Turn off the noise, keep the impact

My 3 interesting things for you this month…

1. Focus: stop your laptop shouting at you

I’m going to be a bit direct here: most notifications are not helping you work, they’re helping other people feel like you’re available and making their day easier.

Remember being helpful is nice, but it doesn’t generate influence.

Finance work is high-cognitive-load work – modelling, judgement calls, writing a clear narrative, spotting the weird thing in the data. Every ping breaks your concentration, pulls you into someone else’s agenda and makes the day feel frantic.

Why does this matter?

Because the work we’re paid for is not “being responsive”. It’s thinking clearly, prioritising well and getting the right things done with quality. No-one needs you available at 30-second notice 24/7.

So, here’s a super tactical 10-minute reset.

Step 1: Turn off Teams notifications (desktop)

1. Open Teams
2. Click … (Settings and more) in the top right (next to your profile)
3. Click Settings
4. Click Notifications and activity
5. Under Chats and channels, set things like:
   1. Chat message notifications: set to Off or Only show in feed (no pop-ups)
   2. Channel mentions/replies: keep Mentions if you want, turn the rest down
6. Under Meetings: decide if you want meeting start notifications on or off
7. Optional but powerful: set Sounds to off, so you stop getting the Pavlov’s-dog effect

Microsoft’s own path is: … > Settings > Notifications and activity.

Bonus (channel-by-channel): if one channel is noisy, you can change just that channel’s notifications instead of muting everything.

Step 2: Turn off Outlook notifications

If you use New Outlook for Windows

1. Open new Outlook
2. Go to View (top menu)
3. Select View settings
4. General → Notifications
5. Turn off Mail (and Calendar if you want)

If you still use classic Outlook, turn off desktop alerts in: File → Options → Mail → uncheck desktop alert / sound options.

Step 3: Keep a “real emergency” back door

If someone genuinely needs you, they can still reach you… just not via 50 micro-interruptions per day.

Option A: VIP email on iPhone

• Add someone as VIP: open an email → tap their name → Add to VIP
• Set VIP alerts: in Mail, go to VIP then tap the ‘i’ and choose VIP Alerts (or configure via iPhone notification settings)

Option B: WhatsApp

Tell your team: “If it’s genuinely urgent, WhatsApp me.” You’ll find that very few things are actually urgent once there’s a small amount of friction.

If you try this for a week, watch what changes: calmer days, fewer rabbit holes, more output that actually moves things forward.

Let me know how you get on.

2. Influence: the 3-step solution ladder

One of the fastest ways to build influence as a finance business partner is to aim for shared ownership, not the perfect answer.

I see this a lot in organisations: finance turns up with the “right” solution, clear logic and good data… and still gets polite nods, delays, or quiet resistance. Or worse, big noisy resistance!

Most of the time the issue isn’t the analysis. It’s that the other person doesn’t feel it belongs to them.

A really useful way to think about this is a solution ladder:

• My solution (what I think we should do)
• Your solution (what the other person thinks we should do)
• New solution (what we co-create together)

The further you move up this ladder, the more partnership you build, and the more your influence grows. This ties in with a principle I often come back to in coaching: make it easier for the other person to engage by giving options, then build from there.

What this looks like in practice

Level 1: My solution

You share your recommendation, clearly and briefly.

A simple opener: “My current view is X. Here’s why, in two bullets.”

Keep it short. If you ram it home for ten minutes, you’ve made it harder for them to contribute without feeling like they’re challenging you.

Level 2: Your solution

Before debating, get them to put their thinking on the table.

Try:

• “If you were solving this without finance in the room, what would you do?”
• “What’s your instinctive solution?”
• “What are you optimising for here?”

This is you moving from your agenda to their world, which is often where influence really starts.

Level 3: New solution

Use open questions to come to a shared solution. It’s these questions that help you and the other person get aligned, stay engaged and establish clear ownership.

Use language like:

• “What would a good outcome look like for you, and what would make it unacceptable?”
• “What are the options we could choose from?”
• “How could we achieve your outcome and stay within budget?”
• “What’s a first step we can both commit to this week?”

The goal is not compromise. It’s finding a path forward that feels like it belongs to both of you.

A quick finance example

Let’s say spend is running hot in a function.

• My solution: “Freeze hiring and pull forward a vendor renegotiation.”
• Your solution: “Don’t freeze hiring, we’ll miss delivery targets. Let’s grow out of it.”
• New solution: “OK. Let’s agree a targeted hiring approach for only revenue-protecting roles, plus renegotiate the top 3 suppliers and put in a simple monthly run-rate trigger so we act early.”

Same underlying problem. Totally different level of buy-in.

When you change how you approach these conversations, you’ll notice a difference in how people see you. After a few weeks or months, you’ve moved from the person who turns up with answers to the person who helps them reach better decisions.

If you want to chat this through in more detail, get in touch.

3. The pathway to real AI usefulness in finance is finally becoming visible

Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen a cluster of AI product launches that, in my view, finally show a clear path for how AI can help finance make meaningful progress.

We’re moving beyond AI writing first drafts and into a time where it can take on core finance work across ops, controllership and FBP.

Here are the four key updates that stood out for me:

Claude Cowork

A more “agentic” Claude experience that can plan and execute multi-step work on your files, not just answer questions. It runs via the Claude Desktop app and works inside a user-designated workspace rather than roaming around your whole machine. Check out Cowork here – pretty impressive!

Claude for Excel (add-in)

This version of Claude sits in a sidebar inside Excel, able to read, analyse, modify and create workbooks with transparent, cell-level behaviour. This is a big deal because Excel is still the operating system of finance.

Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image)

Image generation and editing that can reliably produce diagrams, infographics and visuals with legible text. That matters for board packs, business cases and any moment where a picture beats another paragraph.

OpenClaw

OpenClaw is at the open-source end of the spectrum, pushing personal AI agents that can take actions across tools. Powerful, but also the clearest reminder that security is not optional. We’ve already seen public warnings and active security concerns around how people deploy these kinds of agents.

There are 3 themes on why these matter:

1. Moving from words to action

These launches show that AI can finally do more one thing at once: work with different file types, combine words and pictures together, take action outside of a browser.

In our world of data, spreadsheets and PowerPoint, this is essential.

2. Integration beats intelligence

The technology is improving fast, but the bigger shift is where its visible.

Adoption is a lot easier when AI sits inside platforms people already use every day, like Excel, Outlook, Teams or shared drives. Anthropic’s Claude is pushing into Microsoft 365 style workflows through connectors and integrations. Copilot is finally improving and will have to keep up with competitors.

It will become easier for more people to confidently start using the technology this year.

3. The data problem: security and containerisation

Most finance leaders (and CIOs) aren’t waiting for “better prompts”, but for AI risk to be more manageable.

Sorry this one is a bit techy. When I say security and containerisation, I mean:

Security: clear answers to “where does the data go, who can see it, how is it logged, is it used for training, how do we control access, how do we stop data leakage?”

• For example, many commercial AI products position themselves around not using business inputs/outputs for model training by default.

Containerisation: giving AI a bounded workspace to operate in.

• Think: a locked-down environment where it can work with specific files or data, with restricted permissions and ideally restricted network access.
• You can see this “bounded workspace” idea in tools like Cowork that operate in a designated folder rather than having free rein.

In other words: the future is not “AI with full access to everything”. It’s “AI with controlled access to the right things”.

My view on timing:

My current hypothesis is:

• H2 2026: Faster progress through niche providers and specialist deployments where security and containment are easier to control.
• Early 2027: Broader, mainstream adoption as the big platforms make these features simple, admin-friendly and baked into the tools everyone already pays for.

I’m confident about the direction we’re going because the integration trend is already happening, though the exact timing could absolutely change.

The leadership requirement doesn’t change: get the team ready

Regardless of whether this lands in H2 2026 or slips, the job for leaders stays the same.

Think about it like landing a plane.

• Leaders are the pilot: you control the approach, the safety checks and the landing plan.
• The technology is the runway: it becomes available when it becomes available.
• Your team are the passengers: when they disembark, are they ready to use the technology confidently and responsibly?

The simplest readiness bar, in my view:

• 60% to 80% of the finance team using AI regularly (pretty much daily)
• At least half the team using advanced use cases: not delegating their work to AI, but using it to aggressively upskill themselves and standardise their work

That second point is the difference-maker. The winners will be the teams who use AI to raise the bar on quality, speed and consistency.

Over the last year, I’ve prepared 3,000+ finance professionals for the plane to land. If you’d like me to come and do the same for your team, let me know. I have two slots left in February and three in March.

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