At Karlon Group, we’re serious about work productivity. Our clients rely on us for expertise, responsiveness, and speed. So we’ve recently adopted the CORE workflow approach, as developed by Jeff Su during his time at Google.
The CORE workflow is a simple yet powerful method for handling the flood of tasks, ideas, notes, and files professionals encounter every day. It’s especially helpful for professional services work, where juggling multiple deliverables and deadlines across clients is central to the job. At its heart, it replaces reliance on memory and willpower with a reliable process that ensures nothing gets lost or forgotten. It’s a routine, and by adopting it, you’ll free yourself from the ongoing stress and disappointment of forgetting things, missing deadlines and not making progress on your goals.
CORE stands for:
Capture – Immediately record any task, idea, note, or file the moment it arises.
Organize – Label captured items in a way that makes them easy to process later.
Review – Regularly revisit your task lists during scheduled sessions.
Engage – Block dedicated time to complete the actual work.
This workflow works with any tools you prefer, whether it’s Google Workspace, MS Teams or Apple OS.
How it Works in Practice
- Capture – Our brains are for having ideas, not holding them. You offload the task details and any initial thoughts immediately upon discussing it or learning about it. A general catch-all task list is best for this. Audio recordings can also be helpful as an attachment to a task, if there are lots of details and nuances you don’t want to forget. The key for this step is to make it easy and fast.
- Organize – This means keeping your initial list of tasks and ideas in one place. If there’s a deadline, you’ll want to document that too.
- Review – This is the step that most professionals aren’t doing today, at least systematically. The key is to schedule your review sessions and protect that time like any other meeting. Schedule 20 minute blocks on your calendar each day to do this. I recommend carving out this time at the beginning of your day.
- Engage – Similar to review sessions, this is protected time that you schedule on your calendar to do the work. If you find yourself easily distracted or bouncing between clients and work, you’ll be amazed at how effective simply scheduling specific time to do specific work can be to keep you focused and energized.
Why It Works
The CORE workflow is grounded in proven productivity principles:
- Relying on willpower and motivation is unsustainable.
- Our brains are excellent at generating ideas, not storing and remembering them.
- Simple, consistent review habits keep information actionable.
- Blocking focused time for execution ensures work gets done, not just added to a to-do list.
A Karlon Group Example
You get a slack from a client at 9:00 PM asking for help with a strategy memo she wants to share with the board in a couple of days. You’re at home, away from your laptop, with a full slate of meetings the next morning. It would be easy to tell yourself, “I’ll remember this tomorrow,” and move on. But we know this will, at the very least, cause stress and burden your mind. Worse yet, you may forget the task or its details completely.
Using CORE, we can close the loop immediately and avoid the burden. First, you immediately capture the request in Google Tasks and attach an audio note with a few initial ideas and context. You organize your note by assigning it to the client and adding a deadline in two days. The next morning, during your daily review, you clarify the deliverable and schedule 90 minutes that afternoon to do the work. Finally, you engage by completing the task during your scheduled time.
The result is not just higher productivity, but lower cognitive load. Nothing lives solely in your head, and nothing slips through the cracks.
About the Author:
Karsten Loose is co-founder and Managing Partner at Karlon Group, a fractional finance and accounting firm that helps companies build, scale, and optimize their finance and accounting functions. Karlon Group works with companies across SaaS, e-commerce, manufacturing and technology, offering a full suite of finance and accounting support tailored to each client’s changing needs.