The internet is full of books, courses, templates, apps, and now AI tools promising to help you “10x your productivity” and get more done. You can build an elaborate Notion dashboard, color-code your calendar, automate your task list, and have AI plan your entire week. None of it helps very much if you are getting extremely efficient at doing work that should not be taking up your time in the first place.

You can be incredibly organized and still get very little return on your time. You can finish twenty things in a day and have almost nothing meaningful to show for it. You can even become more productive and accidentally create more capacity for work you never needed to be doing.

That is why I think most time-management advice starts in the wrong place. The first question should not be, How do I get more done? It should be: Who owns your time?

What Are All Those Hours Building?

Because the problem usually isn’t that you can’t fit enough into the day. It’s that work has quietly expanded to take more of your life than you realize.

If you work eight hours a day, work already takes roughly half of your waking hours. And that’s assuming it actually stops at eight. It doesn’t include checking email after dinner, thinking about a client while you’re making coffee, commuting, preparing for tomorrow, Slack, DMs, admin, or the twenty-minute task that somehow ate ninety.

All of that counts.

So before you try to squeeze more productivity out of those hours, I think there is a much more useful question:

What are all of those hours actually building?

If your job disappeared tomorrow, what would still belong to you? If your biggest client walked away, what would remain? If you stopped working for a month, would everything stop earning too?

That’s where time management becomes an FU Money problem.

So I Wrote a Book About It

If this were an easy problem to solve, and I’d already found a system that solved it, I probably wouldn’t have written an entire book about it, would I?

I’ve read the big productivity and time-management books. I’ve tried the systems, the tools, the apps, the templates. And I still hadn’t found anything that really addressed the problem I kept running into: how do you decide what is actually worth doing when nobody else is structuring your time for you?

Nine years as a solopreneur — especially one with ADHD — and a mother of four forced me to completely rethink how I work.

When you have a 9-to-5, a lot of the structure is built for you. Someone decides when you work, where you work, what your priorities are, which meetings you attend, what deadlines you have, and usually what success looks like.

Once you work for yourself, all of that disappears.

Now you have to decide what to work on, when to work on it, what not to work on, how much time something deserves, when something is finished, and whether any of it is actually moving the business forward.

Add to that a family, a life outside of work, house to take care of, meals to cook, homework to help the kids with, and a spouse to spend quality time with, and time gets stretched real thin real fast.

After managing a team and consulting for a large part of the past nine years, I’ve seen the same problem over and over again. Time management is an issue. No one is sitting around wondering what they should do. They usually know.

Actually getting the right things done is the hard part.

So I wrote the book I couldn’t find.

Not a short one, either. 125 pages.

The Time Is Money System is my attempt to rethink productivity and time management for people who have to create the structure themselves — entrepreneurs, consultants, freelancers, and anyone building something outside a traditional job.

The Time Is Money System — Book 2 in the FU Money Plan series

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What’s Actually Inside the Book?

This is not a book about waking up at 5 a.m., taking a sauna and a cold plunge, drinking wheatgrass juice, and meditating before the rest of the world wakes up. If that’s your thing, fantastic.

This book is about what happens after you sit down to work.

It’s about figuring out what your time is actually worth — and then using it accordingly.

I start with the idea that time is capital. You only get so much of it, so the question isn’t simply whether you were productive today. It’s whether the hours you spent are building anything that makes your future easier, more profitable, or less dependent on your continued labor.

From there, I get very practical.

Inside the book, I walk through:

• the five jobs your work can have: Earn, Sell, Build, Operate, and Learn

• how to tell whether your work is actually compounding into income, assets, reputation, relationships, or future opportunities

• why making good money can still leave you completely dependent on your time

• how perfectionism, DIY syndrome, constant restarting, endless learning, and disguised busywork quietly eat enormous amounts of your life

• how to look at your work mix and decide whether your time is going where you actually want it to go

• why time, energy, and focus have to be managed together

• how to protect the parts of your life that work is not allowed to consume

• how to find your time leaks and decide what deserves space on your calendar

• when to delegate, automate, eliminate, or simply pay someone else

• how to start building revenue that can grow without requiring an equal increase in your hours

And at the end, you build your own FU Time Plan around the life, work, and income you’re actually trying to create.

Because the goal isn’t to become better at cramming more work into every available hour.

It’s to get much more deliberate about what gets your hours in the first place.

If You Want To Stop Feeling Behind or Stretched Thin, Get the Book

You do not need another productivity app.

You probably don’t need another prettier calendar, either.

You need to get much clearer about what deserves your time, what doesn’t, and what all those hours are actually building.

That’s what The Time Is Money System is for.

GET THE TIME IS MONEY SYSTEM

Paid FU Money Plan subscribers get $10 off.

Want to See the System First?

I originally created a 20-minute version of this training as a bonus for the founding FU Money Plan cohort.

It walks through some of the core ideas from the book, including the five jobs your work can have — Earn, Sell, Build, Operate, and Learn — and how I think about allocating time when nobody else is structuring the workday for you.

Paid subscribers can watch the full training below. 👇

Approx. 20 minutes

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Confession first: I can’t say I went from zero.

I opened this account last year and let it sit untouched.

So this isn’t a zero-to-hero story. It’s more of an “I finally showed up and started trying” story, which feels more useful anyway.

At the beginning of August, I had about 48 subscribers.

One month later:

204 subscribers
5,000+ views
4 paid subscribers

I spent roughly 20 hours on Substack and $131.

I didn’t go viral. I didn’t import a giant email list and call it organic growth. I didn’t join a follow-for-follow scheme.

I just started treating Substack like something I actually wanted to learn.

Here’s what happened.

The numbers, first

The subscriber growth is nice, obviously. But the number I’m paying the most attention to right now is the 5,000+ views.

I’ve seen publications with much larger subscriber counts getting fewer views, which tells me my work is getting seen well beyond the people already subscribed.

That’s what I want at this stage.

I’m much more interested in reaching the right people than collecting a big number of people who followed me for reasons that have nothing to do with what I write.

And I’m going to keep publishing these numbers every month, including the flat months and the months when something I tried completely bombs.

There’s something humbling about being new somewhere after you’ve already built an audience somewhere else.

You know enough to know what good looks like, but you’re still starting over.

A very quick history

This actually isn’t my first attempt at Substack.

The first time I showed up, I wrote a dry, slightly sarcastic field report after a short scouting trip. I was deep in my “serious Fractional CMO / GTM Revenue Architect phase” at the time, writing for a much more buttoned-up business audience.

My conclusion was basically: I don’t think this place is for me.

So I left.

Then I came back.

This time I wrote about Substack like a pilgrim heading into the Wild West: lots of opportunity, very little order, and no idea what I was walking into.

One month later, I’m still more backpacker than settler. I haven’t figured the place out, but at least I know where to catch a few fish.

What surprised me most

The social side.

Everyone talks about coming to Substack to escape social media, and I understand why.

There are no ads in the feed. My DMs are almost completely spam-free. Nobody is sending me a connection request and immediately asking if I need help generating qualified leads.

It reminds me of early organic Facebook, or LinkedIn before LinkedIn became whatever LinkedIn is now.

What I didn’t expect was how easy it would be to actually talk to people here.

There’s chat. There are DMs. You can message someone without going through the weird ceremony of explaining why you deserve to connect with them.

I genuinely look forward to opening my Substack inbox now, which is not a sentence I expected to write about any platform in 2026.

And the mix of people is interesting. I’m seeing writers, career people, tiny-business owners, longtime newsletter creators, people starting over, and a whole wave of Instagram creators moving into newsletters.

Every so often, someone I know from LinkedIn appears too.

It still feels early enough that people are actually talking to each other instead of simply broadcasting at each other.

I hope it stays that way.

Starting now, this becomes a monthly report, and this is where the free version stops.

Paid subscribers get the receipts: what I published, how much time and money I spent, what actually moved growth, what failed, the tactics I refused to use, and what I’m testing next.

Same sections every month, including the months when the numbers suck.

If you’re building here too, this is the part worth stealing.

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Before I started working for myself, I sat down and did some math.

I wanted roughly $20,000 a month in recurring gross revenue.

I wanted to keep business expenses under about 20%.

And I wanted to cap paid client work at roughly 20 hours a week.

I also wanted to stay solo. No employees. No big team of freelancers. Very little overhead.

The rest of my working time had another job: writing, experimenting, building an audience, and creating intellectual property and assets that belonged to me.

That was the business I was trying to build.

I had already helped build and run an eight-figure agency. I’d done the partners, employees, clients, management and overhead version of entrepreneurship. It was successful and rewarding in plenty of ways. It was also extremely stressful.

There’s a lot of business advice about buying back your time by delegating. Hire people. Outsource. Get yourself out of delivery.

I understand the logic. I’d already lived it.

What gets left out is that handing work to someone else doesn’t automatically hand you your time back. You still have to prepare the work, explain it, answer questions, review it, fix problems and manage the person doing it.

And once you have a team, your business gets hungrier.

You need enough revenue coming in to pay everyone. That can push you into taking projects, keeping clients or making decisions because the business needs feeding, even when those decisions aren’t particularly good for you.

I didn’t want to build another hungry business.

My expertise was the fastest thing I could turn into money. I already knew companies would pay well for it because I’d spent my career being paid for exactly that expertise.

So selling my time made sense.

I just didn’t want to sell all of it.

That’s how I ended up with the $20K target.

Why $20K?

Please don’t get too attached to my number.

I lived in San Francisco at the time. I had children. My expenses and expectations were mine.

Someone else might create exactly the life they want on $10K a month. Another person might look at $20K and wonder how anyone survives on it.

For me, it felt safe enough.

It was also less than half of what I had been earning at the agency before bonuses and revenue share.

So yes, I was taking a substantial pay cut.

I was completely fine with that.

At 38, maximizing my income had moved pretty far down my priority list. I wanted flexibility, independence and enough room in my week to build things I owned rather than spending all of my time servicing clients, managing employees or building someone else’s company.

I wanted enough income that I wouldn’t panic and take whatever client showed up.

Enough that I wouldn’t immediately go looking for another job.

Enough that I could give myself time to figure out what I wanted to build next.

At the time, I didn’t have a name for any of this.

Now I do.

I was building FU Money.

And one thing mattered almost as much as the amount: predictability.

I didn’t want a spectacular $30K month followed by a miserable $6K one.

I didn’t want to spend every month looking for the next project, client or launch because I needed cash.

I wanted a certain amount of money already coming in before the month started.

Eventually, I got that recurring baseline to roughly $20K a month while staying solo.

That’s what I now call my revenue floor.

One clarification because this drives me crazy when people talk about business numbers online: $20K was gross revenue.

There were payment-processing fees, software, other business expenses and taxes between that number and what I could actually spend.

Someone saying, “I had a $100K launch,” does not necessarily mean they made $100K.

They may have spent a fortune on ads, affiliates, contractors, software, refunds and everything else required to create that revenue.

Sometimes the impressive launch made excellent money.

Sometimes the profit was pretty ordinary.

Sometimes they lost money.

Funny how that part doesn’t always make the Instagram carousel.

So whenever I share numbers in FU Money Receipts, I’m going to tell you what they actually represent.

What FU Money Receipts is

There is already plenty of business advice on the internet.

I’m less interested in telling you what business you should start than showing you what actually happened when I built mine.

The things that worked extremely well. The ideas I thought were brilliant that flopped. The revenue streams that made good money but created work I hated. What I kept, what I killed and what I would build differently today.

I’ve been doing this long enough to have receipts for all of the above.

I’m writing this series for people sitting in jobs wondering what else they could do with their skills and experience, and for people already running businesses who sometimes wonder whether they want to keep running them this way.

If seeing the real numbers, workload, decisions and tradeoffs behind someone else’s experience helps you make a smarter decision about your own, good.

That’s what I want these articles to do.

And since we’re here, I should probably tell you who this publication is not for.

If you want someone to tell you how to quit your job tomorrow and make $1 million in the next 90 days, I am definitely not your person.

If you’re looking for a $97 Claude prompt that will apparently build your seven-figure funnel while you sleep, the internet has you extremely well covered.

I’m interested in the messier questions.

How much did it actually make?

How much time did it take?

What did it cost?

What did you give up to get it?

Did you even like the business once you built it?

Would you do it again?

Those are the questions I wish more people answered.

Which brings me back to my $20K revenue floor.

The route I took to build it was fairly winding. Some income streams were excellent for cash and terrible for my time. Some things described as “scalable” hid a ridiculous amount of work behind the scenes. A few revenue streams stayed with me for years. Others I eventually got rid of completely.

And if I were starting again today, I would build the mix differently.

Below the paywall, I’m breaking down how I built the service-business portion of that $20K floor:

• how I packaged the expertise I already had

• how I decided what to charge

• why I chose recurring retainers over more lucrative projects

• what it actually cost me to run the business

• the contract term that protected my monthly baseline

• and how I kept the whole thing small enough that I still had time to build something beyond client work

Annual subscribers also get my actual rate sheet and the detailed revenue breakdown behind the $20K monthly baseline.

Subscribe now

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