{This is what you eat when you’re pregnant with twins. #DontTell}

Oh hiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

It’s me, Claire. Your long-lost blogging buddy.

Generally I love me some good ole’ regular blogging. But things happen, you see, and this year THINGS HAPPENED and it has taken me more than a couple of months to get my groove back.

Here’s the situation: Twins are coming! Boys, to be exact, which remains a confusing concept to my female toddler. It’s a thrilling and exciting prospect and we’re eager to meet them in just a few short months.

That said, the pregnancy hasn’t been the breeziest of calm winds so far, and some of the complications caused a bit of a stir in my work and personal life. At the end of the day, the experience called for a good ole’ kitchen table reckoning, where you draw a line in the sand and say “I can do this”, and “I cannot do that”, and you use a lot of red pen. As such, I doubled down on a few specific work and personal priorities, and put everything else on hold.

Blogging, it turned out, was on hold.

Ultimately, it taught me a great lesson and definitely solidified some of my beliefs about the very things I teach when it comes to the concept of Working by Design. The thesis of what I learned? You can’t plan life, and so the best thing you can do when unexpected things come to hit you in the face is to use the tools you have to get back on track.

Those tools, for me, included ruthless prioritizing, radical productivity, and rest.

But I’m back!

And it feels good, I must say, as I type in a Starbucks (Starbucks being a strange exotic world I haven’t seen anything of in the past few months).

So, all this to say, I hope you’ve been well.

We’ve got some exciting things coming up in this newsletter in the coming months, and I’m pumped to share them with you. For now, though, here are a few of my favorite links.

• How this paddle-boarding CEO implemented a five-hour workday at his workplace and why it worked.
• My friend Scott Harrison’s awesome organization, charity:water, just celebrated their 10th anniversary. Here is an incredible video about what they’ve done.
• If you have your own email newsletter, and you want to grow it, my friend Navid’s List Building Summit will be right up your alley. More than 60 awesome speakers will walk you through the ins and outs of list building for superstars. And it’s FREE. To help you get excited, and to keep track of the FREE event which starts next week, Navid just released the FREE 2016 List Building Playbook. Get it here. It will give you the schedule of the FREE live masterclasses, live panel discussions and training sessions.
• Guess what? Food, Sleep, and Exercise Matter if you want to get your best work done. Here’s why.
• This article about why Marissa Mayers works 130 work weeks had me shudder.