Hello friend,

Welcome to Theory of Change. Every Thursday, I send a 4-minute breakdown of a framework that will help anyone to think strategically and work smarter.  If you were forwarded this email, feel free to sign up here.

I wanted to start January slowly this year. Ease into the work, set clear priorities, and protect space for deep thinking.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, my calendar turned into a winter McFlurry of meetings, strategy tasks, website maintenance, personal commitments, and a hundred other things that felt urgent. By last week, I was stretched thin, constantly switching between tasks, and struggling to carve out time for the bigger-picture work that actually moves things forward.

So, I reached for a framework I designed for exactly this occasion: KIAOK.

If there’s one thing I consistently hear from nonprofit leaders, social entrepreneurs, and journalists, it’s this: “We’d love to focus on strategy, but we don’t have time.”

So, when I work with clients, the first thing we do is audit their weekly tasks. The goal? Freeing up time for the work that truly matters. And we use KIAOK to do it, because even just one extra hour per week can spark some pretty profound change.

Let’s get into it.

🕞 KIAOK 🕞

What is it?

Hot take: Time is the oxygen of our work—even more vital than funding, relationships, or team. And yet, it’s the hardest thing to protect. The Keep, Improve, Automate, Outsource, Kill (KIAOK) framework will help folks just like you audit their workload, reclaim time, and focus on what truly matters (like saving democracy, or Season 5 of The Bear).

Why it works

Nonprofit leaders are time-poor. I don’t need to tell you this. Even well-funded organisations struggle to find capacity for strategic work.

KIAOK frees up time by cutting inefficiencies, reducing cognitive overload, and creating space for deep, high-impact work. One extra hour of focused strategy each week can drive significant change. The key is knowing where to find it.

When to use it

• You’re understaffed and overstretched. Your team is wearing too many hats. Programme staff are handling admin. Leadership is running comms. No one has the bandwidth to think beyond survival mode.

• Funding comes with strings attached. You secured a grant, but now you’re drowning in unforeseen reporting requirements, restrictive deliverables, and funder-driven priorities that eat into your actual mission work.

• A teammate is stuck in reactive mode. Fires keep popping up—grants expiring, policy shifts (a la Meta, USAID), urgent crises. They know they should be planning for the future, but immediate needs consume their every hour.

• Your meetings are eating your week. Funders want check-ins. Partners want alignment calls. Team meetings turn into hour-long updates. By Friday, you’ve spent more time talking about work than doing it.

• You’re struggling to scale. Your programmes are growing, but your internal systems haven’t kept up. Staff are manually entering data, responding to every email individually, and duplicating work across teams.

How to use it

KIAOK is a acronym that stands for…

• Keep: Protect high-value work. What tasks only you can do? Strategic thinking, high-level analysis, team-building, donor management—these are the core of leadership. Everything else is a distraction.

• Improve: Make processes more efficient. Where can you work smarter? Batch tasks, use templates, and reduce the overload of repeatable work without reducing output.

• Automate: Use tech to handle repeatable tasks. What doesn’t need a human touch? Scheduling, data entry, research summaries—AI assistants can eliminate hours of manual work (I highly recommend Jeremy Caplan's newsletter if you need to identify the best AI assistant for a specific task).

• Outsource: Delegate small or specialist tasks. What can someone else do better or faster? Bookkeeping, admin, video editing—outsource work that is either non-core or requires skills you don’t have.

• Kill: Eliminate low-value work. What is wasting time? Pointless meetings, outdated reports, legacy programmes that no longer serve your mission. If it doesn’t add value, stop doing it.

Assess you (or your team's) workload using KIAOK and then take manageable, incremental actions to rebalance it.

How to get started

Step 1: Audit your week

Break down your working hours into percentages.

• Meetings: How much time is spent in calls? Are they all necessary?

• Email/Admin: How many hours disappear into your inbox?

• Deep work: How much uninterrupted time do you get for focused tasks?

• Context switching: How often are you bouncing between different types of tasks?

Frequent switching between emails, meetings, and deep work is costly. Every time you shift focus, your brain takes time to reset. The more you juggle, the more productive time you lose.

Step 2: Identify changes

What can you eliminate or delegate? Where can you group similar tasks to reduce switching costs? Can you block out a protected hour for strategy or writing each week?

Even small changes can free up meaningful time.

Take it to the next level

1. Batch work to reduce switching between tasks. Take a look at Cal Newport's Time-Block Planner.

2. Protect deep work time with no-meeting mornings (see my newsletter on 90:90:1)

3. Conduct a quarterly “stop doing” review to remove unnecessary work (try Start, Stop, Continue to turn your findings into action).

🔮 FUTUREPROOFING 🔮 

The future of leadership in nonprofits, social impact, and community journalism is built on relationships—with funders, partners, communities, and teams. But right now, you’re being pulled in every direction. Funders are moving from backing projects to backing people—dynamic, adaptable leaders who can navigate shifting priorities, prove impact, and build trust. That means more meetings, more proposals, more deep thinking—on top of everything else already on your plate. AI promises to lighten the load, but instead (productivity hacks notwithstanding), it’s just going to increase the expectation of how much work you can do. Add to that public mistrust in institutions and community interventions, and all engagement takes more time than ever.

If you don’t protect time for strategy, relationships, and creative thinking, burnout isn’t just a risk—it’s inevitable. The work won’t slow down. But you have the power to take control, and clear space for the kind of leadership the future (and that pesky funder) demands.

🪁 PARALLEL PLAY 🪁

Three things I’m glad exist, because we all need some hope in our lives.

• Write like a Grrrl is a collective of writers who support women and other marginalised genders to develop their writing craft and confidence (HT Hanna Thomas Uose).

• Need some perspective on the daily news cycle? Last week I learned that sharks are older than the Rings of Saturn and appear in the fossil record before trees even existed.

• This is hella niche, but Persona 5 is one of my favourite computer games of all time and they just released a 3LP vinyl of its amazing acid jazz soundtrack. (also: Turntable Lab is just such a beautiful internet place to be if you like music of any kind).

🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊

You made it to the end! Thanks for trusting me with your precious time.

A small menu of things I’ve been working on this week (using my unblocked extra hours!):

• My website. I’ve updated my coaching offerings, reduced some noise, clarified the CTA. Whadaya reckon?

• I have a free funding database for journalism / civic tech / human rights orgs. It needs updating but is still pretty solid.

• My online fundraising course is free for anyone reading this newsletter. Follow this link and it should give you a 100% discount. 

• In April, I’ll be speaking at Perugia International Journalism Festival appearance for the first time in five years (about my Nieman Lab prediction on impact investment in journalism).

• I created a YouTube video that tries to explain how my mind works.

See you next week. Tell a friend!

Adam

p.s. If you were forwarded this email and you like what you see, you can subscribe for more.