The Weekends I Got Back Once I Stopped Doing Everything By Hand
Updated: Oct 1
Before any of this existed, weekends used to mean actually sitting and watching TV with my kids for a few hours, or just... not doing the thing I was supposed to be doing. Once I started, that stopped. I'd be typing out blog posts by hand, prewriting everything, which took forever and I couldn't even take it with me anywhere.
A single Etsy listing could eat a whole day. I was up around 3am most mornings — meds, kids' lunches, breakfast, all of it — and then straight into Etsy, affiliate work, pins, before anyone else was even awake.
Here's the part that actually got to me, though: my daughter has ADHD too, and she was struggling with big emotions about me not being around enough. I don't get home until 6-6:30pm most nights, and bedtime starts right after that — so there wasn't a lot of room left for her.
Working from a desk in the living room helped some, because she could come up and ask me things, get a snuggle in. Eventually she asked for her own little desk next to mine, just so she could work alongside me too. That's a sweet image, but it also tells you exactly how much of my day was disappearing into the back-end grind.
The system I built didn't change how many hours I'm sitting down — I'm still up at dirt o'clock. What changed is the output.
I can do what used to take me ten days of manual work in one day now, because the tedious back-end pieces — the duplicating, the formatting, the repetitive stuff — aren't sitting on my plate waiting for my attention anymore.
That's the actual trade I was making the whole time: not "work less," but stop spending my limited hours on the parts of the job that were never the reason I started this.
I don't expect anyone taking this course to grind the back-end the way I did to figure it out. That's exactly why I packaged it — so you don't have to sacrifice the same nights and mornings I did just to get to the same place.
My last big grind right now is getting this course out the door for you. After that, I finally get to enjoy the fruits of my own labor. The automation is already doing what it's supposed to — the structure, the plan, the layout, it's all built and running. Things are scheduled.
My job now is mostly just checking in: catching the occasional hiccup if something disconnects, or making room for whatever new idea shows up — and with ADHD, the ideas show up whether I invite them or not.
But once this is live, I finally get to slow down and just be creative and present with my family, which was the whole point of building any of this in the first place.
Want your links to stop being the thing eating your weekends? Grab the free Affiliate Link Setup Checklist + Genius Links Tracker, join the Waitlist for the Full Course while you're there, and check out my other posts for the rest of the free.
See How the System Works Already living in Airtable? The Airtable Command Center is this whole system — pins, ideas, links, voice memos, all of it — built out and ready for you to duplicate. $9.89, no rebuilding from scratch.
If there's one thing you'll learn about me, it's that I'd rather build a system once than do the same thing the hard way over and over. Whether that's a voice memo prompt, an Airtable base that actually holds itself together, or a shortcut that makes me think, "why didn't I build this sooner?", I'm grateful you're here and I hope you found something that makes your own system feel a little more possible. Wishing you clarity, momentum, and a lot less overwhelm wherever you're building.
Comments