The week I planned and the week I had

I meant to write this as a minute-by-minute diary of one week running QuickStaging. Then I went looking for the week and couldn't find it. There's no time log, no journal, no retro. What there is: a folder of plans, a commit log, and a gap between them.

The plans

This summer I wrote three marketing plans in a row, each smaller than the one before.

The first had me spending eight hours a week to send 500 messages to real estate photographers. It stopped after two days.

The second cut that to two hours a week and 100 messages. Three weeks later, the log showed zero messages sent.

The third had a two-hour weekly routine: check the numbers, send a batch, follow up. I never ran it once.

The commit log

Over the same 23 days where I sent zero messages, I made 55 commits.

That's not unusual for me. QuickStaging has had commits every single month since February: 161 in the first month, never fewer than 47 since. Code is the part of the job I never have to talk myself into.

When I finally wrote down why, it was one sentence: every task that needs talking to strangers stalls at "draft ready", and every task that needs code gets finished.

Being honest about time

The next plan started with a sentence I wrote to myself: I can give four or five hours, but honestly, I'm going to get bored after a few days.

It sounds like giving up. It turned out to be the most useful line in the whole plan, because it changed what the plan was allowed to contain. If I'm going to get bored of any routine, the plan can't depend on a routine. So:

• No weekly manual check. A script emails me a snapshot of the numbers every Monday at 8 a.m. If I ignore it, nothing breaks.
• One-off blocks instead of habits. Something I can finish in one sitting while I'm interested, not something I have to keep doing.
• Code where code can do the job. The outreach script picks leads, prepares a personal demo for each, and caps itself at 20 first emails a day. My part is to approve each demo.

What a week actually looks like

Without a diary, the honest answer comes from the log. A typical week is mostly building: a fix that came out of a customer complaint, a pricing change, an SEO cleanup. Then one small thing outside my comfort zone, done as a block instead of a routine. Then a Monday email I read with coffee.

It's not the week a growth handbook would plan. But it's the one I actually keep.

If you're running something alone

Write down the plan you'd give a disciplined stranger, then write down what you did last week. If they don't match, the second one is the real job description. Plan around it.