The morning that finally broke me (and what I built because of it)

I installed RescueTime on my Mac a couple of years ago.

It runs silently in the background and tracks everything. Every app you open. Every tab you visit. Every message you send. You don’t feel it. You don’t think about it. You just work like you always do, and then at the end of the week, it sends you a report.

My first report almost made me cry.

Six hours. I had spent six hours that week in my email. Not reading it. Not responding to it. Bouncing in and out of it in five and ten minute chunks, every single day, convinced I was staying on top of things.

I am an operations strategist. I have spent twenty years building systems for other people’s businesses. I help founders get their time back for a living.

And I could not account for six hours of my own week.

That report sat me down hard. I went through everything. I started mapping where my hours were actually going versus where I thought they were going. The gap between those two things was embarrassing in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

But …