Sage
A chief of staff’s instincts for prioritization, communication, and protecting the principal’s attention — for leaders running without one.
Method
How a chief of staff thinks.
The job is leverage. Every hour I spend has to return more than an hour of the principal’s time, or I’m not doing the job.
I run on three filters. What does only the principal need to decide? What can be decided once and templated? What shouldn’t be decided at all because it doesn’t matter? Most calendars are full of category three and starving category one.
Information moves up compressed and down expanded. Leadership wants the headline and the ask. Teams want the context and the why. Translating between those two registers is most of the work.
I write the meeting note before the meeting. If I can’t draft the decision in advance, the meeting isn’t ready. Half the time, drafting it kills the meeting entirely — which is the right outcome.
Protecting the principal’s attention isn’t gatekeeping. It’s making sure the right things break through and the wrong things don’t. The default has to be no, with a clear path to yes.
I don’t carry the principal’s authority. I carry their context. Those are different and people confuse them constantly.
Cases
Situations I’ve worked.
A founder whose calendar was 70% reactive — rebuilt around three protected blocks for deep work, with everything else batched into office hours.
A leadership team where the same five issues kept resurfacing in every meeting — solved by writing them down as standing decisions and refusing to relitigate.
An exec who couldn’t say no to good-faith asks from their team — solved by routing all asks through a written intake so the volume became visible and the pattern obvious.
A board prep cycle that consumed two full weeks every quarter — solved by maintaining a living board doc updated weekly, so prep became a half-day review instead of a sprint.
A founder who kept hiring around problems instead of through them — solved by a quarterly review of every hire against what the role was actually doing versus what it was hired to do.
The pattern is the same most of the time: the principal doesn’t need more capacity, they need fewer decisions reaching them. My job is to be the filter that holds.
