I watched two people come undone this year, in completely opposite ways.
One never stops moving. Every day is a sprint — inbox at zero by eight, three deadlines cleared by lunch, a task list that breeds faster than he can knock it down. He hits his targets and feels nothing, because there’s already another target waiting. He’s busy in a way that looks impressive and feels hollow. Ask him where all this running is heading and he goes quiet.
The other has the opposite problem. She knows exactly where she’s going. She’ll talk for an hour about the business she’s building five years out, the kind of work that genuinely matters to her. But the payoff sits so far away that nothing she does today feels like a win. Months drift past. The vision is lovely, and the week is empty of anything that actually moved her closer to it.
I’ve been both of these people. Most of us only ever pick one.
There’s a clock in all of us, and there’s a compass. The clock is urgency — it’s what gets you out of the chair. The compass is direction — it tells you whether all that motion is worth anything. On their own, each one quietly fails you. All clock, and you run hard in circles. All compass, and you stand in the driveway, certain of the destination, never turning the key.
Pick a direction you’d never want to finish
The first move is choosing something big enough that you can’t tick it off. Not a goal with a finish line, but a pursuit — getting sharper at your craft, serving a particular kind of client properly, building something that outlasts you. That’s the compass. It doesn’t expire the moment you hit a number.
This is where I lean on Copilot more than people expect. When the long game feels fuzzy, I open a blank Word document, bring up Copilot, and just talk to it — what am I actually trying to build, what does good look like in three years, what would I regret not starting. It drafts, I push back, it sharpens. Twenty minutes later I’ve got a direction I can re-read on a Monday morning when everything else is shouting for attention.
Then build short games you can actually win
A compass won’t get you moving on a Tuesday. You need something to chase this week. So I carve the long thing into small games with a real scoreboard — wrote this, rang that client, shipped one improvement. Proper finish lines, close enough to feel.
I keep mine in Planner, with Copilot doing the slicing. I’ll describe the quarter out loud and ask it to break the work into weekly chunks I can tick off. Then every Friday I get Copilot to pull together what genuinely got done across my Teams chats, my sent items and my tasks — not what I planned, what moved. That summary is my clock. It’s the small hit of winning that the compass can never give me, and it stops a good direction from slowly going nowhere.
The trick was never choosing between the two. It’s wiring them together — a direction you’d hate to ever finish, fed by a steady drip of small wins you can finish by Friday.
The people running on empty are short a compass. The people standing still are short a clock. Look honestly at your own week. Whichever one you’re missing — that’s the one to fix.
CIAOPS 