Hey :)

You don’t have a nine-to-five.

Which means you don’t actually have to live like someone who does.

Sometimes I think people like me — owners — accidentally drift into behaving like employees. We structure our day the same way everyone else does. We start around nine. We finish around five. We sit at the desk all day. We rush around at the same times everyone else does.

But we don’t actually have to.

For example, I haven’t driven to work in about fifteen years. And I’m definitely not sitting in rush hour traffic at eight in the morning or five at night just because everyone else is doing it. That’s just not happening.

Every now and again when I do happen to be out during rush hour, I notice it. You see all the cars packed on one side of the road and sometimes I’m heading the opposite direction with almost nobody there.

It’s a funny little reminder.

You’re not part of this.

And you don’t need to be.

Whenever I find myself caught up in those moments, I sometimes ask myself a question:

Was this accidental?

In other words, did I just drift into doing what everyone else is doing, or could I have deliberately chosen something different?

Because the truth is, you get to choose.

If you want to go to the gym at eleven in the morning, go to the gym at eleven.

If you want to go for a swim in the middle of the day, go for a swim.

If you want to work early in the morning and open your day up, do that.

If you want to work later in the evening instead, do that.

If you want to go to the cinema during the day, go do it. 

Today for example, my plan is pretty simple.

From about quarter past nine until quarter past eleven, I’m going to work on the single most important thing I need to do today. Two hours. Timer on. No distractions.

If that’s all I get done today, that’s honestly enough.

Probably more than enough.

Because two hours of focused work on the right thing is often more productive than an entire scattered day.

After that I’ll go to the gym. I won’t start work again until about one o’clock. I’ve got a couple of meetings in the afternoon and that’s basically the day done.

That’s plenty.

I don’t need to squeeze anything else in.

Cara and I talk about this quite a lot because she’s an owner as well.

As an owner, you have the highest form of leverage over your time. Nobody is telling you what hours you need to work. Nobody is telling you where you need to be.

You decide.

And yet it’s amazing how often owners accidentally recreate the nine-to-five for themselves.

You can do that if you want to.

But you don’t have to.

You could work three days a week instead of five.

You could take long breaks during the day.

You could structure your week completely differently.

For example, Cara and I take Monday mornings off together.

We don’t do date nights. Evenings actually have less leverage for us. Instead we do day dates. Monday mornings are ours. We’ll have breakfast together, go to the gym, sometimes even have lunch before either of us start working.

That’s the time we actually control the most.

Which is interesting, because for most people in nine-to-five jobs it’s the opposite.

Their lowest leverage is during the day — nine to five is controlled by someone else. Their highest leverage is early mornings, evenings, or weekends.

For us it’s flipped.

Our highest leverage is during the day.

So this is just a little reminder — to you and to myself.

You chose to be an owner.

Which means you have the ultimate leverage over your time.

You don’t have a nine-to-five.

And you don’t have to conform to the nine-to-five.

In fact, I sometimes think it’s healthy to actively push back against it. Almost to fight it a little. To deliberately design your life so it doesn’t look like everyone else’s.

Because if you’re not careful, you end up recreating the exact thing you left behind.

🗣️👀

Chris.