Tired of chasing deadlines at the cost of your life? Here’s what I’m doing differently—and why modeling ease for my kids matters more than a finished to-do list.
Last week was spring break here in New York, which meant both kids were home with me for the week.
We don’t do camps during the breaks—I actually love that the business is set up in a way that allows me to be fully offline and enjoy having a solid chunk of quality time with my kids without the morning rush, endless activities or stressing about getting out the door by a certain time.
That said… Michael usually works his normal hours during the kids’ breaks, so it’s often just me solo parenting most for the week.
I’ve designed the business to work around my kids’ school schedule, which means planning well in advance and building in longer timelines; but that didn’t happen this time.
In a bid to let things be simpler and easier this quarter, I ended up scrapping a lot of the original plans we’d mapped out, which meant that by the time spring break rolled around, there were still loose ends, team requests and a to-do list that didn’t feel fully closed.
And then—because life is life—my three-year-old woke up on the last day of school projectile vomiting, which completely wiped out the final workday that I’d planned to play catch up.
In the middle of it all, I had to remind myself of something that I come back to often:
None of this is that deep.
It isn’t life or death.
Deadlines are self-imposed and can easily be shifted.
Is it always ideal to move them around or leave big projects open? Of course not. But I’d rather expand my capacity to get comfortable with that than the alternative.
Because the thing is: there will always be deadlines. There will always be more projects, more things to tick off, more to accomplish.
What creates sustainability isn’t all of those things disappearing.
What shifts the way you feel in your business is how you relate to the work. It’s always you.
What I’ve had to work on – and what I teach – is reimagining your relationship with progress and momentum, so instead of being held ransom by your to-do-list and constantly operating from a state of urgency, you proactively decide your own pace.
And in doing so, you start the process of accepting your reality, rather than fighting it and no longer need to finish everything in order to feel complete. Because completeness is a feeling that’s available for you at any time; irrespective of what “needs to be done”.
This is why running a conscious life-first business goes way beyond putting sustainable strategies and systems in place. You can have all the automations and boundaries and workflows in place… but if your body is still operating from hypervigilance and urgency, it will never feel safe to rest or step away and the experience of a sustainable business will always evade you.
Your brain can want more ease, more space and consistency but none of that means anything if your body hasn’t quite caught up yet.
Feeling is the language of the body, not words.
And that’s why so much of the work required to step into a more sustainable business is about creating safety away from the patterns of over-functioning and self-abandoning.
There was this one moment last week—one of those ordinary but quietly perfect ones. The doors were open, the warm breeze was coming through, and my daughter was bouncing on the trampoline in the back. Michael had just come home from work and was outside playing basketball with Atlas.
I was in the kitchen, making dinner with music playing, and I could hear all of them laughing in the background.
And I just stood there for a second, soaking it all in, thinking: this is it.
This is the thing I’m not willing to miss because of a task list.
This is what all of this is for.
So yes, the shop was meant to open last Monday. And yes, it’s opening a week and change later than planned.
But that’s the gift of doing business this way. We get to move the goalposts when life asks us to.
We get to choose again.
I think that’s what so many of us have gotten wrong about productivity and the way we approach our businesses.
Because if keeping up with deadlines and to-do lists means missing the very life you’re building your business to support, then what are we even doing?
For me, it’s a constant recalibration. Yes, I love my work. Yes, I love building things and creating and launching. But the goal has never been to optimise and systematise for the sake of efficiency alone. I’m not trying to fill every pocket of time with more projects just because I can.
The whole point is to make space—to design a business that gives me more access to those everyday, deeply human moments. The kind that actually makes life feel rich and meaningful.
So yes, the systems and the strategies matter. But not as a way to squeeze more in, but rather as a way to free myself up.
That’s what I’m working on. That’s what I want to model.
I’ll be back tomorrow with all the details on the shop. But for now, I want to gently encourage you to check in on that too.
If you’re someone who’s constantly in motion, constantly feeling like there’s just one more thing to do before you can pause—this is your reminder: it’s safe to stop.
It’s safe to let things wait.
It’s safe to choose life first.
