This article is for the woman who’s pregnant or who might want children in the future, reading everything there is to read about prams and birth plans and sleep training, and nothing at all about the financial reality of it.

It’s also for the man she might want to have children with, to provide an understanding of the three costs nobody actually adds up and the one that arrives thirty years late.

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I was meant to publish this over the weekend, but I didn’t get the chance to because I spent it working back to back NHS shifts.

I wish I could say that there was a night, a few months after the twins' dad and I split, when I sat down at the kitchen table and worked out all the numbers. But there wasn’t.

I worked the numbers out in my head multiple times while doing the countless every day tasks required of me and the numbers just did not add up. No matter how much I tried to make them add up.

I had a full time healthcare job, two toddlers and a childcare bill that took the middle out of my payslip, and I could not see how the month was supposed to work. I remember thinking that I had done everything I was supposed to do. I spent 5 years at university. I got the job. I worked when my peers were out enjoying their lives. As the eldest daughter, I had not really been reckless with anything.

So out of necessity really, rather than a desire to become an entrepreneur, I started searching for ways to earn money from home, because that seemed to be my only option.

Nobody hands you that guide. So here is mine.

The three costs

The thing I did not understand until I was already inside it is that motherhood does not have one cost. It has three, and they arrive at completely different times…( which is exactly why you never see them coming).

The first one turns up every month with an invoice attached and everybody talks about it. The second never reaches your payslip at all, so you feel it without ever being able to point at it. The third does not show up for three decades, by which point there is very little you can do.

ONE: the obvious cost you can see

Right now I pay £700 a month for childcare for two children to attend 3 days a week. That is after the 30 funded hours and Tax-Free Childcare in the UK and living in Yorkshire where everything tends to be a lot less expensive. Before this, I was paying roughly 3 times as much.

£700 a month now is around a fifth of my take home pay from my NHS job. That’s the discounted version. The version with the government help already in it. But it does not cover weekends.

Although nursery is shut, my NHS shifts are not😅

So I’m having to rely on organising childcare from my family and sometimes the twins' dad. The stress associated with that alone is enough to bring on a migraine. Especially as my family live 5 hours + away. If I did not have people willing to do that, I would either have to organise a baby sitter for the weekend and pay premium price for it or stop doing the shifts, which would mean nearly half of my salary gone.

The funded hours for childcare have actually helped me enormously. Since September 2025, eligible working families in England get 30 funded hours a week for children aged 9 months and over. The government reported in March 2026 that full-time costs for under-twos fell by 52%, from £305 a week to £149, saving an average of £8,000 a year per child.

Important thing to remember though is that the funded hours are shaped like a school year, and your job is not. Thirty hours a week across 38 term time weeks comes to 1,140 hours. A parent working most of the year needs closer to 2,500. The entitlement pays for well under half of a working year.

The invoice never actually reads zero either. Providers cannot charge top up fees on the funded hours themselves, but they can charge for meals, nappies and consumables, and the twins’ nursery certainly do!

There is a cliff at £100,000. Adjusted net income above that removes eligibility for both the funded hours and Tax-Free Childcare, and it is a cliff rather than a taper, so a bonus that tips a family over can cost them far more than the bonus was worth.

And a funded place you cannot actually get is not a funded place. Coram's 2026 childcare survey found only 75% of English councils had enough places for even three quarters of the under 2s entitled to them.

Beyond childcare the immediate expenses of raising children need to be taken into account:

• children need food, formula milk ( if you’re not choosing to breast feed), nappies, clothes, shoes etc : my weekly grocery shop price tripled as a result and additional expenses gone up by ~ £150 a month

• they need space to live in and everything else that comes with it such as beds, high chairs, milk bottles, kid’s crockery and cutlery etc : I had to upsize and ended up moving into a 3 bed house after renting a room for most of my adult life, my monthly accommodation cost has doubled as a result

• transportation, car seats etc : I ended up getting a bigger car for safety reasons after my previous one broke and have been driving a lot more for convenience reasons and to save time, when before I would have walked or got the bus if I didn’t have a car available

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TWO: the cost that never reaches your payslip

This is the one I did not see coming, and it is bigger than the nursery bill.

The ONS tracked parents who had a first child between 2014 and 2022. Five years after the birth, mothers were earning 42% less, an average of £1,051 a month, and were 15 percentage points less likely to be in work at all.

I am inside that statistic. I went back when the twins were ten months old, on 50% hours, because once I priced the nursery in, working more simply did not make financial sense. Since then I’ve started working weekends to top up my pay. I also had to pause my training necessary for career progression to go on maternity leave.

Pausing the training is the expensive part, and I did not understand that at the time.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that a woman working full time might see her hourly wage rise around 6% a year. Switch to part time and almost all of that progression stops. Twenty years after a first birth, a woman's hourly pay is on average a third lower than a comparably educated man's, and about a quarter of that gap comes directly from part time work flattening her wage growth.

So cutting your hours does not cost you the hours. It costs you every pay rise you never got on the hours you did work, and it carries on costing you long after the children have grown up.

Time. Probably the most underestimated factor in all this. Raising children especially when they’re little, means you end up with significantly less time for yourself. Time = money. Time to get organised, time to work on yourself and your education, time to better yourself, time to work on your business. Less time more often than not means less opportunity to make money. And the exhaustion associated with motherhood stemming from missed sleep, having to constantly juggle, the stress of financial hardship, all of that can significantly lower productivity.

THREE: the cost that arrives thirty years late

There are two separate losses hiding in here and they get muddled together constantly.

Your State Pension comes first. The full new State Pension is £241.30 a week and you need 35 qualifying years of National Insurance to get all of it. Claiming Child Benefit earns you NI credits while your child is under 12, which protects those years even when you are not earning a penny.

The trap is that a lot of parents never claimed Child Benefit at all, usually to avoid the high income charge, and quietly gave up the credits along with it. HMRC's tool to let people backdate those missing years was due in April 2026 and has now been pushed back to April 2027.

One missing qualifying year is worth about £6.89 a week. That is £358 a year, or somewhere around £7,170 across a twenty year retirement, for one year nobody told you that you needed.

Your workplace pension is the second loss, and it is far larger. Mercer's 2026 report puts the gender pensions gap at 55%. Men reach 67 with around £232,000. Women reach 67 with around £105,000. That is a £127,000 difference.

The mechanism behind it is almost embarrassingly simple. 79% of women working part time earn below the £10,000 auto enrolment trigger, compared with 9% of part time men. Below that line nothing goes into a pension. Not your contribution, and not your employer's either, which is the money you’re being handed and quietly not taking.

So a woman on £30,000 who takes three years out and then works part time on £18,000 for seven years misses around £12,400 of pension contributions. If that happens between 32 and 42, at 5% growth it is roughly £58,000 missing from her pot at 67.

Nobody ever sends you an invoice for that one. It simply is not there when you get to the end.

What I’m trying to do about it

What’s changed is the direction of travel.

I started building digital products in the evenings, around a full time job and two toddlers to have more money coming in the first place. It’s not replaced my salary yet. Some months it makes a decent dent in the nursery bill and some months it does not. It has done nothing whatsoever yet for the pension gap I have just spent four paragraphs describing.

I’ve also started learning about smart finances, practising automated investing as soon as my pay check comes in, figuring out which debts need cutting as soon as possible vs which don’t.

What I would have done 10 years ago before even falling pregnant:

• I would have got my State Pension forecast

• I would have researched my employer pension more and the available maternity pay

• I would have done the childcare maths against my take home pay before deciding the hours and included the weeks the funded hours do not cover

• Most importantly, I would have put money into my own name. Savings, investments, pensions , whatever I could manage at the time. This would have given me a lot more options than I’ve got now

Hannah 🩷

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Where the figures come from: Coram Childcare Survey 2026 · ONS earnings analysis · Institute for Fiscal Studies on part-time pay · Mercer Gender Pensions Gap 2026 · House of Commons Library on funded childcare · MoneySavingExpert on missing NI credits · GOV.UK on the new State Pension · GOV.UK childcare savings announcement

She recorded it herself. It was a country hit. Number one on the country chart, no less, no more than that.

Then Elvis Presley wanted to record it. Of course Dolly was thrilled. She told everyone she knew. It was set up, the session was booked.
The night before, his manager Colonel Tom Parker rang her. Elvis didn't record anything unless they took half the publishing and this literally meant half of the ownership of the song, and permanently.

Dolly said no.

She told him it was the most important copyright in her whole publishing company. She has said she cried all night about it.

Because realistically, think about how that must have looked in 1974. A young woman turns down Elvis Presley to protect a country song that had already had its moment. Everyone would have told her she was insane…

Nearly twenty years later, Whitney Houston recorded it for The Bodyguard.

Fourteen weeks at number one. Twenty-four million copies and still the best selling single by a woman in history.

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What I didn’t understand until this week is that a song is actually two separate things you can own. The recording, and the song underneath it.

Whitney owned that recording. Dolly still owned the song.

So every time Whitney's version was played, sold, streamed or sung anywhere in the world, Dolly got paid.

Forbes reported she earned around ten million dollars from it in the nineties alone.

Now let’s go back to that phone call.

The half she refused to hand over in 1974, when the song looked finished and Elvis was the biggest opportunity of her life, would have meant Elvis earning half of the money Dolly ended up making from the song going forward.

Instead she spent some of it buying a property in a Black neighbourhood in Nashville, and called it the house that Whitney built.

The lesson?

The person who makes something famous is not always the person who owns it.

Ownership is boring at the start. It's a clause, a percentage, a bit of paperwork about something that isn't worth much yet.

That's exactly when people ask you for a piece of it, and exactly when it feels easiest to say yes.

Best option? Create the thing. Keep your name on the thing. And be most careful about giving away a share of it when it looks like it isn't worth anything.

RIP Dolly Parton

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The Peer Set Problem, and why comparison is the thief of data

What if the problem isn't that you compare yourself to others, but that you're doing the sums wrong?

Many day comparison is the thief of joy. The enemy.

But in fact, it’s one of the most useful instruments you own, and telling people to stop doing it is a bit like telling us to stop noticing things. What I do believe is that most of us run the comparison badly, reach a conclusion we never checked, and then spend months acting on it.

I did exactly that, and it cost me the better part of a year.

This is what I’m going to cover in this article:

• The comparison that had me working myself into the ground

• Why total earnings is the most misleading number in this industry

• The invisible denominator, and how to work out yours

• When comparison builds you and when it flattens you, according to the research

• What comparing badly costs you in actual money

• The Extraction Rule, so you never leave a comparison empty handed

The comparison that cost me a year

There's a woman in the online digital marketing industry I watched for a long time.

She started after me. She's in her fifties, her children are grown, and she came in with more than twenty years of corporate selling behind her. In roughly half the time it took me to build what I've built, she had made about twice the money.

I looked at that and reached one conclusion, which was that I wasn't working hard enough.

So I did what most of us do with that conclusion. I posted more, added platforms, and tried to be everywhere at once, on top of a full time healthcare job, solo parenting toddler twins, and a support network smaller than I'd like.

It didn't work. The tactics weren’t necessarily wrong, but I just couldn't sustain them. And I guess a strategy you can't sustain, isn't a strategy.

Was it because I compared? No. The noticing was fine but the conclusion was rubbish. I'd compared two totals and ignored everything underneath them.

The invisible denominator

When you see someone's revenue figure, you're seeing a numerator. You're not seeing the denominator, which is everything that number was divided by to get there ie the hours available, years of prior skill, money spent on testing, childcare etc etc etc.

The number on your screen is a fraction with the bottom half torn off.

I have roughly two hours a day, and they don't arrive as two hours. They arrive as five or six pockets of twenty to thirty minutes, most of them when I’m exhausted. Call it fourteen hours a week on a good week.

She had, as far as I could tell, most of a working day. Call it forty hours, which is being generous to my side of the argument.

So let's do it properly.

Effective hourly rate = total earned ÷ hours actually available to earn it

Fifteen months at fourteen hours a week gives me around 910 hours. Divide [your figure] by that and you get roughly [£X] an hour.

Seven months at forty hours a week gives her around 1,120 hours. Divide her figure by that and you get roughly [£Y] an hour.

Run it with your own numbers and I think you'll find what I found, which is that the gap between us was a fraction of what the totals suggested. And that's before I count the twenty years she'd already been paid to spend learning how to sell, which is thousands of hours of skill that never shows up in her start date.

She wasn't beating me. She had a bigger denominator, and I was measuring the wrong thing.

Of course, this isn't a consolation prize.

Output per available hour is the only figure that tells you whether your business actually works, because total revenue mostly tells you how much time somebody had. If your rate is climbing, your business is working, and it doesn't matter that the total is smaller. The total is a function of time.

The ONS data from late 2023 found women in the UK spent an average of three hours and thirty-seven minutes a day on unpaid work including housework, caring and volunteering, fifty-four minutes more than men.[1]

That gap is around six and a half hours a week, roughly a full working day, sitting in your life and nowhere in your revenue figure. If you're a solo parent or working shifts, yours is higher.

That isn't an excuse and I've no interest in handing you one. It's a denominator, and you're entitled to know it's there when you're doing the math(s) on yourself.

When comparison builds you, and when it flattens you

Comparison isn't a character flaw, it's a documented default. Festinger's original work in the 1950s proposed that we have a drive to evaluate our own abilities, and when there's no objective standard available, we use other people as the measuring stick.[2]

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NB. None of this is financial advice. I'm not a regulated financial adviser and nothing I write here is financial advice or a personal recommendation. It's general information based on my own research and experience, and it can't take your circumstances into account. Before you make a decision about your money, please verify the details yourself or speak to an FCA regulated adviser.

To be honest, I didn’t expect this much engagement but forty two people told me their one financial lesson. The answers I got were very extremely insightful and I thank everyone who took the time and the effort to contribute.

One reply even came in Spanish ( thank goodness for Substack translating because my Spanish vocabulary does not extend past “mi case, su casa”😅).

People who write about property & real estate sat next to people who don't write about money at all, and people who clearly do this professionally sat next to people who just wanted to say something true.

I responded to every single comment because it others can put the effort in and contribute, I will do my best to reciprocate it. But there’s something about it all that was bothering me and it took me a while to work out what.

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What forty two strangers agreed on:

The overlap was genuinely striking.

Thirteen of the forty two said a version of this one  thing: spend less than you earn. Live below your means. Don't buy things to impress people. "Just because I can, does not mean I should."

One of my favourites came from Wiem Jd https://substack.com/@meliorarbywiem: "If you can't buy it twice without flinching, it means it is a luxury and out of budget."

Eight people said start investing early, and several of them said it with a slightly urgent tone.  Olivia Antoinette https://substack.com/@oliviaantoinette just wrote "start investing yesterday."

Nazli Roth https://substack.com/@nazliroth added the bit that stuck with me: retirement years come faster than you imagine.

Three said budget properly. Tom Jones https://substack.com/@tomjones579104 was super  specific : “track every penny for a minimum of three months, and only then decide what to fix”. Which is better advice than most of what I've paid for.

Then:

Avoid consumer debt.

Clear the credit card.

Control your emotions and the money follows. Read the annual report.

Find a partner who's good with money, which made me laugh, but Rusty https://substack.com/@smallbusinessmistakesdefinitely isn’t wrong.

So far, so sensible. This is essentially the whole of personal finance in a comment section, and I could have stopped there and written a nice tidy article.

The part where the math(s) is genuinely worth your time:

Two of those clusters aren't just opinions. They're arithmetic, which is perhaps more important than people realise.

With regard to starting early, say you put £200 a month away from twenty five to thirty five, ten years, and then you stop completely and never add another penny. You've put in £24,000.

Now say someone else starts at thirty five and keeps going every single month until sixty five. Thirty years. They've put in £72,000 ie three times as much.

Assuming seven percent a year on average, the first person ends up with roughly £281,000. The second ends up with roughly £244,000.

Ten years beats thirty. A third of the money wins.

Striking, right?

It is arithmetic, not a prediction. Seven percent is an illustrative long run average, real returns can bounce around, and I've ignored fees and inflation to keep it more simple.

But change the assumption and the totals change. What doesn't change is the shape. Time does more work than money does, and it's the one factor you can never buy back.

I started at thirty one. Which means the most useful thing I can do with this information is hand it to someone younger than me, today.

On clearing debt:

If you're carrying a balance on a card charging twenty four percent, paying it off is mathematically identical to earning a guaranteed twenty four percent. Guaranteed. No risk, no volatility, no platform fee.

There is nowhere in the market you can buy that. It's the highest certain return most of us will ever get access to, and it looks so boring that people skip past it to go and research index funds.

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The things almost nobody said:

This is the part that made me wonder…

Exactly one person out of forty two mentioned an emergency fund. Akhil R https://substack.com/@theakhilr said keep six months of runway, saved and held away from your main account so you can't casually raid it.

Exactly one person said you might need to earn more. Joy Wiggs  https://substack.com/@joyforsales: "You don't need to just save more money. You need to make more money." Fourteen words, and in my opinion, it's probably the most useful sentence in the whole thread.

Exactly one person talked about the permission side of it. Ayushi Sardana https://substack.com/@ayushisardana wrote that it's your fundamental right to build financial intelligence, and not to feel shy talking about money with anyone, employer, partner, anyone.

Three of the most load bearing ideas in personal finance, one vote each, buried under thirteen variations of spend less.

And the thing not one of the forty two said:

Not one person mentioned factoring children in.

Not one mentioned a career break, maternity leave, caring for a parent, or dropping hours because a small person needed you more than a payslip did.

Again, I didn’t expect anyone to. I asked a general question and got general answers, and every single one of them is great advice.

But looking back at these answers I noticed one thing and that’s that every answer assumes you already have a surplus.

Spend less than you earn assumes there's a gap between those two numbers. Live below your means assumes your means are above your outgoings in the first place.

And for an enormous number of people, they simply aren't. Yes, one could argue that if you don’t have anything left over after paying the rent and the bills and buying groceries, the answer would be to decrease those outgoings in the first instance. But having children, makes things a lot more complicated than that…

The FCA's Financial Lives survey found that in 2024, 29% of UK adults had no investible assets at all, or less than £1,000. Is it a knowledge gap? Maybe. Is it a discipline problem? Maybe.

But it probably can’t be fixed by a budgeting app or a sentence about lattes.

For a lot of those people, the reason is structural, and a good chunk of it is gendered. In many parts of the UK, full time childcare for two under threes costs more per month than the mortgage on the house you're leaving to go and pay for.

And every year out of paid work isn't just a year of lost salary, it's a year of missing pension contributions, missing employer match, and missing compounding on both.

The TUC's 2025 report put the gender pensions gap at 36.5%, using 2022-23 data. Retired women receive pensions around a third lower than men's, roughly £7,600 a year less. The gender pay gap is 13.1%.

The gap women retire with is almost three times the gap they earn with.

You cannot budget your way out of that.

So here's my answer to my own question:

If I could share one financial lesson, it would be this:

Work out whether your problem is a spending problem or a capacity problem, and stop treating them as the same thing.

If you have a surplus and you're leaking it, spend less than you earn is great advice.

But if you've already cut everything and the numbers still don't work, if you're doing everything the internet told you to and it isn't moving, please stop reading that as a personal failing. It usually isn't one. It's arithmetic, and arithmetic responds to more coming in far more reliably than to less going out.

Frugality has a ceiling & a floor. Earning doesn't.

I didn't know most of this at thirty. I didn't start investing until I was thirty one, my reaction was the sort of furious why did nobody tell me.

That's the whole reason this Substack exists. I'm learning it late, out loud, in twenty minute pockets between NHS shifts and toddler chaos, and writing it down as I go so that somebody else gets it earlier than I did.

If that's useful to you, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And then tell me in the comments: what’s the next thing I should ask about ?

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Sources

FCA, Financial Lives 2024 survey (fieldwork Feb–Jun 2024) — 29% of UK adults had no investible assets or under £1,000

TUC, Gender Pensions Gap Report, August 2025 — 36.5% gap (2022-23 data); gender pay gap 13.1%

MoneyHelper — auto-enrolment minimums: 8% total, 3% minimum employer, qualifying earnings £6,240–£50,270 (2026/27)

ISA allowance 2026/27: £20,000 across all ISA types; Lifetime ISA capped at £4,000 within that.

They tripled it or 10x’ed it or left their job, and then sat down and wrote the rules that got them there, and the rules are usually good. But every one of those pieces is written from the far side of a door I haven't walked through yet, and there's a specific thing that happens when you read them from this side. You nod along and take notes and close the tab, and nothing in your actual Monday changes, because the rules quietly assumed a surplus you haven't got.

Nobody writes the rules for where you’re in the thick of it. For when there's one income and two three year olds and a rota you don't control and yet another exam you have to pass and no second adult in the house to catch a single thing you drop.

So these are my rules, and I've put the cost next to each one, because a rule without a scar isn’t really worth following, is it?🤣

⚠️ As always please remember nothing here is financial advice, it's my own learning written down as I go, and where I mention rates they're my genuine numbers and my own assumptions.

Rule one: pay yourself first, because what's left over does not exist

Before I had the twins, I had money spare at the end of most months, and I want to be honest about what I did with it, which was….

nothing.

I let it sit in my current account and become a meal out or a thing off the internet or just a slow leak I never audited, and it never felt reckless because it never felt like a decision at all.

Nobody consciously chooses to waste a surplus, you just don't move it, and not moving it means you actively make a choice.

I never started investing in those years on the premise that I was waiting to see what would be left after I’d ticked off yet another meal or drinks out with friends and booked another trip abroad. And somehow there was never anything left.

That isn't discipline and it isn't a character flaw, it's simply how what's left behaves. Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi built an entire savings programme around the fact that our present self will always outvote our future self in a live negotiation, so the answer is to stop holding the vote.

But this is the most ironic bit that actually hurts more than I’d like to admit : I had the surplus then, with no childcare bill and no dependants and full control of my weekends, and I used none of it to do anything even remotely focused on creating a better future.

Yet now, I've got the understanding but not the spare money. If I'd moved even a small amount out on payday during those years, I wouldn't be a bit further ahead, I'd be years ahead.

So now the money leaves my account the day it arrives, before I've had a chance to form an opinion about it. Yes, after I’ve paid all the bills, childcare, groceries, there’s realistically nothing left for anything else but I guess it’s the price you pay for years of ignorance.

Rule two: automate it once, then never think about it again

I work full time, I'm studying for yet another exam,  I’m building an online business and raising twins alone. My working memory is fully occupied and allocated.

This means any system requiring me to remember something on the twenty eighth of the month will fail. Of course I’d try to fix it as soon as I’d notice, but I’d probably notice about three months in, on a week when I'm tired and something else is on fire. And by the time I’d look up the habit would be gone and I'd decide I'm someone who can't stick to things.

Before 2012, just over half of eligible UK employees were paying into a workplace pension. Then auto enrolment arrived and employers were required to sign people up automatically. By 2022, 88% of eligible employees were paying into a pension. Nobody sat those workers down and taught them about compound interest. Their salaries didn't change. What changed was the starting position. Saving became the thing that happened on its own, and stopping it became the thing that took effort.

So every good financial decision I've made, I made exactly once, on a morning when I had the brain for it, and handed to a standing order to carry out forever. The woman on hour eleven of a twelve hour shift makes genuinely poor decisions, and I've stopped trying to improve her. The point is that nothing important is ever waiting for her.

Rule three: not all debt is the same, and I know not to pretend it is

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…enjoy the great British weather before it does a complete 360 again and decides to be not so great again…

But I think you should know what how I got here and what it cost, including the bit I'm not proud of.

A lot of what I’ve written has been written in a hospital car park

Not a nice one. The staff car park at work, engine off, phone at twelve percent, seventeen minutes before a nice hour shift, replying to comments while mentally walking into work already. That's where the growth actually happened, and I think it's worth saying plainly, because it did not happen at a desk or inside a morning routine or during any of the conditions that people who write about growing a newsletter quietly assume you have.

Yesterday I crossed one hundred subscribers. Today it's one hundred and eleven. A beautiful number. And I said I'd be honest about it, so this is the ledger rather than the celebration.

First, hiiiii 👋

Most of you arrived in the last two weeks , which means the majority of people reading this have never actually been introduced to me. You've just watched me shout increasingly excited numbers into the void.

I'm Hannah, I'm thirty three, and I have twin 3 year olds with no second adult in the house. I've worked in healthcare for ten years, the sort of job where the shift doesn't finish early because you happen to be exhausted, and I'm constantly studying for exams to help me progress while pouring into my entrepreneurial cup out of hours.

I write about money & smart finances because I have had to become extremely good at it and not because I've ever had very much of it 😅

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What the numbers actually say:

One hundred and eleven subscribers, up from nineteen on the sixteenth of July. Nine published articles and over ninety notes, and I'd like you to sit with that second number, because I have. Ninety notes. I've written more than ten times the amount of notes than I have articles.

Nearly all of my subscribers have came from notes and recently I’ve been trying to average 3-4 notes a day. Across everything I've published, precisely one subscriber traces back to an article, and it was a piece from June that eight people read. So if you're building here and your carefully written essays aren't converting anybody, I'd stop taking it personally, because the small posts have done  almost all the work for me.

My open rate is fourteen percent, which means I reached one hundred subscribers and around eighty six of them aren't opening the emails….

That's not something I’m proud of, and it's something I clearly need to work on to grow further.

What worked, and the thing that badly didn't:

What’s made a massive difference has been engaging with others. Commenting on their posts, responding to comments others have left  on my own posts, subscribing and following when others Substackers’ content’s resonated. Having genuine conversations.

Then having a system for my notes and how I release them. My life is beyond busy as it is, so I schedule my notes for the week in advance using the in app scheduler. Otherwise there’s genuinely no way I would have been able to post as many notes as I have.

My best note ever went out on a Wednesday at ten to ten at night, from bed, and it was just me saying I was on ninety six and so close to one hundred and was it going to happen. Twenty nine likes, thirteen comments, and more than that, people replied to say they'd subscribed specifically to push me over the line. Complete strangers closed the gap on purpose and it means so much to me.

Before that my biggest note was one sentence in July about entrepreneurship being betting on yourself again and again and again, which got sixty five likes. So a fortnight later, feeling quite pleased with myself, I rewrote it. Same idea, tidier phrasing, better rhythm to my ear. And it got two likes.

I guess the lesson is that there's no such thing as reusing a moment. Doing more of what’s worked is normally a really good cross platform strategy, so I’m not sure why it didn’t. Perhaps it was too similar to my initial note or I didn’t engage enough around the time I posted it? I’m not sure. But it’s something I plan on testing out more going forward.

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Now the cost:

Stolen time. That's the raw material this was built from, and I'd rather be specific than poetic about it. Minutes from before shifts, the car park, lunch breaks that weren't really breaks. The alarm at half five on five and a half hours of sleep, laptop open on the kitchen table in the dark, then a full day on my feet, repeatedly. I want to say I’m used to it because Substack isn’t the first platform I’ve tried to grow on and I'm not offering it as a hustle story either. I get that the hard work is part of entrepreneurship.

But there’s one thing that doesn’t quite sit well with me and that’s the day I sat drafting notes after work when I could have picked the twins up about half an hour earlier. But I know I did it, and I've noticed that I reach for the sentence about building something for them whenever I need to feel better about it, which is precisely the sort of sentence that should make a person suspicious of herself. I traded minutes of my children's day for the approval of people I've never met, and some of those trades I'd make again tomorrow, and a few of them I absolutely would not.

The lowest point wasn't a rude comment or any of the things you brace for. It was writing something I'd genuinely put a lot of effort in, reading it back, thinking it was good and might actually help somebody, and then watching it not get opened. Not disliked, not argued with. Just not even opened. There's a particular quiet that comes off an unopened email at eleven at night when you've got work in seven hours, and it doesn't make you feel rejected so much as slightly stupid for having tried, which is worse, because rejection at least implies somebody was in the room.

And then somebody paid me:

I didn’t have a launch or a countdown, or any of the machinery I've spent months learning to build. Just a woman called Dr Teodora Szasz, who writes Standout Systems by Teodora, quietly deciding my writing was worth actual money. Check her out here :

https://substack.com/@teodora485587?r=6jgpn9&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=stories&shareImageVariant=image

I sat holding my phone for a good few minutes after that. It was a similar feeling to seeing a 3 figure sale come in out of the blue when putting the twins to bed, but 100 times better. Because it was my first paid subscriber and that meant absolutely everything. It gave me the belief that it is actually possible to grow on Substack after starting from nothing. And it provided the drive to keep going.

So thank you, Dr Teodora Szasz, genuinely.

Ending remarks :

One hundred subscribers hasn't changed my life in any measurable way. My bank balance is identical and I'm going back to working crazy NHS shifts next week and the twins still need their dinner at 6pm. What's changed is that one hundred and nine people know a version of me that nobody in my actual life does. I’m learning and sharing as I go.

So consider becoming a free or paid subscriber if this article helped you and if your interests in smart finances, good money practices and entrepreneurship reflect mine.

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Finally, what would you like to see me write more about?

Let me know in the comments🩷

My lil backstory…

At 23, I thought emergency funds were for people with spare money. That's genuinely what I believed. I focused on funding and planning my next trip abroad instead.

A savings buffer felt like something you did after you'd made it. A “nice to have” but definitely not a necessity.

At 33, as a single mum with twins, I know the exact opposite is true.

The safety net isn't the thing you build once you're secure.

The safety net is what security actually is.

It's what stops one broken boiler, one car repair, one surprise bill from making you feel 8 months behind.

Because you cannot build anything on top of a foundation that one bad week can take out. I've tried and it really doesn't work. You just keep rebuilding the same first floor.

And the key thing I wish I’d known at 23?? An emergency fund isn't for people with spare money, it’s for people who can't afford emergencies. Which is precisely why now it comes first.

Below is the whole system ie what I hold, where it sits, how it gets funded on a single income, what I've decided counts as an emergency before the emergency happens and the concept the wealthy describe as emergency access.

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That was it. That was the whole thing.

I was asked to work outside my scheduled hours, and I said no, because those hours belong to my three year olds. And I was told, fairly clearly, that saying no might mean no more bank shifts for me.

To be honest, I’ve probably thought about that conversation every day since.

It didn’t shock me. After graduating I used to stay over to complete tasks on a regular. And I did so for years. But since having the twins, my perspective on the value of time and making money in general has done a total 360. And I can’t go back.

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My little back story

I'm 33. I've a total of given fifteen years to healthcare. Fifteen years of studying, of covering, of saying yes, of being reliable, of taking on risk, of going the extra mile to put others first.

And I have almost nothing to show for it.

My monthly salary still barely covers the mortgage and the bills as a single mum of two toddlers.

No safety net. No emergency fund ( built through my NHS job). Nothing that would let me lose that income for a month without the whole thing coming down.

Fifteen years of loyalty, and the moment I protected one evening for my babies, I found out exactly how much that loyalty was worth in the other direction.

It was worth a threat.

It’s really all about the finances

I used to think this money was a me problem.

I thought I was bad with money.

It turns out I wasn’t. Because before the twins, £3,500 a month in the north of England felt comfortable. After them, the same number felt like standing in a sea and drowning.

That's not a discipline problem. That's a math(s) problem.

And shame is brilliant at getting your attention. It's absolutely useless at changing anything.

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So going back to the conversation…

What it actually taught me was something a lot less dramatic that “ quit now” and much more useful:

Your salary is probably the riskiest income you'll ever have.

Because it’s based on someone else deciding what it costs you. Someone else deciding which evenings are yours. And the less of a buffer you have, the less of a say you get.

I didn't feel trapped that day because I lacked courage.

I felt trapped because I lacked a safety net.

If I'd had six months of costs sitting in an account, that conversation would have been a completely different conversation. Same words from them but a totally different woman receiving them.

What changed?

It’s reaffirmed two things for me, and none of them are exciting:

1. I will not wait to feel confident with money. Confidence is what the habits hand you afterwards. It is not the thing you need first, and waiting for it’s already cost me years. I don’t save what’s left over, because there is never anything left over. I invest on payday now, before my life gets its hands on it.

2. I’m building after hours now. After bedtime, before the twins wake up, in little daily pockets of time. Something that’s going to be truly mine. Because I want more than one thing standing between my kids and a bad month

If you're reading this at 11pm with a laptop on your knees, know that you’re not behind. You're early in your own story, and early is loud and unconvincing and looks like nothing for a long time.

The graph of anything worth building is flat for ages and then vertical.

Most people quit in the flat bit.

Don't be most people.

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And if someone at your work has ever made you feel that protecting your family was a performance issue, I see you. That's not a flaw in you. That's information about them. And it’s the information you need to take serious action.

What about you? What’s the moment that made you decide to build something of your own?

I genuinely do read every single comment ( let’s face it, I don’t actually get many… Yet 😉)

Also this week for paid subscribers I'm sharing The Safety Net Blueprint , the exact way I build and hold an emergency fund on one salary as a single mum. It's the thing I wish I'd had before that conversation, so subscribe if you’d like access🫶

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My 1st product did better than I expected, which you'd think might have felt like enough. Welllll…..it didn't. Within a fortnight I was building the second one.

I built it badly. Rushed, half the prep I'd put into the first, and I finished it while on holiday at my parents' house with the twins. I sat hunched over my phone getting it live while everyone …

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I said it last week. We were in a shop, one of the twins grabbed a beach ball with that hopeful look kids do so well, and the words came out of my mouth before I had done any maths at all. “We can't afford it.”

The thing is, that day, we probably could have. It wasn't a lot of money. There was enough in the account and there would still have been enough at the end of the month. But the sentence arrived anyway, fully formed, the way sentences do when they have been said to you a thousand times before.

That was the moment I understood that I had inherited something.

The house I grew up in

Money in our house came in waves. There would be a stretch where things felt fine, where there was enough and nobody seemed worried, and we’d go on holiday or get a new gadget or a toy we were excited about. And then it would be gone. Without any warning I could see as a child. One week things were normal and the next week they weren't.

What I remember most isn't going without. It's the embarrassment. And as the eldest child out of 9, the older I got, the more I felt it. Bills that stayed unpaid, people looking at you with that strange “ worried” yet “disdainful” look on their faces. Letters that got hidden away but stayed there for me to find them. I was a child who knew which things hadn't been paid for, and I don't think children are built to carry that. You have no power to fix any of it. You just hold it and worry endlessly.

Nobody sat me down and taught me a single thing about money in those years, but I learned plenty anyway. I learned that money is something that happens to you rather than something you steer, and that having some doesn't mean anything at all, because it can vanish. Most of all I learned that the safest thing a person can do is go to university, get a job, work for someone else for the rest of their life and want less.

What it turned me into

I would have told you, until fairly recently, that I was just careful. Sensible. Always good with money. Trying to save from day one..

But I’ve never really been  careful. I’ve been frightened.

I have been so obsessed with stability that I have made my life smaller than it needed to be. I check my account far more than any reasonable person should. I have said no to things I could have afforded because of a fear that lives in the middle of the month, the one that whispers there might not be enough for groceries in three weeks' time, even in the months when there always is even now that I’ve got a credit card that I know I’ll pay off at the end of the month.

The fear doesn't do maths. It just talks.

And the sentence I reach for when the fear talks is the one my twins hear.

I want to be fair to myself here, because I know what that frugality has brought me. It’s meant I’ve been able to provide a roof over the twins’ heads, feed them and pay for childcare each month. As a single mum with zero financial help from their father.  It’s kept us steady through very tough times and it is the reason we’ve had any stability at all. It’s worked. I just didn't notice the moment it stopped being a strategy and quietly became a reflex. And the constant fear and worry that comes with it, of not being able to afford things if I lose my job or get sick or if anything at all happens, that fear still eats me up at night.

It turns out this has a name…

I assumed for a long time that this was a personal failing with a personal explanation. It isn't. There is a whole field of research on it and I only found it because I went looking.

The broad term is financial trauma, and it describes a lasting psychological and physical response to distressing money experiences, whether that's one sudden catastrophe or a long stretch of instability.

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It isn't a formal diagnosis in the way that depression or PTSD are, but the symptoms are recognised clinically, and the distinction that matters is this; ordinary financial stress responds to the situation in front of you. Financial trauma is your nervous system responding to the situation behind you, and it keeps sounding the alarm long after your bank balance says you are safe.

The more precise idea comes from Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist who has spent decades studying what he calls ‘money scripts’. These are the beliefs about money we absorb in childhood, usually without ever putting them into words, and which quietly run the show in adulthood. His research identified four of them: money avoidance, money worship, money status, and money vigilance.

I had to read the description of money vigilance twice. It covers frugality, secrecy around money, and anxiety about it. It is, more or less, a research paper describing my entire adult financial personality…

Klontz found that these scripts harden most when they form around what he terms a financial flashpoint, meaning an emotionally charged or frightening money moment. That is precisely why they resist ordinary advice. A belief formed in fear does not respond to a spreadsheet.

There is a well known Cambridge University study, funded by the old Money Advice Service, that is usually reported as showing our money habits are set by the age of seven. The headline is stronger than the paper though. What the research actually found was that by around seven, most children have developed the basic concepts underpinning later financial behaviour, including recognising the value of money, understanding that it is exchanged for things, planning ahead and delaying a decision. The researchers' point was that the habits of mind children bring to complex decisions form very early, which is a softer claim than "your fate was sealed in Year Two" and, I think, a more useful one.

There is also good research explaining why the fear doesn't do maths. Work by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir on scarcity found that the experience of not having enough consumes what they call mental bandwidth, and it measurably impairs decision making while it's happening. In one famous finding, sugar cane farmers in India performed worse on cognitive tests before harvest, when money was tight, than they did after they'd been paid. Same people, same tests, different amount of money in their pocket. Scarcity isn't only a bank balance. It's a cognitive state.

And it isn't rare here. Barclays research published this year found that half of Britons consider money a taboo subject, and that fifty-nine percent of UK adults say their childhood experiences with money directly shaped the financial habits they have now.

Fifty-nine percent. So if you're reading this with a slightly tight chest, there are a great many of us.

The thing that really made me think..

I was listening to Sharran Srivatsaa talk about money and children, and the idea that stuck with me was this: In his house, the answer to a child wanting something isn't no. It's yes, if.

Yes, if you can do something for this amount of time. Yes, if you're willing to do something towards it.

It’s something that made me feel straight away what was wrong with my version. "We can't afford it" is a closed door. It teaches a child that money is a fixed amount that either exists or doesn't, that wanting something is faintly shameful, and that the only sensible response to not having enough is to stop wanting. Which is precisely what I learned as a child.

What I didn't expect was to find that Klontz says the same thing, and rather bluntly. He advises parents to drop that phrase and explain the choice instead, along the lines of we could do that, but we're choosing to put our money here, and here's why. His point is that "we can't afford it" often isn't even true. Most of the time the thing could technically be bought by taking on debt, working extra hours or dipping into savings, and the family is choosing not to. Saying so teaches children that money decisions are about priorities rather than about personal failure.

Ramit Sethi has made a similar observation from interviewing hundreds of couples. He kept meeting people who were financially secure and still couldn't bring themselves to spend reasonably, and traced it back to hearing that phrase constantly as children. They believed it. Thirty years and a good salary later, they still felt broke.

The reframe doesn't mean saying yes to everything. What it changes is the question itself. Not can we afford this, but how could we afford this. What would it take, and what are you willing to do towards it.

One version ends the conversation. The other one starts an entirely different education.

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Where I actually am with it

I would love to write the part now where I tell you I've fixed it. I haven't. I said it again today, in Lidl over something that cost less than a block of cheese.

What has changed is that I hear myself say it now, which I didn't before. Sometimes I catch it in the moment and turn it into a goal to work towards instead. Like today, one of the twins wanted the more expensive ice cream than I would have chosen and initially I resisted and tried redirecting his attention to the cheaper one. But then I caught myself and said, “yes, you can have it if you behave well for the rest of the time we’re in the shop”. I guess this showed him that it’s not impossible. He just has to work towards it. And he did. Sometimes I catch it three hours later in the car and feel a bit rubbish about it. Both of those are further along than I was a year ago, when I couldn't hear it at all.

I have also stopped thinking of myself as someone who is bad with money, because that was never the problem. I know the numbers. I have always known the numbers. What I have is a nervous system that learned something very early and has been running that same programme ever since, and no amount of budgeting advice was ever going to reach it. That is the part nobody mentions about financial literacy. You can know the facts perfectly well and still flinch.

So I am learning the facts anyway, one at a time. I’m learning how to build a more secure and stable financial future and I’m learning to let go of  scarcity and the  “we can’t afford it mindset”. Instead I’m asking how. How can we afford it? And I’m trying to hand my two a different sentence to inherit.

Yes, if. It's only two words, but they leave the door open and foster the “HOW?” mindset, so that our kids and their kids don’t inherit the financial trauma we did.

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Sources: Klontz, B. & Britt, S., "How Clients' Money Scripts Predict Their Financial Behaviors", Journal of Financial Planning (2012); Klontz et al., "Money Beliefs and Financial Behaviors: Development of the Klontz Money Script Inventory", Journal of Financial Therapy (2011); Klontz interviewed by CNBC (December 2025); Whitebread, D. & Bingham, S., "Habit Formation and Learning in Young Children", University of Cambridge for the Money Advice Service (2013); Mullainathan, S. & Shafir, E., "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much" (2013); Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir & Zhao, "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function", Science (2013); Barclays UK research on money and financial confidence (March 2026).

Also, nothing here is financial advice. It's my own learning, written down as I go. Take it as you wish to.

I noticed something about myself recently and I could not stop thinking about it.

I hate being told what to do. Not in a dramatic storming out of rooms way. But the moment someone tells me how something should be done, something in me digs its heels in. Even when I know the advice is good. Especially when I didn’t ask for it…

And here is the other thing I noticed. I really struggle with reselling other people's products now. Which is a bit ironic because I made my first $8K online purely reselling other people’s products. But now, in my body, there’s something that makes me resistant to it. Something that makes me hesitate. I want to sell my own things, in my voice, on my terms.

For ages I thought this quiet rebellion was just an “eldest daughter” quirk. I’m the eldest of 9 children, so I thought it came with the territory😂

But I’ve always been intrigued by the psychology behind it, and I truly believe that understanding it will help me to understand my whole business better. So today I want to walk you through it, because I have a feeling a lot of you are wired exactly the same way.

The science behind this

There is a well established theory in psychology called the self-determination theory. It says humans have three core needs that drive our motivation. Competence, which is feeling capable. Connection, which is feeling like we belong. And autonomy, which is feeling like our choices are actually ours.

Everyone has all three. But we do not all have them in the same amounts. Some people are perfectly happy following a system someone else built, and honestly, good for them, it is a peaceful way to live. Others have an autonomy need turned up so loud that any threat to it feels almost physical.

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There is even a name for that bristling feeling when someone tells you what to do. It is called psychological reactance. It is the instinctive pushback we feel when we sense our freedom of choice being squeezed. Reactance does not check whether the instruction is good or bad first. It just fires. That is why you can find yourself resisting advice you were literally looking for.

Sound familiar yet?

Why this explains the affiliate thing too

If your autonomy need runs hot, reselling someone else's product is never going to feel right, no matter how good the commission is.

Because when you promote someone else's offer, you are building on their foundation. Their voice. Their positioning. Their price. Their ceiling. You can dress it up in your own captions but underneath it, the thing itself is not yours. And for people like us, ownership is not “a nice to have”. It is the whole point.

This is why I will always be a “create your own products” girl at heart. My little guides and tools are not just income streams. They are proof that the thing I built from twenty minute pockets between shifts and toddler chaos belongs entirely to me.

When this trait is genuinely your superpower

Let me be really clear about something. This wiring is probably the reason you have built anything at all.

The people who start businesses around full time jobs and small children are not usually the compliant ones. They are the ones who looked at the standard path, the one that says work your shifts, be grateful, retire tired, and thought, no thank you, I will make my own.

Your rebellious streak serves you when:

• It pushes you to create instead of consume: Most people buy courses and never act. You act, because following someone else's plan forever feels unbearable to you.

• It gives your brand an actual point of view: Audiences do not follow beige. They follow people who think something. Your resistance to the status quo is where your best content comes from.

• It protects you from bad advice: Not every guru is right. Your instinct to question things is a filter a lot of people wish they had.

• It makes you build assets you own: Your products, your email list, your voice. The things nobody can take away or algorithm you out of.

When this trait quietly costs you

And now the part I need you to hear, because I am saying it to myself as much as to you.

Reactance does not distinguish between bad instructions and good ones. It just resists. Which means the same trait that made you start can also slow you down. Watch for these:

• Rejecting proven mechanics because someone else found them first: If a hook format works, it works. Refusing to use it because it feels like being told what to do is not independence, it is expensive stubbornness.

• Reinventing wheels that did not need reinventing:Sometimes the template exists because a hundred people already made the mistakes for you. Taking the shortcut is not surrender.

• Hearing feedback as control: Someone pointing out a weakness in your sales page is not bossing you around. But reactance can make it feel that way, and then you defend the weakness instead of fixing it.

• Confusing different with better: Doing it your way is only a win if your way actually performs. The market does not give points for originality on its own.

The question that changed how I use this trait

I stopped asking myself why I am like this. There is no fixing it and honestly I would not want to. Instead I ask one question whenever I feel that familiar bristle:

Is this resistance serving me right now, or is it just firing?

Resisting a genuinely bad convention, serving me. Resisting a proven strategy purely because someone else discovered it, just firing.

That one question lets me keep the fire without letting it burn the house down. I still build my own products. I still trust my own voice. But when the data says a format works, I use the format, and I save my rebellion for the things that actually matter.

If you recognised yourself in this

Then you are probably exactly the kind of person who should be building something of your own. Not reselling. Not renting someone else's system. Creating.

Your need for autonomy is not a flaw to manage. It is a compass. It has been pointing you towards ownership this whole time. The only skill you need to add is knowing when to follow it and when to gently tell it, not this one, this one is fine.

That is the difference between a rebel and a builder. And you are a builder.

If this resonated with you, hit the subscribe button. I’ll be creating more similar articles going forward as I go on the journey of self discovery and building a better, more financially secure future for myself and my family. I’d absolutely love to have you here!

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And tell me about you! Are you a “create your own products” person or does affiliate feel fine to you? What are you building? Let me know in the comments.

I created most of my main product in the forty minutes after my twins went to bed, usually with a cup of tea I never finished and a pile of laundry I was actively ignoring.

I work full time in healthcare, sometimes twelve hour shifts, and I'm raising toddler twins on my own.

By every rule of the productivity world I should have produced absolutely nothing, and yet in the space of a few months I built a five figure online business.

Everything I know about productivity was learned under pressure, after hours of a genuinely full life.

Most productivity advice is written by people with empty calendars, and you can tell, because it assumes you have mornings to protect and hours to block out.

Here's a statistic that should make you feel better about yourself immediately: research shows the average worker is only productive for about two hours and fifty three minutes a day.

Not eight! Which means the game was never about having more hours, it was always about what happens inside the few that count, and that is a game a busy woman can absolutely win.

These are the seven lessons that got me there, and I'd read them in order, because each one builds on the last.

Lesson 1: Make your decisions when you're fresh, and execute them when you're tired

Every decision you make throughout the day draws from the same limited pool of mental energy, which researchers call decision fatigue, and by evening that pool is nearly empty. The reason you sit down at 9pm to work on your business and end up scrolling instead isn't laziness, it's that you're asking a drained brain to do the most expensive thing a brain can do, which is decide.

There's a hundred year old technique for this called the Ivy Lee method, and it's still taught today because it works. At the end of each day, you write down the most important things you'll do tomorrow, in order, before you finish.

I use a stripped down version of it: one single priority, written on my phone before bed, phrased so specifically that there's nothing left to figure out, so never "work on content" but "write the caption for Thursday's carousel."

Psychologists call this an implementation intention, and studies show it dramatically increases follow through, because when your pocket of time arrives, you're not negotiating with yourself, you're executing a decision that was made when your head was clear.

Step by step: tonight, before you sleep, write tomorrow's one priority in your phone. Make it small enough to complete in the time you realistically have. Tomorrow, when your window opens, do that thing before anything else, including your notifications. Repeat daily until it's automatic.

Lesson 2: Eat the frog in your very first pocket of time

Brian Tracy built an entire productivity philosophy around a line often credited to Mark Twain, that if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, nothing worse will happen to you all day. Your frog is the hardest, most important task on your list, and the science behind doing it first is simple: willpower is highest early and declines through the day, so the task that needs the most of it should get the freshest supply.

For a busy mum the principle needs translating, because "first thing in the morning" might not exist for you in any calm form. So here's my version: your frog goes in your first genuine pocket of the day, whenever that falls. Mine is usually the twenty minutes before the twins wake, and I've learned to spend it on the thing I'm most tempted to avoid, which is nearly always the thing that matters most.

The follow up message I'm nervous about.

The offer I keep polishing instead of posting.

The Substack article I’ve been avoiding posting for days.

Avoidance is expensive, because a dreaded task doesn't just cost you the time it takes, it costs you the mental load of carrying it around all day, and putting it down first is like taking a weight out of your handbag every morning.

Step by step: when you write tomorrow's one priority tonight, deliberately choose the task you flinch at slightly. That flinch is information. Do it in your first available pocket, and notice how much lighter every hour afterwards feels.

Lesson 3: Shrink the container, because your lack of time is secretly an advantage

Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the time available for it, and every busy woman has lived the reverse without realising what it was. Give me a whole free Saturday and I will tinker, second guess myself, rewrite the same caption nine times and post nothing. Give me twenty minutes before a shift and the thing gets finished and published, because there is simply no room for perfectionism inside a small container.

Productivity researchers call the deliberate version of this timeboxing, where instead of working on something until it's done, you give it a fixed end time and treat the deadline as the tool.

It's considered one of the most effective techniques there is precisely because it weaponises Parkinson's law instead of falling victim to it.

This is why I've stopped apologising for building my business in fragments. The fragments are the reason it works. Constraints force you to identify what actually matters and drop everything that doesn't, which is a skill people with unlimited time never develop, and it's why so many of them are busy without being productive.

Step by step: stop waiting for big blocks of time, because they're not coming and you don't need them. Give every task a deliberately tight box, roughly half what feels comfortable. Set a timer for twenty minutes, name the one thing you're finishing inside it, and stop when it rings. Twenty honest minutes will regularly outproduce two distracted hours.

Lesson 4: Protect your focus like it costs money, because it does

This is the lesson with the most startling research behind it. Studies from the University of California, Irvine found that after an interruption it takes around twenty three minutes to fully return to the task you were doing.

Now put that next to the reality of building a business in twenty minute pockets. One glance at a notification doesn't cost you a few seconds, it can cost you your entire session, because the refocusing time is longer than the pocket itself.

Multitasking is just as bad, with research showing it can reduce productivity by up to forty percent, because every switch forces your brain to reload the context from scratch.

This is how my 20 minutes changed completely. Phone notifications off, focusing on the one task I’ve set myself until I’ve completed it. It felt almost silly at first, being so precious about such a small window, but that window is the business, and guarding it is the least silly thing I do.

Deep focus for twenty minutes beats shallow attention for two hours, and it isn't close.

Step by step: before every work pocket, put your phone in another room or in a drawer, close everything except the one thing you're working on, and tell yourself what the session is for out loud if you have to. Treat interruptions as the genuine expense the research says they are.

Lesson 5: Manage your energy by type, not your time by hour

This lesson took me embarrassingly long to learn. I used to try to write fresh content at 9pm after twelve hours on my feet, then wonder why everything I made felt flat and everything I felt was worse.

The problem was that I was not at my peak creativity level. Energy comes in types, and creative energy, decision energy and execution energy drain at completely different rates and refill on different schedules.

Productivity researchers call the practice energy mapping, where you track your natural highs and lows for a few days and then schedule your most demanding work into your genuine peak windows.

My simple version is two piles. Thinking work is anything requiring judgement or creativity, so writing hooks, planning offers, deciding strategy, and it gets my freshest pocket, usually early morning.

Doing work is anything my hands can manage without much brain, so scheduling, formatting, replying to simple messages, and it gets the flat, fried evening hours, because it needs my hands but not my judgement.

Same twenty four hours as before, completely different output, and the difference was never discipline, it was placement.

Step by step: for the next three days, jot a quick note of when you feel sharpest and when you feel foggy. Then sort your business tasks into thinking and doing, protect your sharpest window for thinking work only, and never again judge your ability by what your brain produces at 10pm.

Lesson 6: Stack your habits and sweep the small stuff immediately

The habits that survive a chaotic life are the ones attached to things you already do. James Clear popularised this as habit stacking, with a formula so simple it feels like cheating: after I do my current habit, I will do my new habit. The genius is that you're borrowing a neural pathway that already exists instead of building one from scratch, which matters enormously when your days are unpredictable, because the anchor habit happens no matter what kind of day you're having.

My business runs on these stacks. After I wake up and go to the bathroom, I check what my one priority is.

After the twins go to sleep, I grab my phone to post a carousel and respond to DMs because the order of those two events decides the entire evening.

Pair this with David Allen's two minute rule, which says if a task takes less than two minutes, do it immediately rather than adding it to a list, because the cost of tracking a tiny task is often higher than the cost of just doing it.

Replying to a comment, saving a content idea, sending the link someone asked for. Handled in the moment, these keep your head clear.

Postponed, they pile into a backlog that greets you at 9pm like a second job.

Step by step: pick one business habit you keep dropping and bolt it to something you already do daily, using the exact "after I, I will" phrasing. Then, whenever a sub-two-minute task appears, do it on the spot instead of storing it.

Lesson 7: Apply the 80/20 rule ruthlessly, and measure what actually counts

The Pareto principle says roughly eighty percent of your results come from twenty percent of your efforts, and in an online business this is not a cute theory, it is brutally visible once you look.

A handful of my posts drive most of my growth. A small number of genuine conversations drive most of my sales.

Which means the productivity question is never "how do I do more," it's "which twenty percent is doing the work, and how do I protect it," and when your time is measured in minutes, that question is the whole job.

This is also about scoreboards, because whatever you measure is what you'll optimise, and hours worked is a vanity metric.

I know women who spend twenty hours a week on their business and make nothing, because the hours are going into motion rather than progress.

I track two things only. What did I actually finish and put into the world this week, and how many genuine conversations did I have with real people in my audience.

Posts shipped and conversations started are the two numbers that reliably turn into money, and the beautiful thing is they're completely achievable in fragments, which means a busy mum on twenty minutes a day can genuinely outscore someone with a free schedule.

She usually does, because she's counting what counts.

Step by step: look back at your last month and identify which posts and actions actually produced results, then deliberately do more of that and quietly drop the rest. At the end of each week, write down what you shipped and how many real conversations you had, ignore hours entirely, and trust those two numbers over your feelings, because feelings lie about productivity constantly.

The honest bit before you go

I still lose the odd evening to my phone, and none of this makes you superhuman. What it does is make ordinary, tired, interrupted days count for something, and it turns out that ordinary days, compounded over months, are the entire game.

Everything you’ve just read here is a piece of the framework I eventually wrote down properly, in order, the content system and the step by step of how it all connects into actual sales.

It became The After Hours Success Code, my blueprint to building an online business as a busy mum with no business degree or prior business knowledge. It exists specifically for people building something real after hours of an already full life, because that's exactly where it was built.

If that's you, you can find it here:

The After Hours Success Code

And if you're not ready, take Lesson 1 with you tonight anyway : one priority, written down before bed. It costs nothing and it's where all of this started for me 💕

Not for sympathy, just because I think it helps all of us to see the real version of what building a life and a business actually looks like.

1️⃣ The first thing I failed at was being there

The twins were ill with chicken pox this week. I was at home with them for most of it, but I had to go in for a shift at my healthcare job on the last day, and it broke my heart a little bit.

It made me feel like a bad mum, because I want to be there for them all the time, and especially when they're sick or need me.

If I'm honest, that exact feeling is one of the main things that drives me to make this business work. I want a life where I don't have to choose. I want options.

2️⃣ The second thing I failed at was believing in myself.

I got really insecure about my business and about building online.

The truth is, I'd love to be so much further along than I am right now.

I want to be having 5, 6 even 7 figure months. And right now I feel a bit lost about how to get there.

So I fell straight into the comparison trap, looking at everyone else and quietly wondering if I'd taken on too much, and whether I can actually make this my online business work while juggling life as a single mama or twins and working full time in healthcare.

And then something small shifted it. A beautiful message landed in my inbox, someone who said they’d been watching me for a while and I was an inspiration to them. And that reminded me that people see me completely differently to how I see myself.

I don't think we say that enough, how much a single kind message can pull someone back from feeling defeated.

3️⃣ The third thing I failed at was letting myself rest.

I got a takeout while the twins were asleep, and then felt genuinely guilty about it.

I have such big goals for what I want to give them and the rest of my family, that it feels like every single penny I earn should go straight back into building that future.

But I'm slowly learning that sometimes it's okay to treat myself. That looking after the person doing all the building matters too.

It hasn't all been doom and gloom, though, and I don't want to come across that way.

I'm beyond grateful to God for my family, for our health, for a roof over our heads, and for the opportunities I've been given that so many people never get.

But in a world where everyone mostly shares their wins and their highlights, I think it's genuinely helpful to see the struggles too. Nobody is perfect. The goal was never perfect. The goal is just to keep working on becoming the best versions of ourselves, one honest week at a time🩷

Numbers like that deserve a moment of proper, jaw on the floor respect, so let's give it. What she built is brilliant, and from everything I've seen she's done it with warmth, generosity and a complete absence of the slimy energy that usually comes attached to launches this size. She seems lovely, the thing she's teaching is genuinely valuable, and she has changed her family's life by being brave enough to talk to a camera when she had every reason to feel cringe. I am completely here for it.

But I've watched my whole feed fill up over the last fortnight with people deciding that the takeaway is "I should start yapping too," and I want to gently offer a different way of looking at this. Because I think the real lesson of Jessi Jean is almost the opposite of the one most people are about to learn.

First, let me pull out what she actually got right, because there's gold in here.

Lesson one: she made people feel seen long before she asked them for anything 🎉

People did not buy because Jessi launched. They bought because she had spent months making them feel understood. She never positioned herself as the guru on the pedestal who had it all figured out. She became the case study, the woman a few steps ahead who was working it out in public, and her audience saw themselves in her story. By the time she made an offer, thousands of people already felt like she got them. That trust was the groundwork, and it was quietly laid weeks and months before there was anything to sell.

Lesson two: she sold a moment, not a PDF 🎉

This is the bit I find really clever. Jessi didn't drop a course onto a sales page and leave it to gather dust. She ran a challenge, with a hard start date, a group all beginning together, and doors that closed. That single decision changes everything about how it feels. A course is a thing you buy and feel mildly guilty about never opening. A challenge is an event, with urgency and a countdown and that irresistible "everyone is doing this, get in before it shuts" pull. Better still, it ran on a public hashtag, which meant every single person who paid was posting their own videos, tagged, into the same algorithm, during the exact window the thing was being sold. Her buyers became her marketing. You can build that kind of momentum at any audience size, and most people never even think to try.

Lesson three: she was the living proof of the thing she was selling 🎉

She was selling people how to talk to a camera and grow fast, and her entire existence was the demonstration. Zero to 400,000 in five months was the curriculum. Every video she posted to sell the challenge was itself a live performance of the exact skill she was charging you to learn, so there was no gap at all between the claim and the evidence. You didn't have to take her word for it, you watched her do it in the very same reel where she pitched it. And she launched right at the peak of her growth, when the algorithm was actively shoving her in front of brand new people, rather than politely waiting until the moment had passed. She moved when the demand was already there.

So that's the praise, and I mean every word of it.

Now here's the part nobody wants to say at the party

The reason it worked was never "yapping." Yapping was the vehicle, not the engine. The engine was that she did something relatively fresh, with perfect congruence, at exactly the right moment, when almost nobody else was doing it in that particular way. She zigged when the lane was completely empty.

The lane is not empty anymore.

Within weeks, every coach, creator and their nan is either yapping or quietly building their own version of a challenge. And here is the uncomfortable maths of that. When everyone copies the winning move, the move stops winning, because the one ingredient that made it work in the first place is the single thing that cannot be copied. You can copy her format. You can copy her doors closing and her public hashtag and her casual talk to camera style. What you genuinely cannot copy is the fact that she was first. The ten thousandth yap challenge does not feel like a movement. It feels like a queue.

So when a busy mum watching all this decides "okay, I'll start yapping then," she is, with all the love in the world, about to run straight towards the thing precisely as it becomes crowded. She'll be competing on Jessi's turf, in Jessi's format, against forty thousand other people, most of whom started before her. That is the hardest possible place to win.

The real lesson is not "zig." It's "zag."

The opportunity was never to do exactly what Jessi did. It was to do the thing underneath what Jessi did, which is to look honestly at where everybody is about to crowd, and then deliberately walk the other way. Find the format nobody has tried yet. The angle that makes someone stop mid scroll and think "oh, I've genuinely not seen that before." Originality is the moat. Being early to your own idea will always beat being late to someone else's, no matter how shiny that someone else's idea looks right now.

And you do not need a huge following to pull it off, because Jessi has just proved that beyond all doubt. What you need is the nerve to back an idea before a million other people have validated it for you. That is harder, of course it is, because in the beginning there's no proof and no crowd around you for reassurance. But that is exactly why it pays. The crowd is reassurance, and reassurance is very often the opposite of opportunity.

So yap if you genuinely love yapping and it's truly you, because authenticity always travels. But if you're only reaching for it because she did it and it worked, pause for a second and ask the better question.

Not "how do I copy the thing that just worked," but "what is the next thing that hasn't been done yet, and could I be the one brave enough to do it first."

That question is where the next two million dollar day is hiding.

It was never in the queue behind her 🩷💕🌸

The version sitting on the sofa after everyone has gone to bed.

The version reheating a cup of tea for the third time.

The version scrolling through other people's success stories while wondering if what you're building will ever work.

The version squeezing a dream into the tiny pockets of time left over after you've spent the entire day taking care of everyone else.

I see her.

Because I think I’m her too.

There are days when building a business online feels exciting.

And then there are days when it feels impossible.

Days when you're exhausted before you've even started.

Days when you wonder if you're wasting your time.

Days when you post something you're proud of and hear nothing but silence.

Days when you question whether you’re experienced enough, smart enough, or consistent enough.

Days when quitting feels easier than continuing.

But most people only see the result.

They don't see the woman building after bedtime.

They don't see the early mornings.

The late nights.

The weekends spent learning, on your phone. Guilty that you should be a more present parent.

The notes scribbled at 12am when you should be asleep.

The content created while dinner is cooking.

The dreams being built in twenty minute pockets of time.

They don't see the hundreds of ordinary moments that slowly become something extraordinary.

And that's why so many women underestimate how far they've already come.

Because growth rarely feels dramatic when you're living through it.

It feels repetitive.

It feels slow.

It feels invisible.

Until one day it doesn't.

One day you look back and realise the woman who almost quit became the woman who didn't.

The woman who doubted herself became the woman who trusted herself.

The woman who felt stuck became the woman helping others move forward.

Because she kept showing up.

Again.

And again.

And again.

So if you're reading this after bedtime, wondering whether it's worth continuing, this is your reminder:

You do not need to have everything figured out.

You do not need to know exactly how the story ends.

You do not need proof that it will work before you take the next step.

You only need enough courage to keep going today.

And see what tomorrow brings.

And one day, the life you're working so hard to build, will be built from all these small moments nobody else saw.

Keep going.

The woman you're becoming is already on her way

✨🌸