Let’s talk about freaking money (#2)
A tactic to help you know when to stop pushing and panicking
A couple of weeks ago I kicked off an editorial series about money, in which I will share about how to earn money, manage financial panic, wrestle with scarcity fear, etc., with nitty gritty details and tactics, not just vague aspirational directives. Welcome to installment #2! As a reminder, my lens is not that of a financial expert. Instead, I am an everyday person and independent businesswoman with deep historical financial baggage, and in nearly two decades as an entrepreneur I have learned a lot and implemented concrete tactics to face my financial fears and find emotional relief.
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As I described in my first post, my financial history instilled in me a scarcity/doom mindset—for example, the fear that I’m just one day away from homelessness, even when my finances are stable. A major problem with carrying this scarcity/doom mindset as an independent businessperson is that it’s hard to know when to stop pushing and panicking. There is no clock to signal that it’s time to punch out, no manager or HR figure to step in and say, “Hey, you’ve been working here 10 years and have never taken a sick or personal day.”
This means that the boundaries are up to you.
When I first left academia and started figuring out how to build a new career, I followed typical working hours, mostly because my work was reasonable to fit the time. But when things started to ramp up via consulting work and other elements in my financial breadbasket, I started working at night. A lot. It’s worth noting that very early on, my friend/colleague Morra Aarons-Mele gave me one of my favorite pieces of client boundary advice. She wanted us to send all of our client communications during regular business hours, both to establish our own boundaries and model to clients that we could do great work without the whole, we’re-at-your-service-24/7 posturing nonsense.
I loved this. And while I did adhere to her email boundaries advice, and have maintained it since, as I started to experience growth in different domains, I felt like I needed to catch up in the evening, or use that time to get ahead or hatch new plans. Because of my scarcity/doom fears, I felt like I needed to keep fueling the fire in the evenings because otherwise the fire would surely burn out.
So I worked most nights. Weekends too. And it was a disaster for my most immediate and treasured relationships.
After some very painful personal work, I finally came to the realization that I did not want to be a person who worked around the clock. I did not want to be a person who was always thinking about something productive I should be doing while with my beloved husband and kids. I have seen that story repeatedly and the ending always sucks.
The first thing I did was put a stake in the ground and commit to ending my work day at a more typical hour—some time between 5-6pm, depending on kid pickups. Jon and I also developed a cadence where I would help with phase #1 of the morning routine with the kids, then he would take over at 7am so I could start working. (Yes, this is still a longer than typical work day, but progress takes time.) With concrete hours established, I then worked on developing and implementing processes to become a freaking ninja during the hours of 7am to 5-6pm. I leveraged my project planning skills and freakish ability to focus and project switch on repeat so that every minute of my day was productive. I am not exaggerating. In addition to consulting, I was also running anywhere from 4 to 6 businesses/projects that all required daily attention. If you think about all of the time people do normal things such as chat at the water cooler, grab lunch, dick around on social media, or plan their next vacation during work hours, I was actually not doing any of these things. I took productivity to a new level—my colleagues often said that one Christine Koh hour was not the same as anyone else’s hour. While this was great for my work, it still wasn’t ideal. I would get to the end of the workday and feel like a complete zombie. But at least I could then stagger out of my office and begin the process of unwinding with my family the rest of the night.
I spent about a decade in this mode: not working nights but working hyper-efficiently during the day. And while it was definitely an improvement in terms of my family balance, that intensity was driven by the pressure of financial scarcity fear, and a nagging feeling that I should—and could—be doing more in my working minutes.
And then a game-changing conversation last year, February 2024, led me to develop a tactic to help me square up with reality and see when I could, in fact, stop pushing and panicking. I was finally able to build in breathing room and not work with such fierce, desperate urgency all the time.