Thank you. Alright. So, again, what an honor and and a great opportunity. This is so cool to be here with you today.So I wanted to start off with a question, And the question is, if if you close your eyes, just close your eyes and imagine for ninety of for ninety straight minutes, zero meetings, no messages, No notifications. Just the space to think. Okay. So the question is, how does that feel? Does it feel a little uncomfortable? Maybe, like, a little bit of freedom? Probably pretty impossible. Right? Well, that feeling, that feeling that you feel right now, that's what we're here to talk about today. Because here's the thing, if we want to lead with impact, if we want to innovate and strategize and build the things that really matter, we have got to stop treating uninterrupted time like it's a luxury. It's simply not. It's a necessity, especially now, and especially for us. Look. I'm I'm not here to talk about productivity hacks.

There is definitely a place and time for those things. Today, I'm here to talk about power and the power to reclaim that energy, the energy that we need to do the things that actually move the needle. Because our real value as leaders, it isn't in how fast we reply to emails. It's actually in how well we create space for bold, creative thinking. So, look, we are navigating more noise than ever. The reality is that most of us before we, when we wake up, before our feet even hit the floor, we are reacting to things. We are checking our email and our messages. We are reading notifications, skimming the news headlines, and responding to those too urgent requests.

And this is all before we've had coffee. That's not leadership. That's just survival. And the other thing is if you're a woman in tech, especially in a leadership role, you know it doesn't stop there. We carry an unspoken load. We keep the peace and fill the gaps. We make the impossible actually possible. There's this quiet kind of energy drain that comes from being the one that everyone counts on just to figure it out. Our calendars are impossibly full, but our minds are fragmented. And in that fragmentation, we lose the space where strategy lives. I've seen brilliant women shrink their ideas to fit this teeny tiny thirty minute window, And then I've seen teams with this extraordinary potential never get beyond the surface because they're booked solid from morning all the way through to the night.

And, honestly, I felt it myself, that slow fade of clarity, that exhaustion from being always on, being always available, but just rarely impactful. So I did come with some facts and some data. So look at let's let's look at the science for just a minute. The facts are that we consume about 74 gigabytes of information every single day. That's like simultaneously streaming 16 movies, And we deal with well over a 100 emails per day, probably almost around a 100 chat messages per day. The reality is, again, that 80% of our workers are are overwhelmed, and that's just by the sheer volume of all of this. Understandably so. But the two data points on the right, these are the ones that really gave me pause.

These are the ones that made me realize that a change has to happen. So what we now know is that most workers are interrupted somewhere between four to 12 times per hour, And stats show that after every time we are interrupted, it takes our brains about twenty three minutes to get back into a flow state. So if we think about that for a minute, when are we actually recovering? When are we actually in flow and able to create? Here's what that means. Our brains are constantly switching gears. The part of the brain that's responsible for logic and planning and creativity, that's the prefrontal cortex in the front. And it goes offline when we are in this reactive mode. So all of the blood and energy that we have to have to be in that, functional state, it rushes to the amygdala to the back of our brain, and that's the part that's all about survival and emotion and urgency.

It's just a hijack. We weren't built for this. We we just weren't built to be this overstimulated. So focus is not just about getting work done. It's about actually accessing the parts of our brain that can build something that's meaningful. Alright. So let's talk about the topic that I know everyone else is talking about too. But here's why this matters in this topic today. AI is coming in fast and furious. It's impressive. It's changing everything. It can generate content, analyze massive datasets, build some amazing slide decks, summarize our conversations, and how you can even write code. It's taking all this fast repetitive work. But what that means is that the value of human time is shifting. What's left for us is the work that AI cannot do. It's the human work.

It's messy, and it's nuanced, and it's deeply creative. It's the emotional labor of leading people and setting a vision and making ethical choices, connecting those dots that cross silos and systems. And that work can't be done in these little ten minute intervals. That work demands time. It demands presence, and it demands, you guessed it, focus. So if we don't protect the space for humans to do the work, we're just handing away our unique edge. So I wanna share, just a personal story. This is when it all kind of changed for me. And, it was about a year ago, and my calendar was completely nuts. It was completely out of control. I was leading a global portfolio. I was overseeing a massive transformation of our new value delivery office. It was very exciting.

I was reporting into a structure, though, that rewarded reactivity over reflection. Every day felt like a hamster wheel at full speed. And so one Thursday, after something like 14 back to back meetings, it was different time zones and different topics, different teams, all asking me for help, and I'm over here existing off of pretzels and peanut butter, I realized that I hadn't had a single moment to myself all day, not even to think.

So that evening, as I typically do, I, you know, finish up my meetings and I close my laptop and I look down and there they are, my my two little buddies, my little miniature dachshunds, Oliver and Penny, and they're looking at me like, hello? Alright, mom. Come on. It's time. It's time to go. And I just I just had nothing. I had nothing for myself. I had nothing left for them. So I kinda crumpled up on the floor, and I got emotional, Not because of the meetings or the emails, but because I realized I was doing so much, and yet I was impacting so little. I was too tired to be creative. I was too distracted to think deeply. I had built this rhythm that rewarded motion, but had no meaning. So the next morning, I woke up, and I was just done. I blocked my entire Friday. I declined meetings. No phone calls. Just space. I called it my focus fortress Friday. And, honestly, at my team did not know what to make of it. But I modeled it, and I protected it.

And soon, they kinda started trying it on for the for size two. That one Friday, it changed everything. I got clarity, and I mapped a new approach to our strategy. I made better decisions, and Oliver and Penny got to go for a walk. So I ended that day knowing that I had done stuff that mattered, And that's when I knew. This wasn't just a personal hack. This was leadership. Okay. So let's go over again why this matters. Why does focus time matter? It's not just a perk, you guys. It's not just a treat that you give yourself when everything else is done. It is the very foundation for doing our very best work. When we protect the space to think, we just we make better decisions, and we connect and see ideas that we wouldn't have seen in that reactive state.

We actually include voices that often get overlooked in those noisy, constant environments. We reduce burnout, and we just elevate the quality of everything that we touch. So in short, we shift from just surviving to leading. And this is another concept that's a little newer to me. It's something that, a colleague introduced recently, and I've got her reference on the last slide. So let me throw another wrinkle in our nirvana. Okay? The fact is we can't do this alone. We actually need to build better systems to support this. So if we think about most of the platforms that we use, like email and messaging and dashboards, they weren't designed for focus. They were designed for alerts, for visibility, and for constant communication.

So now as leaders and architects and builders of work culture, we have a responsibility to start designing for flow. We have to reduce the noise in our systems. We need to start promote promoting async updates when possible, and we need to normalize this protected time so that our teams learn to do it. We have to create tools that enable deep work, not this constant context switching. Because the reality is that if our systems are constantly interrupting us, they are quietly killing our best ideas, and that is just not okay. I work for a $25,000,000,000 company, and we are ambitiously trying to double our revenue in the next five years. It's exciting. It's a little ex it's a little scary. It's bold, but it doesn't happen through more meetings. It happens through more clarity.

It happens through trust, and it happens through a culture where people are empowered to think, not just respond. So what we've started to do is to shift. Shifting from status meetings to asynchronous updates. We've built in reflection time before making key decisions. We've encouraged our teams to protect one meeting free block at least each week. And the really cool part about this is that we are actually seeing the results. More ownership, more engagement, bolder ideas, less burnout. Alright. So this is all great, Tracy. So what? So what do I do? Well, here's what I propose that that you start today. Start this week. Start protecting your focus time, and here's some tips to to do that. Block ninety minutes this week. Label it strategy sprint or focus fortress, and stay true to your commitments. Choose one meeting that could be a video or an email update.

Cancel the meeting and send the asynchronous update. Try turning off your notifications for a few hours. See what happens. Notice how your brain feels. Definitely talk about this with your team and normalize protecting time for real work. And then start to reflect on this weekly. What drained your focus? What fueled it? It's not about perfection, but it is about intention. So in closing, here's a line I keep coming back to, and that is to guard cognitive space. The silence between pings sparks tomorrow's bold ideas. Our calendars are not going to protect that space for us. Our systems will not ask us if we've had time to think. It's up to us. And when we start to make that shift from reaction to intention, from noise to clarity. We don't just change how we lead. We change what we're capable of creating.

So let's make space. Let's reclaim our time, and let's leave like it matters because it does. Alright. Who's ready to start the focus revolution? Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Tracy, I was literally literally taking screenshots of the things that you were sharing.