i don´t have time. or do i?

i get asked this question quite often: how do you do it? how do you work full-time, have two children, run an online shop and write a blog? the honest answer is: sometimes i wonder the same thing. and no, there isn't a secret extra hour hidden somewhere between midnight and 1 a.m. that only mothers and women with side businesses have access to. my husband actually built the foundation of the website over three weeks, working on it full-time. eight hours a day, locked in his office, figuring out all the things neither of us knew we were going to have to figure out. so when people look at the finished shop and imagine i somehow built the entire thing between school runs and making dinner, that's not quite how it happened. but even with that foundation in place, keeping an online shop and a blog alive is a ridiculous amount of work. there are products, designs, photos, descriptions, seo, social media, emails, ideas, more ideas, fixing things, changing things, learning things and occasionally staring at a screen wondering why something that should take ten minutes has somehow eaten an entire afternoon. at some point, i had to admit something to myself: if i wanted better results, and eventually better income, i couldn't keep giving the business the same amount of time and energy and expect everything to magically grow. apparently, businesses are annoyingly similar to most things in life. they require actual effort.

that thought also reminded me of a book i remember from growing up in the community. it used stories of women from the bible as examples of the women who had come before us. women who traded in spices, brought foreign goods into their communities, made and sold things with their own hands, fed their families and found ways to make things work with what they had. i remember finding that idea inspiring. not because i think we should all recreate biblical entrepreneurship in 2026, although i'm sure there is a niche market for handmade sandals somewhere. but because those women were not simply waiting for life to happen to them. they were doing things. making things. trading things. building something from whatever resources were available to them. and sometimes i think about that when i look at how we spend our time now. because we have something they never had: tiny computers in our pockets that can consume hours of our lives without us even noticing. i started wondering what would happen if we actually counted the minutes. how often do i open my favourite shop just to look? how many times do i check instagram for “just a second”? how many episodes disappear into an evening? how many minutes do i spend looking at clothes, houses, recipes, holidays, other people's lives? there is something deeply humbling about your phone telling you how many hours you've spent looking at other people's lives while wondering why you don't have enough time to build your own. i'm not saying every free minute should become productive. quite the opposite. sometimes watching television for an hour is exactly what you need. sometimes scrolling is mindless and harmless and sometimes you simply need to sit down and do absolutely nothing. rest is not a productivity failure. i had to learn that one the hard way too. there was a point where i started thinking about how much more i could accomplish if i just worked a little longer, answered one more thing, stayed up another hour. until my body made the decision for me. i learned that my fixed sleeping hours are not negotiable just because there is money to be made. no shop, no idea, no extra order and no amount of income is worth destroying your health for. health comes first. always. and that changed the way i think about productivity. i'm not interested in squeezing every possible minute out of my life anymore. i'm interested in knowing where those minutes actually go. because there is a difference between consciously choosing rest and accidentally spending three hours consuming things you didn't even care about. there is a difference between taking an evening off because you need it and losing an evening because you never decided what you wanted to do with it in the first place.

maybe that's what i've been trying to figure out. not how to become more productive, but how to become more intentional with the limited time i actually have. because i don't have unlimited hours. i have a full-time job. two children. a husband. a home. a business. a brain that occasionally needs to be switched off. a body that needs sleep. and a life that i actually want to live, not just optimise. sometimes that means working after the kids are in bed. sometimes it means writing instead of watching another episode. sometimes it means finally doing the thing i've been putting off. and sometimes it means closing the laptop at nine and going to bed because tomorrow still exists. i don't think the answer is to eliminate every distraction or turn every hobby into a side hustle. honestly, that sounds exhausting. maybe the more interesting question is simply this: if we knew exactly where our time was going, would we spend it differently? not because every minute needs to produce something. but because our time is still our time. and maybe there is more of it available to us than we think. maybe not enough to do everything. probably never enough for that. but perhaps enough to do some of the things we've been saying we don't have time for. i don't know. i'm still looking at my screen time, occasionally pretending the numbers are lying to me.