or three things that I do that are most valuable to the company? It’s like an attention destruction or attention poison mailbox. That’s what I would want. Like, hey, CEO, I had seven non-urgent conversations I had to keep up with today and I could get nothing really done. No hard thinking could actually happen. Hey, CEO, I’m averaging four meetings a day. My average, uninterrupted, max size, uninterrupted time block per day now is like under 60 minutes. And yet my primary job is to write white papers, and it’s really making it hard to do. That’s what I would want reported. And I would want my CEO to see again and again, report after report of like, my God, my people’s ability to just put their mind to the work of producing value is being heavily diluted. What do we do about this? And then solutions come in.” 

The brilliance of a mailbox initiative, according to Newport, regardless of whether it’s for bureaucracy or focus or some other key activity, is that process tends to be invisible unless you explicitly pay attention to it. 

That’s what set Stevens up for success. He started by carefully studying the process at work, making the invisible visible, before acting to streamline it. 

Mailboxes can help to crowdsource this awareness and effort. 

There is one downside to the study of process, however. 

You may find that the list of associated activities and bottlenecks can become protracted and overwhelming. 

How do you know where to focus your effort and ensure you don’t get lost in a swamp of process refinement? 

Stripe has the answer…

4. Dozens of high-performers have these two things in common

We’ve now studied the creative process of dozens of people at the top of their field together. 

Actors, musicians, writers, architects, leaders, athletes, scientists—you name it. 

What do they all have in common? 

A lot! 

But two things stand out: 

1. They think deeply - they explore many more ideas and possibilities on average before taking action.
   

2. They act boldly - when they’re done thinking, they organize their ideas, become crystal clear on their next move, and act fast. 

The tricky part is that these two “modes” of creativity are naturally oppositional. 

It can be tough switching back and forth between them efficiently. 

That’s where the Action Book comes in handy. 

It’s designed to mirror the way high-performers think and streamline the both sides of the creative process. 

How?

By separating them. 

• On the left, a space for deep, unfiltered exploration. Sketch, doodle, mind map, or jot down every thought that comes to you. No rules. No constraints. Just a place to let your ideas breathe.

• On the right, a place to focus. To consolidate. Here’s where you bring clarity to your vision. Break down your next steps into clear, actionable tasks. Check them off one by one and watch your ideas come to life.

It gives you the freedom to think without limits—and the structure to turn those thoughts into bold action.

Elevate your creativity and order a fresh copy today.

We’ll leave you with this…

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