when every platform & algorithm is asking for more

you stop building and start performing

A few weeks ago I noticed I had filled my calendar with the same kind of week I used to have when I was running my business.

Not the good version of that week. Rather the other one. The one where every hour was time blocked, every evening had a deliverable, every weekend had something I was “catching up on.” The version that ran me for nearly a decade until I closed my business because I realized I didn’t want to and couldn’t keep doing it anymore.

This time it crept in quietly. A YouTube video here, a Substack piece there, a fractional opportunity I was considering, client conversations, content batching – oh and a full-time job. Each thing on its own was reasonable. Each thing on its own felt like building. Then I looked at the actual rhythm of my week and realized I had recreated, almost exactly, that pace I left behind.

And I want to tell you the truth about this, because I think it’s something a lot of us are doing without naming it.

I wasn’t building. I was performing building.

The pattern is old for me. I built a successful business by being a doer. That identity got rewarded for years – by money, by press, by my own sense of self. I am someone who gets things done. I had said time and time again that I’m a doer and when I say I will, I always do. And when you’ve spent a decade being praised for output, output stops being a strategy and starts being a personality.

So when I closed the business and started building my life again, I told myself I’d do it differently this time. Slower. More aligned. From a different place.

I meant it. I still mean it.

But meaning it and doing it are different things – and the muscle memory of the old way is strong. So strong. It’s the first thing my body reaches for when I feel uncertain, or behind, or like I should be further along than I am. Do more. Produce more. Schedule more. Fill the calendar. Then I’ll feel okay.

I want to be clear about something. This desire isn’t efficiency in disguise. It’s not me secretly loving the grind. It’s something more vulnerable and harder to admit…

when I’m producing, I feel in control.

That’s the real thing. The reason it’s so easy to fall back into the old patterns isn’t because they worked – sometimes they did, for a moment or period of time, but in the long run, keeping that pace nearly broke me. It’s because it gave me the feeling of control over an uncertain outcome. If I’m doing the work, the logic goes, then I’m earning the result. If I’m visible, present, posting, pitching, producing – then the future I want is being built, brick by brick, by my own hands.

And underneath that is a fear I haven’t fully wanted to name: that if I’m not producing, maybe nothing is actually happening.

Even typing that feels scary – to write, to say and to admit.

It doesn’t help that everything around us reinforces this. Every platform is asking for more. More posts, more videos, more reels, more carousels, more lives, more newsletters, more launches. The algorithms reward consistency over depth. The culture rewards visibility over discernment. You are, at all times, slightly behind on whatever the current expected cadence of being a person online is.

I’m not anti-content nor am I’m not anti-ambition. Actually, I’m one of the most ambitious people I know.

But I’ve been noticing the gap between building something and performing the appearance of building something, and I’m realizing how easy it is to confuse the two. Especially now, in this second act of my life, where the thing I’m building isn’t fully visible yet. It’s tempting to fill the invisibility with noise. To produce, just to prove to myself – and maybe to you – that I’m still here, still moving, still doing.

What I’m trying instead is something I’m genuinely uncomfortable with.

Less.

Less platforms, less output, less calendar density. Less performing of the work in order to feel like the work is real.

I’m trying to trust that a small thing done from alignment matters more than a big thing done from anxiety. That moving slowly in the right direction is more useful than moving fast in the wrong one. That if I stop posting on three of the five platforms, I will not actually disappear. That the people who need to find me will find me through the things I do with care, not through the things I do out of compulsion.

I’d like to tell you I’m good at this and that I have it figured out. I’m not and I haven’t. I caught myself having a conversation with my husband, Michael, two weeks ago about some last minute plans and I went into planning mode. I pulled out my calendar, looked at my time blocks and started playing tetris to move things around in order to fit life in. That’s right – I was trying to squeeze the act of living, saying yes and enjoying this one life in to an already full calendar and a calendar that did not need to be full. That’s when it hit me – I have not left that old me behind, she was still there and I’d slowly slipped back into that pattern.

But I’m noticing it now. I can see it as it’s happening. That feels different than the last time I was in this pattern, when I couldn’t see it at all until. When I’d put life to the side, say after one more sacrifice, not this weekend or maybe even this season – that work and output came first and that life could wait. But life doesn’t wait. It continues on and if you don’t chose to live it, the time passes anyway.

I’m not going to wrap this up with a framework or a five-step plan. I don’t have one yet. I’m in the middle of it.

But what I know right now is this: the version of me that built a business by sheer force is not the version that’s going to build what’s next. She got me here but she’s not coming with me.

And the work, it turns out, isn’t to produce more. The work is to keep choosing discomfort in slowing down and doing less, especially on the days when the old pattern feels safer than the new one.

That’s where I am at – still figuring it out, learning to catch it before it goes too far and prioritizing life over my output.

XX

Mary

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