Charlie Gilkey.

Charlie Gilkey is the author of Start Finishing (Sounds True, 2019) and Team Habits (Hachette Go, 2023), the founder of Productive Flourishing, and the founder of Momentum. He has been publishing online since 2007, and his planners have been downloaded more than a million times.

Before the books, Charlie was an Army logistics officer in Operation Iraqi Freedom, responsible for moving people and materiel across a theater of war. He also spent years in a PhD program in philosophy. The combination shows up in everything he builds: rigorous about how work actually moves, and honest about what it costs the people moving it.

His work turns on a single question. How do you finish the work that matters, with a team, without grinding down the humans involved? Start Finishing answers it for the individual. Team Habits answers it for the group. Both come out of two decades of advising leaders across the military, nonprofits, and fast-growing companies.

Productive Flourishing, the platform he started in 2007, has grown into an award-winning body of work on productivity, planning, and leadership for people who care about their craft. The writing now lives on Substack, where Charlie publishes essays, tools, and the monthly planning cadence readers have used for years. He also founded Momentum, a planning app built on the Momentum Method.

Charlie’s work has been cited in The New York Times, Time, Forbes, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Inc., and Lifehacker. He hosts the Productive Flourishing Podcast and co-hosts Sparked with Jonathan Fields. He lives in Portland, Oregon.