It’s 6:52am. The toddler is on my hip, patting my face with a sticky hand like he's checking if I'm still real. My coffee is already cold, sitting exactly where I set it down twelve minutes ago and forgot about. Someone is yelling from the bathroom that they need help but also do not want help, which is somehow both true at once. Someone is asking for a screen for the fourth time this morning like the first three no's were a rough draft. And instead of thinking about breakfast, I am doing math.
Not money math though, time math.
I do this every single week now, usually Sunday night or right here at 6:52am with a toddler patting my face, before the day has even officially started. Ten. That’s the number. That’s how many hours I actually have this week to work on my business. Not ten hours a day. Ten hours total.
Some weeks it’s less, if someone’s sick or summer decides to summer harder than usual. I used to think I was hiding something when I told people that number, like it wasn’t a real enough answer, like real business owners worked forty hours and I should round up to sound more legitimate. I don’t do that anymore. Ten hours is the truth, and the truth turned out to be the more useful story, because here’s what having that little time forced me to figure out.
When you have all day, you can afford to lie to yourself about what actually matters. You can research one more thing. Take one more course. Scroll one more app looking for whatever secret you’ve convinced yourself you’re missing. When you have ten hours, none of that is available to you anymore. You cannot afford it. And that constraint, the thing that sounds like a disadvantage, is honestly the reason I’ve built more in the last year with three kids home than I ever built when I had more time and fewer kids.
So I want to walk you through exactly what fills those ten hours, why, and just as important, what I have completely stopped letting myself do with them, because I think most people’s problem was never actually a time problem to begin with.
The mistake almost everyone makes, and I mean almost everyone, including me at different points
I watch this happen constantly, in my DMs, in comments, in friends who message me convinced they just need one more piece of the puzzle. It’s never actually a time problem. It’s a switching problem.
Every new idea gives you the same little dopamine hit. New course. New niche. New planner. New business model. New platform. New AI tool. New strategy. It feels like momentum. It feels like you’re finally doing something about it.
Most of the time, it’s just avoidance wearing productivity’s clothes.
Switching strategies every few weeks is like replanting the same seed in six different pots hoping one of them will finally grow. The pot was never the problem. You just kept pulling it up before the roots had time to do anything.
People learn too much and implement too little. They’ll buy course after course, convinced the next one is the one that finally hands them the missing piece, when the real issue is they haven’t even fully used the last three they bought. They try to perfect something before they’ve given it enough time to know if it’s even working, tweaking their offer, their content, their whole approach every couple weeks instead of letting anything run long enough to produce real data. There’s no consistency with content, so the algorithm never actually learns who they are, and neither does their audience, because you cannot build recognition out of inconsistency. There’s a huge amount of scrolling that gets quietly relabeled as research, which is really just comparison wearing a work outfit, sitting there feeling productive while accomplishing nothing. And underneath all of it there’s this constant switching. New idea, new platform, new strategy, always evaluating, always hunting for the secret ingredient they think everyone else has found and they haven’t.
Let’s actually do the math on that switching for a second, because I think it hits differently once you see it in numbers. Say you spend three of your ten hours a week “researching” a new platform or strategy instead of executing the one you already picked. That’s 156 hours a year, almost four full working weeks, spent evaluating instead of building. Four weeks is enough time to actually make a $27 digital product profitable if you’d just left it alone that whole time instead of starting over in March because something newer looked shinier.
Here’s the sentence I need you to actually sit with, not skim past. The secret isn’t hiding somewhere waiting to be found. There is no secret. There’s just doing one thing long enough for it to actually work, instead of doing five things a little bit each and calling that effort.
Most people are not failing because they’re doing the wrong things. They’re failing because they never do any one thing for long enough to find out if it was the right thing.
When I lost my Instagram account in May, I remember sitting there, staring at a screen that used to be years of my life, thinking, okay, if this is gone, what actually survives? Not what felt productive. Not what got me the most likes that week. What actually pays the bills when the thing you built your identity around disappears overnight. That question changed everything about how I spend my ten hours now, and it’s a big part of why Substack is on the list you’re about to read, not as one more platform, but as the one thing on that list that can’t be taken from me the way Instagram was.
P.s. also make sure you read I Made $1,000,000 Online in 3.5 Years. Here’s The Exact Framework and How You’re Going To Do It Faster
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