An entrepreneur from Racine, Wisconsin, Dr. Stacia Thompson excels at workforce development and community building. She guides the Stacia Thompson Impact Collective, where she coordinates empowerment workshops and events that foster values of resilience, authenticity, and building cultural legacy. The collaborative partnerships Stacia Thompson designs and implements deliver meaningful organizational change. She is also active with the Racine Creative Center.
Dr. Thompson has past experience as director of Upward Bound at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. She also served as project director of the Health Profession Opportunity Program for several years. She had fiscal oversight of a $10 million budget, and built lasting partnerships with local hospitals and community organizations. She also trained and supervised student success-focused staff members. Dr. Thompson’s past responsibilities include a board role with the National Council of Workforce Education, where she instilled best practices in career, basic skills, and technical education.
Dr. Thompson draws on insights gleaned throughout a life assisting others in her book PAUSE: The Power of Intentional Rest. Combining gentle humor and wisdom with personal stories, she provides readers with ways of reclaiming their time and sources of strength, as well as orienting themselves toward sustained healing.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
My typical day starts with ensuring my 23-year-old son, who is neurodivergent, is awake and prepared for his day program. This primary responsibility grounds the start of my morning and establishes a foundational structure. While waiting for his transportation, I use that time to review my calendar and triage any urgent emails that arrived overnight. I make my day productive by strictly adhering to a process of review and planning the night before. I maintain weekly priority lists that rank all tasks, both professional and personal, from high to low priority. This method ensures that once my focused work time begins after my son’s bus departure, I can immediately tackle the most impactful tasks without wasting time on deliberation.
How do you bring ideas to life?
My approach to bringing ideas to life is highly structured and collaborative, centered on rigorous validation before investment. It begins with drafting a formal proposal that articulates the core problem, the proposed solution, and measurable success criteria. This document is immediately shared with subject matter experts (SMEs) for a critical, early-stage review, ensuring the concept is technically sound and strategically viable. Concurrently, I conduct in-depth research to understand the market, potential risks, and resource requirements. Crucially, I focus on assembling the right cross-functional team—the individuals who possess the necessary expertise and buy-in—to drive the project. The final step before a major launch is often the creation of a small, controlled test program or pilot, allowing us to test assumptions, gather real-world data, and refine the execution strategy before committing to a full-scale rollout.
What’s one trend that excites you?
The trend that excites me most is the myriad of uses for generative AI, both personally and professionally. My excitement stems from the belief that AI isn’t meant to be a replacement for human effort, but rather a powerful compliment. It handles routine, repetitive, or complex data processing tasks, effectively acting as an intelligent copilot. This frees up human time and mental energy, allowing us to be significantly more creative, strategic, and productive in areas that require high-level judgment, emotional intelligence, and novel thinking. The potential for AI to democratize complex skills and accelerate the pace of innovation across every industry is immense and thrilling.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
My single most effective habit is the strategic separation of planning tools—using my reMarkable tablet for detailed, handwritten to-do lists and using my digital calendar for time-blocking non-meeting work. I find that the physical act of writing my to-do list on the reMarkable aids in commitment and retention, keeping my daily and weekly tasks tangible and less overwhelming than a purely digital list. More importantly, I consistently create placeholders on my digital calendar not just for meetings, but for dedicated blocks of time for reports, project work, and specific deadlines. This habit of treating focused work like an immutable appointment ensures that necessary deep work gets scheduled, protected, and prioritized over the constant pull of incoming requests, effectively creating productive, uninterrupted blocks of time throughout the day.
What advice would you give your younger self?
I would tell my younger self that it is okay to ask for help and you don’t always have to try and do everything on your own. The most difficult lesson to learn was accepting that self-reliance, while a strength, can quickly become a roadblock to growth and efficiency. I would teach my younger self to view asking for assistance not as a sign of weakness or failure, but as a strategic move to leveraging the expertise of others and accelerate outcomes. This applies equally to professional tasks—delegating, consulting mentors—and personal life, particularly regarding caregiving, where a supportive network prevents burnout and allows you to be more present for those who need you.
Tell us something you believe that almost nobody agrees with you on.
My unpopular opinion is the widely-held belief that multitasking is productive. I do not believe it is a legitimate productivity tool. The reality is that multitasking is merely rapid, inefficient task-switching. When we attempt to do multiple items simultaneously, we rarely finish any of them completely, and the constant mental context-switching drastically increases the cognitive load, leading to a loss of focus and lower quality of work. I firmly believe that the most productive state is single-tasking, where you dedicate an uninterrupted block of time to one priority until it reaches completion or a logical stopping point.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
I repeatedly take and schedule pauses for mental well-being and clarity. I recommend this practice to everyone because burnout is not a sign of hard work; it is a sign of poor resource management. My pauses are deliberately scheduled, ranging from a mid-week block of a few hours to a monthly digital detox day. These breaks are not focused on “doing” anything productive, but on pure decompression, such as visiting a farmers’ market, going to the spa, or simply binge-watching a favorite show in my pajamas while eating comfort food. This conscious, structured stepping away prevents cumulative stress and is essential for refocusing energy and maintaining creative capacity.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
When feeling overwhelmed or unfocused, my immediate action is to institute a short, deliberate break followed by a return to my priority list. First, I will step away from the keyboard and engage in a simple activity—often a short physical walk—to clear my head, effectively triggering a context shift. Upon returning, I immediately consult my weekly high-to-low priority list and my digital calendar. The feeling of overwhelm often comes from losing sight of the highest leverage activities, so I use this review to re-anchor myself to the single most important task scheduled for that block of time, shutting down all other applications and notifications to enforce single-tasking and regain momentum.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
The core strategy that has been most responsible for advancing my career is the deep belief that “your network is your net worth.” This goes beyond simple contact collection; it is a continuous commitment to networking, genuine collaboration, and strategic partnership. I invest time not just in asking for opportunities, but in complimenting and championing the work of my colleagues and peers. Many of my biggest successes, whether securing a promotion, landing a key project, or successfully implementing a cross-functional program, have come directly from relationships where mutual respect and shared goals were established long before the opportunity arose. This strategy ensures I am top-of-mind and trusted when complex initiatives require external expertise.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
My biggest early career failure was in developing a workforce program that struggled significantly with participant recruitment. The initial struggle stemmed from a fundamental flaw: we designed the program based on what we thought the population needed rather than what the intended audience was interested in and motivated by. We had prioritized internal metrics over user desirability. To overcome this, we paused the entire rollout. I led a rapid redesign phase that involved extensive surveys and focus groups directly with the target student demographic. This research revealed a disconnect in our proposed curriculum and scheduling, allowing us to pivot the program content and delivery methods to better serve their actual needs. The key lesson was the paramount importance of user-centered design—never build a solution for an audience without deeply understanding their voice, interests, and stated needs first.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
The most valuable business idea I can give away is to develop your passion into your paycheck by executing the SME to Platform model. If you are a recognized Subject Matter Expert (SME) in your field, your starting product should be to write a book that codifies your unique knowledge and perspective. This book instantly creates a credible platform and an audience. From this foundation, you can then scale your offering: you can facilitate paid presentations and workshops, offer professional development and consulting to organizations, and create evergreen online programming (courses or digital toolkits). This structure turns a one-time knowledge asset (the book) into multiple, diversified, and passive revenue streams.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
The most impactful software for my productivity is my reMarkable tablet and its associated cloud platform. I use it to combine the benefits of deep, focused work with digital accessibility. The physical feel of writing on the device helps me to take digital notes that feel like writing on paper, which boosts retention and reduces distraction compared to typing. Crucially, I am able to keep all my notes, documents, and presentations securely stored and synced across all of my devices—my phone, the reMarkable itself, and my laptop. This means that a key document is always available for review or presentation, regardless of where I am working.
What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?
The best $100 I recently spent was on branded apparel and professional vending items for a recent conference where I was speaking and exhibiting. This expenditure delivered a significant return on investment. The professional, cohesive look of the branded gear made a noticeable difference in how attendees engaged with me; it instantly elevated my presence and made my brand recognizable. I received numerous compliments, and it acted as a natural conversation starter, directly leading to more inquiries about my business and services than a generic setup would have. This purchase demonstrated the power of presentation in professional networking.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast you’ve gotten a ton of value from and why?
My favorite book that has provided immense value, particularly in managing a busy professional and personal life, is Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much. The value of this book is its daily reminder to pause and check the impulse to overcommit. It highlights the difference between being truly productive and simply being busy for the sake of feeling valuable. The core concept I apply daily is that my worth is not tied to my output, which enables me to be more strategic about where I dedicate my limited time and energy, allowing me to step away and practice the mental well-being pauses I recommend to others.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
I recently enjoyed the Michael Jordan documentary series, The Last Dance. What made it so compelling was the multilayered storytelling—seeing his career story told through his own words, alongside the simultaneous perspectives of his teammates and opponents. This provided invaluable background context on the events and competitive landscape during that era. The documentary was enhanced by the strategic inclusion of the original music playlist and the complementary post-show live podcasts with the series creator, which created a truly immersive experience and brought back strong, nostalgic memories of that time.
Key learnings
- Productivity is driven by planning tasks from high-to-low priority the night before and creating protected calendar blocks for deep work.
- Career advancement and business growth are best achieved by prioritizing collaboration and genuine networking over individual effort.
- Scheduling deliberate, regular breaks and digital detoxes is an essential strategy to prevent burnout and maintain creative clarity.
- Program or idea failure often results from assumption-based development; always pause to conduct research and pivot based on the audience’s actual needs.
- Multitasking is an illusion; the highest quality work comes from single-tasking and dedicating uninterrupted time to a single high-impact priority.