How to Get Your Time Back as a Business Owner
What you pay attention to is what you end up being
On a line from a novel I can't put down, what your last week says about your business, and how to hand one job off so it stays off your plate for good.
I've been reading Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. I'm not finished with it yet. I've read a lot of good books this year, and this one continues the trend.
The writer pulls you in from the first page.
The characters are very rich and deep, and you feel like you're sitting right there in the room with them.
I don't want to give anything away. But there was one section I bookmarked, and I've gone back to it a few times since.
One character tells another about something he was taught a long time ago.
"The things that we love tell us what we are."
He loved that line so much he got a tattoo of it right across the top of his chest.
In the book it's credited to Thomas Aquinas. I went looking, because I'd never heard it before, and the trail is murkier than that. Best anyone can tell, the words the way we say them today come from Thomas Merton, writing in 1956. Aquinas said something close to it seven hundred years earlier, and somewhere along the way the two got stitched together.
I kept turning it over for days…it really resonated even though I wasn’t quite sure why. Then it dawned on me I don't actually agree with it.
People have been chewing on this for a long time
I was sitting at my desk and a sticky note stuck to my computer caught my eye.
“Your life is defined by what you pay attention to.”
That one has been up there a long time. So I started holding the two lines next to each other, and then I did a little digging, and it turns out I'm in good company.
"Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are." José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher, back in the 1930s.
"You become what you give your attention to." Attributed to Epictetus, who was around almost two thousand years ago.
"Life is the sum total of what we pay attention to." Ezra Klein said that one in 2019.
"What we pay attention to becomes our life." Jeff Warren, the meditation teacher.
Same idea, told over and over, for two thousand years. I love that. Somebody in a toga worried about this, and somebody with a smartphone is still worried about it. It’s not an easy one, is it?
Love or attention?
So which one is it? The things you love, or the things you pay attention to?
For me, they mostly match up. Long walks with Mark. A slow dinner on Friday after a long week. Reading. Sitting on the floor playing with the kittens. I love all of it, and if you looked at my week, you'd find these moments there. The hours are on the calendar.
That's how I know which line is the truer one. Loving something is invisible. Showing up for it puts hours where anybody can see them.
Love is what you'd pick if the week were empty. Attention is what you picked when it was full. Only one of those leaves a mark on how your days actually went.
It's just like this in our business
If somebody looked at your last week, with no explaining from you, what would they say your business is about?
Set aside your website and whatever you say at a networking thing. Just look at the hours.
I work with course creators, membership owners, and group coaches, so let me get specific about what I actually see on those calendars on a random Tuesday:
Forty minutes on Monday answering the same question in the community that you answered in July, and in March, and in the cohort before that.
An hour on Tuesday going back through six months of notes before a coaching call, trying to remember where this person left off and what you promised her.
Twenty minutes chasing a failed payment, then a second twenty when the card bounces again.
Half of Wednesday hand-building the slides for a call you've now run eleven times.
An hour uploading the replay, renaming it, tagging it, dropping the link into the right module, then fixing the one you dropped in the wrong module.
Sunday night scrolling the member list wondering who's gone quiet, because there's no way to know except scrolling.
The DM you write yourself, one at a time, to the four people who haven't logged in since the first week.
Forty-five minutes writing a refund email that you have written, in some form, eleven times before.
Not one of those is on the list of reasons you started this. You started it because you're good at the thing. You wanted to teach it, or coach it, or watch somebody get it.
That owner loves the deep work. She's just not paying attention to it, because forty other things got there first.
Your business becomes whatever keeps getting your hours. It doesn't much care what you meant to build. Whatever got the attention is what got good, and the rest stayed mucky.
The five-day receipt
Here's an easy thing I know that fixes this. It takes about ten minutes total, spread over a week.
1. Write it down as you go. Starting Monday, at the end of each day, jot down the three or four things you actually spent the day on. Not where the hours were supposed to go. Where they went. Nobody's grading this.
2. Add up the week on Friday. Roughly is fine. Two hours of community questions, an hour on the payment thing, half a day on slides.
3. Go down the list and ask one question about each line. Could somebody else do this if they knew what I know?
If the answer is no, mark it only me. That's the work that needs your face, your judgment, or your relationship with the person. Running the coaching call. Deciding what goes in the next module. The hard conversation with a member who's struggling.
If the answer is yes, mark it not only me. That's the work that sits on you out of habit. Nobody wrote down how it's done, so you're the only one who can do it, and that's a different thing from being the only one who should.
4. Circle the biggest one on the "not only me" side. The one that ate the most hours and gave you the least back.
It's like reading the grocery receipt after you swore you'd been eating pretty well all week. The receipt doesn't argue with you, it just knows.
Most people are surprised by how short the "only me" list is. Four or five hours out of a whole week, sometimes less. Everything else got done by the owner for reasons that made sense at the time and then never got looked at again.
That circled item is your first one.Only that one. Trying to hand off six things at once is how people end up handing off none of them.
Before you hand it anywhere
You've got your one thing. Now what?
Start with the easy question first:
Does this job need to exist at all? Some of what's on your list is there because you built it in year one and nobody ever went back to check. Cut it and see if anybody notices. That's the cheapest win available to you and almost nobody takes it.
If it does need to exist, run it past two questions.
Does it repeat? If you'll do it again next week, or next cohort, it's worth setting up once. If it's a one-off, just do the thing and move on.
Could I hand it to a smart intern? Somebody capable who doesn't know your business yet. If the answer is yes, it can come off your plate. Notice what an intern would need from you, though. Not the steps but the context. What you need to get started, what good looks like, which cases are exceptions, when to come ask you.
Both yes means you've got a candidate. And you don't have to reach for AI first. Some of these belong to a person you already have and haven't handed enough to. Some are a pinned post and a saved reply.
Task thinking and Outcome AI thinking
I see most people living in task thinking.
Task thinking asks: how do I get AI to do this for me?
Outcome AI thinking asks: how do I build this once so I never have to do it from scratch again?
Same job on the table, two different questions, and over a year they don't end up anywhere close to each other. Task thinking gets you a slightly faster Tuesday. Operator thinking gets you a Tuesday you never think about again.
Give away the job, not the task
When somebody hands a job to AI, they almost always hand it a task.
"Summarize this email."
"Write me a description for this module."
"Pull these numbers."
Every one of those works. The trouble is you're right back at the keyboard ten minutes later handing over the next little piece, checking the output, feeding it more. By Friday you've saved maybe forty minutes and you're tired of it. That's usually the point where people decide AI doesn't work for them.
Allie K. Miller named this better than I could in her AI with Allie newsletter. People delegate tasks when they should be delegating outcomes.
Think about how you'd bring on a person. You wouldn't hire an assistant and then stand behind her chair saying type this sentence, now this one, now attach that file. You'd tell her what she owns. Here's what I need to be true at the end of every day, here's how I want it handled, here's when to come get me.
Do that with AI.
Say the job is the Sunday night scroll, the one where you're trying to figure out who's slipping.
The task version: "Look at this export and tell me who hasn't logged in."
The outcome version: "The goal of your job is to catch members who are drifting before they cancel. Every Monday morning, hand me one short list of names. Include anybody who hasn't logged in for two weeks, anybody who stopped turning in work, and anybody who used to post in the community and has gone quiet. Next to each name, put the last thing they did and how long ago. Sort it so the longest-standing members are at the top, because those are the ones I most want to keep. Anybody gone more than thirty days goes on a separate list, since that's a different conversation."
Nothing in there asks it to sound like you or make a delicate call. It's a list, and either the list is right or it isn't, so you can check it in about a minute.
That's what makes it a good first one. Pick something where you can tell at a glance whether it worked.
Try it on your circled item. Write it as a job description, starting with the goal of your job is to, then keep going and add the rest of what you know.
What AI is actually missing
Here's the fear I hear most. My work is too specific for this. AI would get it wrong.
Nine times out of ten the tool can handle the job just fine. What it's missing is everything you know and never said to anyone.
Go back to the intern for a second. An intern is plenty smart. Hand her that member list with no explanation and she'd give you something useless too, because she doesn't know that the person who missed two weeks in July was on vacation and told you so, or that people always go quiet in December, or that you'd rather hear about one at-risk member on Monday than fifteen maybes.
Writing the steps is the easy half. What takes actual work is writing down how you decide. Which cases are exceptions. What good looks like. When to come get you.
That written version of your thinking is what Rachel Woods calls a playbook, and she teaches it in her AI Operator program. I wrote about how it works right here. Get your thinking down first and the AI has something solid to build from. Skip it and you get the generic version, which is exactly the thing everybody complains about.
Go small on purpose
I want to spend a minute here, because this is where I watch good people fall over.
Momentum is the number one thing that separates the businesses who do okay with this from the ones who do great. It is the measurement that matters most, more than any of the fancier ones.
The trap is you start pulling on this thread and you realize how many of these jobs you have. Not one playbook, more like twenty or even hundreds. Then you realize they'll all need updating as your business changes. Then you think about every weird edge case and every exception you've never written down. And it starts to feel impossible, so you either quit or you go build one enormous, complicated thing that tries to handle everything at once and breaks on step two.
That big complicated thing is the one that never runs right. Then you sit there wondering what went wrong, and you decide the whole idea was oversold.
The way through is smaller than you think. The key is to find the smallest version of a job that is still usable and still useful, and build that one. It doesn't have to cover everything!
Ship it before it's finished. It only has to be better than doing it by hand.
Use it for a week and let it show you what's wrong. That teaches you more than another week of planning.
Fix that one thing.
Then, and only then, start the next job.
Small wins stacked up is what gets you somewhere. Five little ones in five weeks will take you further than one perfect build you're still tinkering with in October. And after a few, the bigger projects stop looking so big, because you've learned how to cut them into pieces. This is the same thing I mean when I talk about getting your momentum back when the work starts feeling heavier than it should.
Done is better than perfect.
Where I see this with the people I work with
Almost everyone I work with is good at what they do. That's usually the problem. Being good at something means people bring you more of it, and pretty soon your week is full of work you can do and nobody stopped to ask whether you should.
So I come in and watch how the work actually moves. I watch, talk and listen. I look at the numbers and how things are done. I find the jobs eating the owner's attention. Then we build the thing that takes one off her plate for good. I call it an AI Quick Start.
Hours saved is a small number.
The big win is what shows up on her calendar. When her week starts matching the business she's been telling me about, the one where she brings her gift to the world in spades.
Which brings me back around to that sticky note on my computer.
Your life is defined by what you pay attention to. It reads like a nice thought to keep near your desk, and it's also the measurement. Take one job off an owner's plate and what she gets back is ninety minutes of attention. She spends it on the work she's passionate about, or on a walk, or on the kid who has a game Thursday night. Those hours go on the calendar, and the calendar is the true record of what her business is about.
It's the same question I ask clients before we add any new tool: what are you trying to be more present for? Answer that one and the rest of this gets a lot easier to sort.
That's the thing I get to say when a job is done. I cleared the path so she could do the work she was meant to do.
Here's what I'd do starting Monday
Beginning next week, Monday through Friday, at the end of each day, jot down the three or four things you spent the day on. Friday afternoon, look at the list and ask what a stranger would say your business is about, based only on that.
If the answer doesn't match what you love about your work, go easy on yourself. Your attention has been running on autopilot, and autopilot never picked that destination on purpose.
So let me ask you. What's the one job you already know is going to show up on that list, the one eating your hours and giving you the least back? Tell me in the comments. Saying it out loud is usually the first move.
Shell, Yes! Here's to your success,
Michelle
FAQ
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Spend one week writing down where your hours actually went, not where you meant them to go. For each item, ask whether somebody else could do it if they knew what you know. Then take the biggest one that somebody else could do and get it off your plate, whether that's a person, a template, or an AI tool. Keep the first one small enough to finish. One job at a time beats a big plan you never start.
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Look for the one that took the most hours and left you the most drained, then run it past two questions. Does it repeat? Could I hand it to a smart intern who doesn't know my business yet? Two yeses means it's a good candidate. Start there instead of with whatever is easiest to explain, and don't try to hand off five things at once.
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Usually because you're handing it tasks instead of outcomes. Asking it to summarize one email at a time keeps you at the keyboard feeding it work, which is task thinking. AI Outcome thinking asks how to build the job once so you never do it from scratch again. Write it like a job description, including how you want decisions made, and it starts owning the outcome instead of waiting on your next instruction.
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Usually the tool can handle the job. What it doesn't have is your context, the exceptions and judgment calls you've never said out loud because you've never had to explain them to anybody. A new intern would get it wrong for the same reason. Write down what good looks like and which cases are exceptions, and most of that worry goes away.
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A playbook is the written version of a job. The steps, the rules, and how you decide along the way. AI can't run something for you if the deciding part only lives in your head, so you get a generic result that doesn't fit your business. Write your thinking down first and the AI has something solid to work from. I walk through how playbooks work and why AI falls flat without one in more detail here. Start with the smallest version that would still help you, and improve it after you've used it for a week.
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Find the work routing through you out of habit instead of necessity. That five-day receipt will show it to you fast. Then get one of those jobs written down and running without you, and repeat. I wrote about what that looked like the first time I stepped away from my own business for eleven days. Nobody's asking you to disappear. The aim is a week spent inside the four or five hours that actually need you.