Last night I was sharing with my wife an observation about my own calendar. When I look objectively at how I’m spending my time, there isn’t much balance in it. Family life with her, work, the gym, cooking, sleeping well. That’s the whole rotation.
And here’s the more honest part: outside of that, the only thing I seem to want to put in my schedule is more work.
The urgency is real
It’s not workaholism for its own sake. I feel a genuine urgency to leverage the tools that are suddenly available to us, especially the new AI tools, to quickly build capabilities that would transform and scale the team.
That’s the designer portal. The client portal. All of it supported by AI and built with Claude Code, with me leading the direction, and the entire knowledge base built with its assistance too.
Why the knowledge base matters
The key realization came from the renovation work itself. A renovation process is a long chain of decision points. And without close guidance at each one, we’re setting up new teammates for failure, and ourselves along with them.
There are so many breaking points. So many dependencies on decisions from us, from the client, from our subcontractors. It all calls for a good knowledge base and a repository of lessons learned. Otherwise we’d be doing the foolish thing: making the same mistakes again, paying full price for tuition we’ve already paid once.
So the extra hours aren’t really extra work. They’re an attempt to make sure the hardest lessons of year one only have to be learned once.
When does normal come back?
I do wonder, though, when life goes back to something a bit more normal. When I get to see friends every week or so. Or, if I’m honest, when I even have the desire to.
Perhaps that will be next year, when my wife heads to Paris for work and the rhythm of the house changes anyway.
But in the meantime, I will keep building. And I really hope it yields dividends at some point.