There was a period of about three months where I was trying to give everything full energy at the same time.
Signoraware during the day. Vedikaura in the evenings. Content planning somewhere in between. I was updating supplier sheets at midnight and opening my work laptop at 7am and somewhere around month two I stopped being able to do either thing well.
I didn’t have a breakdown or a dramatic realisation. I just noticed, one morning, that I had been staring at a Vedikaura product page I was supposed to be writing copy for, for forty minutes, and had written nothing. Not because I didn’t know what to write. Because I had nothing left to write with.
That’s when I finally accepted that doing two things at the same time is not the same as doing two things well.
I had this idea that balance meant equal attention. That if I was putting in the hours across both, I was doing it right. What I’ve worked out since is that balance isn’t really the right word for it. What I’m actually doing is sequencing — at any point, one thing is in active build mode, and the other things are being maintained. Not ignored. Just not receiving primary energy right now.
Right now, Red Horizon is where my first attention goes. Vedikaura is the second priority. Signoraware is a fixed commitment that I honour fully within office hours and don’t extend beyond them.
Getting to that clarity took longer than it should have. But once I knew it, the daily decisions became much simpler. When two things both wanted attention on the same afternoon, I knew which one to give it to.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that I was always trying to do the Vedikaura work in the time that was left over. After corporate, after dinner, after everything else had claimed its share. And leftover time is also leftover energy. What I was giving Vedikaura was whatever remained after everything else.
I shifted some of the strategic thinking — not execution, but thinking — to the morning. Before email, before any Signoraware context had settled into my head. Even thirty minutes of thinking about something for Vedikaura, when my brain was still fresh, produced noticeably different work than the same thirty minutes at 9pm.
The tracker I built — an Excel file covering every active project across all three things — is the one tool I’d find hardest to give up. Not because it’s impressive to look at, but because it answers the one question that used to drain a quiet amount of energy every single day: what am I doing today?
When I know the answer before I open my laptop, I can just do the work.
The hardest thing about building something alongside a job isn’t the time. It’s the pace. A decision I make on Monday about a Vedikaura listing might not get executed until Thursday because Wednesday had three Signoraware deadlines. Things that would take a full-time team a week take me a month.
I’ve let go of the urgency around that, mostly. Moving slower on solid ground is better than moving fast before things are ready to carry the speed.
What’s the one thing that’s been hardest to accept about building something while keeping a job?