If you’re self-employed, you’ll know the feeling.
School holidays arrive and, however much you love your kids, there’s a background hum of dread about what’s going to happen to your work for the next six weeks.
This summer is the first time I’ve genuinely felt OK about it. More than OK, actually. Which is a new feeling, and a welcome one.
(The girls are also done with primary school entirely this year, so that’s a whole other thing!)
Why school holidays used to derail everything
I’ve been doing this juggle long enough to know how summers usually pan out:
- Six(ish) weeks of trying to work AND be present every day
- Half-finished tasks
- The constant background noise of things that haven’t moved forward
Feeling stressed because there’s work to be done, but the kids need to be entertained, and the lack of routine means my anxiety spikes in new and unfun ways.
I’d tell myself it was fine. That having an enforced break is good, and yes, having breaks IS good.
But when you’re not really switching off, because you can almost tangibly feel the weight of everything piling up that needs to be done (and you know how long it all takes)… well, it becomes pretty stressful, instead of being relaxing.
What’s different this summer
This year feels different. It’s because AI is such a big part of my working processes that, even though I’ve got an almost full roster of clients, I know I can get my work done in the gaps. In a way that just hasn’t been possible before.
Over the last few months I’ve also been building a new working rhythm:
- One day a week for my own business, the rest for client delivery
- A clear split between working ON the business and working IN it
That distinction has meant all the things I’ve been wanting to get done, sometimes for years, are finally getting chipped away at.
Truthfully, it’s because I have an AI system that lets me pick up and drop projects at any point.
It has such a sophisticated memory that nothing gets lost.
And it’s so embedded in my business that it can do tasks in a fraction of the time I could do them myself, things like:
- Writing keyword-optimised blog posts
- Running audits on my website
- Helping me build a list of people to follow on Threads (and reminding me daily to do the engagement, with a one-click link in my inbox)
That’s just a small sample off the top of my head.
What working in small bursts actually looks like now
The summer holidays means my nice rhythm goes to pot, of course. I’m back to filling small gaps with frenetic bursts of activity.
But here’s the thing: it’s actually OK.
(One of my unexpected takeaways from using AI: context switching now works.)
What it looks like in practice is me going through my pinned conversations, one at a time, and getting my AI to work on the next step in each project.
In the space of 10 minutes I can:
- Get a client website page designed
- Get a new sign-in page written for another client’s funnel
- Make an existing skill more sophisticated
- Get my AI governance documents ready to upload to my website
That was literally yesterday morning, while everyone was in the house doing their own thing.
When they all went out for an hour, I used that time to give feedback on the website design, finalise the funnel page to send back to my client, and edit this post ready to publish it.
Previously? That was days of work. Easily.
The thing I didn’t expect is the mental health bit
The reduction in cognitive load has been massive.
I’m not trying to carry it all in my head.
As a thought comes to me, I add it into a new chat, and when I’ve got time to look at it properly, it’s there, waiting for me.
I used to carry everything around in my head, or at least try to.
So much stuff got lost.
And carrying all of that is exhausting, like a constant low-level hum. A weight that goes everywhere with you.
That weight is gone now. Or massively reduced, anyway.
This is the thing I wasn’t expecting when I started building my AI system – the mental health benefits.
I knew it would make me more productive.
I didn’t fully predict that it would make switching off feel like actual rest, because I CAN switch off now.
I’m not low-level panicking that it won’t all get done.
Getting more done in an hour than I used to get done in a day means I can run the girls around to whatever they want to do, guilt-free, without a running list in the back of my head.
Be honest with yourself.
How much of your time off actually functions as time off?
When the version of rest you get during the holidays is mostly just… slower anxiety?
If you’re heading into summer without an AI system yet, and the thought of six weeks of slipping momentum is already sitting somewhere in the back of your mind: that’s exactly what AI HQ is for.