All diaries
Week in the LifeAugust 17, 2026 · 37 min read

A Week In The Life Of Kate August 17, 2026

Listen0:00 / 50:14

All times are EST.

Family:

  • Mattie (husband)
  • Jackson (son; 7.5)
  • Gemma (daughter; 6)
  • Fergus (dog, 3)
  • Scout (our senior kitty, 15)

Please feel free to comment (not ‘suggestions’) with any follow up questions you have to anything I’m doing!

Note: many of the links I’ll share here are affiliate links.

🕊 Bhakti Business Blessing

May this be an offering, not a performance. May it rise from truth, not fear. May I be guided not by outcome, but by integrity. May I release all grasping and pour only what is real. May this serve even one heart—and let that be enough. May I remember: I am not selling. I am devoting. May I be unattached to who comes, who buys, who claps. May this be a sacred act of remembering who I am.

Monday Aug 17, 2026

7 am

Wake up. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at 8 this morning so I’m taking a loooong shower (haven’t washed my hair in… over a week? Omg! That’s gross, even for me!) and heading out. Gemma has been having major separation anxiety transitioning back to school after being home with us all summer, so that’s been really challenging and today she is especially upset. So hard to see her so distressed.

I end up running late because Mattie took my car to drop the kids off and I can’t find my laptop charger, which I’m bringing with me because I’m going to work from a coffee shop afterwards.

8:03 am

Get a call from the doc on my drive there telling me if I can’t be there by 8:05, I need to reschedule. Argh! Thankfully this is just my PCP and I was just going for my annual exam so nothing super urgent. I’m only like 6 minutes into the drive, so I turn around and come on home. Mattie and I chat for a while about poor little Gemma bean and how we can support her. And ourselves.

8:30 am

Do a quick tidy up and make some tea. Open up my laptop so Coffee with Claude can run. I don’t understand how sometimes it runs overnight even when my laptop is closed and sometimes it doesn’t. Claude’s local vs cloud stuff seems like it should be really simple but it’s so inconsistent that I often get my head all twisted up trying to understand what should go where.

I reschedule my doc appointment, book a laser appointment, read 2 poems from my new Mary Oliver book (she writes poetry I can actually understand and it’s wild how nearly every one I read, and she has hundreds, always resonates so strongly), and clean out my personal inbox of a few things for groceries, insurance claims, etc.

9-11:30 am

Ummm I don’t know where the time goes. Here’s my best guess thanks to the tracker I have set up on my browser now with AI (this comes with Dia):

  • I do a few odds and ends at work, watch the Loom Evelyn Weiss sent me as part of her VIP EverAds program I’m in now working with her weekly on my ads, put the transcript into Claude to create a checklist for myself,
  • Go through a few emails, mostly replying to support threads (Kartra billing and access issues, beehiiv segmentation and unsubscribe/pause logic, HTMLpub image optimization, WP Tasty’s affiliate program migration), reviewing my bookkeeper’s P&L report for July (our second six-figure month in a row!), and coordinating collaborations and JV webinars (with people like Kara Loewentheil, Amy Porterfield’s team, Laura Belgray, and Staci from HTMLpub).
  • Around the same time I was inside Relay and Axos, reviewing balances and transactions for Success with Soul Inc., including my Axos Business Savings account (which I opened this summer because I needed a high yield account to put some business savings) and Relay (where I manage my profit first accounts.)
  • Briefly looked at Fathom API pages plus the GitHub repo for the unofficial Fathom MCP server, decide I’m going to try this later.
  • Spent a solid block in beehiiv: looking at automations and the “paused 30 days” segment, confirming the 30‑day email pause flow, checking an automation that currently has no active subscribers, and editing my “HTML Broadcast with LWD Footer” template and general post templates to include the new “snooze for 30 days” option next to the unsubscribe button.
  • Back up a few things to my new Obsidian set up that I just soft-launched this week (my second brain that will allow me to go between AI tools and get better output across everything),
  • Update a few things for my BlockBuilder demo tomorrow (tweaked blocks (like the “Question Block” and “Newsletter Resource Roundup”) and then I start feeling super queasy.

This hits me totally out of the blue. I was doing great, I feel like I’m done so much healing and recovery and letting go over the past few months and my mind feels so at peace, but I’m pretty sure I’m having a panic attack. I start feeling super clammy and hot and sweaty and then I’m gagging and feeling like I might throw up (sorry TMI) and now I’m shaking and shivering, both hot and cold and yep, I’m throwing up.

This is the weirdest panic attack I’ve had because while it’s totally classic for me in terms of symptoms, but weirdly my mind is not hooked into this. I’m eerily calm and just watching my body have this weird reaction to something I’m not even sure what is and I just feel like this neutral observer.

I decide to turn on some music and do some somatic dancing that I learned at that class I shared about last month and it helps a bit, and now it’s time for my call with the Weird Hermits, as we’re co-working on getting our Obsidian second brains built out. I’m going to see if I can just ride this wave and distract myself.

12 pm

Obsidian co-working call. Oof, not feeling great, really nauseous and tired. And oh yep, I’m throwing up again. I’m honest with my friends and tell them I need to go lie down. I go straight up to bed and fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. I take a Zofran and wake up 2 hours later.

2:45 pm

Well that was strange. Not at all how I expected my day to go, but so grateful I have the kind of job that can flex for things like this. I’m actually feeling much better so decide to go downstairs and see about getting back to work.

3 pm

I start by handling affiliate logistics. I need to reconcile what we owe some of our top affiliates who I’m paying out multiple five figures (and some six figures) this month, and create a Claude Skill to help me make sure Kartra’s reporting is correct and everyone’s numbers are right.

Rachel and I decided last week to change our affiliate program so that everything gives 50% commissions, except 1:1 coaching, services and sponsor spotlights, which give 0% since they are all time based. We also decided to pay our affiliates out every week to help with bookkeeping now that this is making up such a large chunk of our income and it’s skewing our numbers when it looks like our profit is much higher than it is for months at a time. And we also decided to charge our payouts to be after 14 days, instead of 30. All things that will be better for our affiliates and make our tracking and reporting smoother.

Then I need to payout Rachel’s bonus for July. These past few months have been SO fun to be able to pay Rachel out such big bonus checks, and nobody deserves it more than her! She also just got a big raise that starts in September, something we negotiated earlier this month and I cannot tell you how good it feels to be doing this from an abundant place where I can afford to pay my people well instead of having to decide whether I pay them or myself. WOW! Feeling so proud.

Get the Fathom MCP set up in Claude, which took A LOT more time than expected because I had to be in terminal and set up a bunch of techy things and man… probably not the best use of my time. This is a community MCP, not

5 pm

Alright that ended up taking quite a while to get everything done and I’m sure I did a few other odds and ends while that was happening. Now, I realize how uncomfortable I am in my office chair and instead of getting up and moving my body to do something else, I’ve decided it’s the perfect time to go down a deep ergonomic chair rabbit hole.

I’m interested in something like cross‑legged and meditation‑style office chairs, but also really want massage built in and… oooh shiny, what about a zero‑gravity style chair?

After what became quite the saga, and ended with me on my phone on the couch with my family continuing the research, I landed on this one. It should be here in a week or two so we’ll see. You know I’ll report back.

7:30 pm

Eating Chinese leftovers on the couch and listening to my book while Matt gets the kids ready for bed, bath, books, etc. It’s his turn and I am wiped after today so I just lay here for another 2 hours and then take myself to bed early.

Finished the Calamity Club. 10/10. Wow! Whoever doesn’t think there’s such a thing as Patriarchy and White Supremacy, just go read this.

9:30 pm

Asleep.

Day in numbers
Revenue Earned
$2,396.50
Orders
29
AOV
$82.64
Hours worked
4.75 hours

Tuesday Aug 18, 2026

7 am

Wake up. Try to get Gem out of bed and dressed for school for a solid 15 minutes. This is an uphill battle, but alas she’s dressed and Mattie takes them downstairs to finish getting ready and head out the door.

If you’re new here, Mattie and I follow the Fair Play book and cards for how we divide up our household and emotional labor. He physically does a lot more with the kids, like school drop offs and pickups, taking them to practices and activities, and such. I do a lot more of the invisible labor (teacher communication, coordinating activities, schedules, play dates, doctors and dentist appointments), and housewife type things like cooking and cleaning (or managing our housekeeper who does most of that now). I swear it has changed out marriage and we’re so much happier together than when we were always fighting about who’s turn it was to do something.

7:45 am

I’m up. It’s my neighbor’s 50th birthday today so I’m bringing her her favorite bagel sandwich and going to have coffee with her for a bit this morning. I head out the door to pick up the bagels and then walk over to her house.

8:45 am

Back home and getting the animals fed, medicated, myself too, and making myself a latte. My neighbor didn't have decaf, which is all I can drink so it’s my turn now.

9 am

Sitting down at my desk, and I have a lot of scheduled tasks in Claude that have run for me while I was away:

  1. Morning Briefing (coffee with claude)
  2. Newsletter Pulse
  3. Skool post scheduling
  4. Skool post commenting
  5. Email Triage
  6. Sponsor Spotlight stats
  7. Call prep doc

It’s amazing how much calmer and more organized my mornings can be now with this stuff all done and just waiting for me to approve. Skool takes the longest because I give the most input on what goes there, and the rest is mostly just me reading and getting briefed on what’s what.

Oh and one thing I forgot to tell you that came up in my call prep that might be interesting for y’all to know… 13 days into my This is How We Claude event, here are the stats:

  • 24k revenue(12.1k All-Access Pass on 264 sales, $2.8k from the $27 bump, $4.7k from the 297upsell,
  • ~18k profit after $2k affiliates and $3.7k ads,
  • 2,650 opt-ins with 1,128 new

I also spend a while updating this doc because I didn’t come back to it yesterday when I had my panic attack and needed to fill in what happened. That probably took 20 minutes alone.

10 am

My mom calls and gives me an update about my dad’s audiologist appointment. He has hearing aids and is really getting so deaf and starting to show some other signs of memory/personality/behavior changes so we’re worried about him. This is step 1 of what will likely be quite a lot of doctor’s appointments to get to the bottom of this. Perhaps what some of my anxiety yesterday was about, though I’m really trying to just stay in the present, we don’t know anything yet and this could be a lot of very treatable things besides dementia. Send love and prayers please!

10:15 am

Quick call because he’s still at the doc, but she’ll call me after with a more complete update.

10:30 am

So back to work, reviewing metrics and call prep, I pop into Beehiiv to check automations and segments, skim yesterday’s Beehiiv Pulse report on list health and campaign performance, and then hop between ClickUp and Airtable to look at overdue tasks and today’s priorities plus today’s sales so far.

It’s a very “CEO + chief tinkerer” kind of morning. I start by looking at my calendar and my Morning Briefing for the day—ads deep‑dive for This Is How We Claude, a decision on Coffee with Claude, and nailing a single CTA for tomorrow’s BlockBuilder demo—plus sales pacing, cyclical living notes (late follicular, waxing crescent), and a few overdue ClickUp tasks glaring at me.

From there I bounce between ClickUp and Airtable, checking tasks and our Daily Sales Tracker, then dive into Beehiiv: main dashboard, segments, automations, and a big Pulse report from last week on how our list cleanup and recent campaigns are performing. I cross‑reference all of that with Facebook Ads Manager, looking at leads, CPL, ROAS, and which ads are actually pulling their weight.

In between, I tweak my BlockBuilder blocks for tomorrow’s demo, peek at Littlebird as a possible “AI brain” for my systems (decide, nope, don’t need it), and handle email threads with Steph (BlockBuilder) and Staci (HTML.pub) about promos, demo details, and sponsor logistics—pausing occasionally to celebrate fresh Kartra “you’ve made a sale” notifications. We got a new sale at the new price totally out of the blue, so gotta celebrate when that happens! No launching or promo of any kind. YES!

It’s wild to see how much of my marketing and admin load is now shared with AI, while I can stay focused on decisions, strategy, and nervous‑system‑friendly pacing.

12:30 pm

Time for a break before back to back calls. Going to get something to eat.

1 pm

Room call. Surprise! We brought in my colleague from HTML Pub to do a live demo for our co-working session and I know people’s minds were totally blown about how quickly and easily they could get their new sales and landing pages up and running.

2 pm

BlockBuilder live demo with my friend Steph. Are you using this tool yet? Apparently this week’s theme is software that’s changing my life and totally upgrading the way I work and Steph’s demo did not disappoint.

3 pm

Client delivery day continues. I got into Voxer while I made a very late lunch and responded to our 1:1 partnership clients. Then I hopped over to Telegram for our $1k/Day office hours and chatted up a storm. Back over to Voxer to respond to a bunch of messages from peers and friends that had been sitting for way too long and then I looked up and it was 4:15 and my brain was fried.

So I decided to sit down with some nervous system calming music on and work on my puzzle until the kids got home. I needed calm and quiet and to just turn my brain off.

5:15 pm

Kids get home and everyone seems in the mood to be calm and quiet (hallelujah!) so Jackson gets his legos out and he and Mattie set up shop at the kitchen table while Gem asks me to turn on this calming youtube video called melting to help her regulate. I mean, what in the world? I know I’ve done something right when my 6 year old tells me she needs to calm her body down and do this meditation. We don’t normally allow Youtube for the kids anymore, but this feels like a very worthwhile exception so I put it on and after the cutest meditation of my life, she asks if we can do yoga together and moving my body actually sounds divine so I put my puzzle away and we spend the next 45 minutes stretching and doing yoga videos together, and it was the best. Like exactly what my soul needed.

Around 6:30 I start getting dinner ready for the kids and Mattie and I heat up Chinese leftovers and the kids fill out their chore charts and then we have our newly installed 15-minutes of reading. Everyone gets their books, Mattie turns on spa music, we set a timer for 15 minutes and everyone reads quietly. We’ve done this maybe half a dozen times now and it is also one of my favorite things. Clearly quiet is my happy place.

Eventually it’s time for baths and bed time and it’s my turn tonight and snuggles commence and Gem reads Piggie and Gerald to me, while Jackson does legos on the floor next to us and I’m in awe of how much her reading has improved and she’s even getting the inflections and tone of voice right and in this moment I just feel so grateful for my little family.

To be clear, I do not always feel this way and most nights do not go anything like this. But I think we all needed it and it felt so nourishing. Most nights we’re running around between soccer practice and OT and homework and making dinner and oh no the dog just pooped in the playroom and the cat is meowing to be fed again and yes of course you have to take a bath tonight just like every other night of your entire life, why are we negotiating this again and you know… just life.

Oh one thing that’s definitely been helping. We’ve finally been bricking our phones. I brick mine from 6-8:30 pm every night since school started back and it’s helped me so much to just be more present, turn my work brain off for a bit and stop modeling poor habits for my children. We don’t allow devices for them during the week, so while the TV is on a lot, now that our phones are bricked everyone is more together and connected without us on our individual devices and it’s been so nice.

9:15 pm

Kids are asleep and Mattie wants to finish his book in bed and so I go downstairs with my new audiobook,Good People, which is literally narrated by an entire cast and is incredible, to finish my puzzle.

11 pm

Up to bed, puzzle complete, snuggles with hubs commence, asleep in <5 minutes. It was a good night.

Day in numbers
Revenue Earned
$2,719.00
Orders
40
AOV
$67.97
Hours worked
6.5 hours

Wednesday Aug 19, 2026

7 am

Wake up. Wow, nobody is in my bed, except Fergus. That’s a first. I start reading on my phone… my Coffee with Claude morning briefing has arrived in my inbox, which again… how? None of my computers are on, this task is run locally and half the time it says it couldn’t run because of that, but then sometimes it does. Whatever, I’ll take it. My goal is always to read this from bed because I need a slow start in the mornings and this is exactly the kind of thing that would feed two birds with one seed.

Jackson comes running in to snuggle for a few minutes before he heads off to school, then Gem and they fight about whose mommy I am and Fergus has to join the cuddle puddle because nobody loves mommy more than him and I must be in a sentimental mood because once again I think to myself how lucky I am. I love how affectionate my kids are. Physical touch is not my love language but I sure do appreciate it.

7:45 am

Alright, time to get up. The kids left for school, no tears from Gemma who seemed genuinely excited for school (man this is a rollercoaster) and I read my phone for a while, started feeling vaguely anxious, practiced some of my new mantras (“I’m so good at being anxious. I have so much experience with anxiety. Who cares, so what? I’ve been anxious more than almost anything else in my life, I can do this.”

And also, this new one… asking myself, “What is unbearable in this moment?” when I do that, it brings me straight into the present and I realize that my anxiety is always about worrying about the future. But in this moment, oh my god, nothing is unbearable, look at my beautiful life, look at how much I have, so much love and comfort. I am safe, I am okay.)

And then get myself up out of bed, take a shower, get dressed for the day and head downstairs and out onto my front porch. Talk with some neighbors who have a 2-week old baby girl and are out on a walk, and then really just sit down and write here. I know I call this a diary but in this moment it feels more like one than almost ever before. Really writing the truth about what’s happening for me. Thank you for witnessing me. This really is one of my most favorite things that I do.

9:30 am

Time for my call with my new ads mentors.

11:15 am

Okay off my call. Generated 2 new ad campaigns with them, featuring over 100 new ads as part of my attempt to scale the two Claude campaigns I have running right now. One for the live event and one for Coffee with Claude. I am so obsessed with this tool and grateful that I had the accountability to build these out live with Evelyn/team to get their feedback. Amazing use of my money right now!

Going to take a quick break to eat a snack and call my friend.

12 pm: Alright, back at Everads and working on creating 2 more brand new campaigns for two freebie to tripwire funnels. Both of which, I’ve run ads for before but had turned off because they weren’t converting.

  • AA Guide: I’m redoing the landing page for this one right now and then creating a brand new campaign.
  • BTS Challenge: I’m just creating new ads for this and running the same funnel. I know it works, I just need to get new ads live.
1:15 pm

Alright at a stopping point there and need to get my BlockBuilder email sent out. And schedule the 2nd send for Friday night before the cart closes.

1:40 pm

Done there, taking a quick break to let the pup out and get another snack and Diet Coke.

2:05 pm

Alright back outside and it’s actually not ungodly hot out today so I’m going to move to the porch again. Better for my nervous system, which is still a bit off this week. Glad I’ve got my sound bath tonight.

I need to get the WSL written and also the Black Friday Summit promo email that goes out tomorrow. I’ll finish my ads after that as I’m awaiting some info about extra credits anyway so can’t move forward until then.

I also reviewed Rachel’s Friday email and gave her some edits, and emailed Libro.fmbecause they rejected my affiliate application since I’m not a book content creator… who turns down free money. I literally asked them because, well, because I’m me and I have to know and understand all things:

3:35 pm

All done and ready for a quick break before I finish the ads stuff. Ate a bowl of butter noodles leftover from my six-year-old’s dinner because that’s what potato day (aka writing day wednesday) is for. Watched some interview with the cast of the Four Seasons (I love this show soooo much!). Have you seen it? Season 2 was chef’s kiss!

4:15 pm

Back at it with ads. Created 2 campaigns for BTS challenge and 1 for AA. Now the problem is narrowing down all of these amazing creatives so I don’t hit my account max of 250 ads running at a time. HA! Never thought I’d have that problem!

5 pm

I need another break. I’m losing steam, and going to take a quick walk around the block and try not to die of heat stroke.

5:15 pm

Alright, on the couch with laptop, checking in on a few emails, Skool, ClickUp, etc.

6 pm

Done for the day. I’m headed to another sound bath tonight at a very cool studio near me (the one I did the somatic dance class at last month) and I’m so ready to just lay down and do nothing. Kids should be home any minute from soccer practice and then I’m heading out. Going to return some things at Anthropologie on my way home too as I did a big spree and everything I ordered was enormous. I always forget how big their stuff runs!

See you tomorrow!

Day in numbers
Revenue Earned
$1,641.00
Orders
30
AOV
$54.70
Hours worked
6 hours

Thursday Aug 20, 2026

10 am

Wake up. Oof I was so tired this morning. Just listened to my body and gave it what it needed, more sleep. I did wake up briefly to snuggle the kids around 7:15 before they went to school and then promptly fell back asleep.

Continued moving slow this morning, talked to my housekeeper for half an hour when she got here this morning about how hard it is to be a human with so many emotions and complicated brains. She is such a gift to me. You know there’s people sometimes you meet and you think, I was meant to know this person. That’s how I feel about Nicoletta.

11:10 am

Okay, I need to get moving now. I’m out on the porch with Fergus and a cup of coffee. I’ve got a mini VIP day today with one of my fave clients who hired me to help her set up Claude stuff in her account, for herself, for her team and now for her clients. It’s been so much fun!

11:45 am

Coffee with Claude done. Skool posts scheduled. Somatic dance class booked for me and Nicoleta next week. New Everads styles created when I learned about a new feature and had too much fun playing with it. 45 minutes until I’m on calls for the rest of the day… what NEEDS to happen?

  • Update Rachel’s blockbuilder email ✅
  • Update a clause in my terms and conditions about testimonials ✅
12:30 pm

VIP Day with Molly. Success!

2:30 pm

Mastermind call with Weird Hermits (I usually eat lunch on these calls for whatever that’s worth to you, ha). I thought I’d share what I’m kicking around here personally because it shows a lot of what my decision process looks like and how I think about things:

  • First, The Room's pricing. I've been having Claude build me a membership dashboard every month from my Airtable data, and this month's version told me something I'd been half-avoiding — monthly is dead. I have roughly ten monthly members, nearly every one of them grandmothered in at the old $97 price, and since I raised it to $197 in March, only 3 people have joined at that rate. Total. Everyone else comes in on annual or lifetime. So I brought "should I just kill monthly?" to my mastermind this week, and someone asked me the question I should've asked myself before I opened my mouth: what problem are you actually trying to solve by changing it? Because pricing tweaks feel like strategy when they're really just fidgeting.
  • The actual problem is that new-member acquisition into The Room has slowed. And my brain's first move (watch yours do this too) was straight to a discount — bring back the $7 trials! Except I already ran that experiment. Those trials got me 20-40 signups a month with roughly 70% churn, plus people reusing the coupon in ways Kartra can't technically prevent, and when I did the math, I had to sell 10-12 of them to equal one person joining at full price. One person who, by the way, is far more likely to stay and actually do the work. Past Kate already collected this data and made this decision. Present Kate just needed reminding, which is half of what a good mastermind is for (the other half is people politely watching you re-litigate settled questions).

I wanted to be sure about this so I had Claude check the actual data and here’s the truth:

So yeah… the one-month-and-out pattern is glaring in the raw data — there's a wall of members with exactly 28-31 days enrolled and a $7 lifetime value. May 2025 was the worst single month: 42 cancellations against 26 new members.

$7 trials ran November 2024 through September 2025, then I switched to $27 trials October through December 2025, and the last discounted join was December 30. Discounts stopped January 2026.

Since killing discounts in January, new joins dropped, but so did cancellations — March through June 2026 ran 5-7 cancels a month versus 19-42 in the trial era, and June bounced to 20 new members (this was due to the Jenna/Gemma launches that brought in so many new MBA clients who got their first month free in the Room). So, my acquisition problem is real, but the retention win is bigger.

The structure of the money is the real story. In 2025 you were buying volume at $7 a head, churning 80% of it, and grinding out $2,500 months. In 2026 you're collecting

997 payments from people who stay, with 5-7 cancellations a month instead of 19-42. Fewer people, more money, less admin, no coupon abuse. Every instinct you had on that call — kill monthly, sell the year, stop discounting — the revenue data agrees with even more emphatically than the churn data did.

  • So monthly is dying, and I'm the one killing it. The Room is a year-long program, and I think I’m going to sell it like one — $997 for the year or a three-pay payment plan to make annual more accessible (like 3 payments of $397 for 12 months access), with lifetime saved for the occasional special promo instead of sitting on the shelf. If acquisition craters, I bring monthly back for a launch and we all pretend this never happened. Reversible decisions don't deserve weeks of agonizing.
  • The bigger gift from that call was noticing what I already have. MBA includes your first month in The Room free, and it auto-renews at 50% off the annual price. That renewal rate has been running around 60%, and after the Jenna launch, about 30 people took the free month and 20 of them stayed. I have been treating this like a cute little feature when it might be the single best funnel in my business. MBA on the front end, The Room on the back end, and my job is to tighten that pipe instead of inventing a new one. I preach "look for the leverage you already have" to clients constantly, and I still needed four other people to point at mine. We all have the thing we can't see because we're standing on it.
  • And one more, since my wheels are turning about Black Friday already (it's August, I know). Last year I did the whole elaborate production and made $30k. The year before, I threw one offer up the weekend before with half the email list and made $10k. So this year Black Friday is just membership week — my two memberships, pushed hard, and nothing else — with the plan done by the end of October instead of assembled in a panic the Wednesday before. Almost every decision I made this week came down to the same move: pull the data, name the real problem, check what past experiments already taught me, then pick the simpler thing. It's rarely a new idea. It's usually subtraction.
4:30 pm

Off my mastermind call now. Taking the dog out, piddling around the house for a bit to take a break.

4:45 pm

Sitting back down at my computer and trying to untangle the mess of the Fathom transcript that misattributed almost everything to the wrong speakers, and same with wisprflow’s transcript. I don’t understand why these tools are getting worse?

Responded to a couple of emails that were important and urgent and checking in on a few things in ClickUp. Today felt like kind of a wash in terms of getting actual work done. I guess that’s what happens when you sleep until 10, ha!

The kids are at OT until 6:15 though so I’m going to knock a few more things out before then… let’s see, what’s most important and urgent?

  • Pay out affiliates who earned > $2k via ACH
  • Vox Rachel about my ideas about the Room/MBA funnels, trials, cross-selling, plus some other ideas about collab guides and Black Friday from the WH call while it’s fresh

Everything else is tiny stuff or huge projects and I think those big projects are keeping me a bit frozen because I don’t have batch days/weeks mapped out to get them done. I think I need to brain dump what’s in my head and what I want to do to make sure I can actually make a plan so that these things happen instead of just getting bumped every week:

  • Move all sales pages from Kartra/Showit into HTMLPub and redo them with Claude.
  • Clean up the testimonial base, migrate fully off Senja and into Airtable and get the scheduled task working correctly. Create BlockBuilder testimonials walls for each offer that can be auto-updated and embedded on our sales pages.
  • Pitch Day: more JV partnerships, sponsorship brand deals (quarterly/annual)
  • Finish updating MBA 2.0 and create the new skills hub in the portal
  • September birthday month skill sale
  • Create a new system for email management and collabs
  • Create a new system for blog post management and new posts
  • Finish Kartra/Beehiiv syncing issues and ensure all subscriber info is updated and the
  • Decide on a live event cadence like for This is How We Claude
  • Update upsell funnels on all products (maybe switching to Room from MBA?)
  • Clean up $1K/Day Membership hub in airtable and reach out to errored payments
  • Create a $1k/Day app and migrate from Google docs/Telegram

Whew, this is a lot of big projects, no wonder I feel a bit spinny about it all. It’s the end of the day now so I’m not going to be able to make a plan, but this may be what I come back on Friday to do if I decide to work at all.

6:15 pm

Kids are home now, so I’m logging off for the night to go spend time with them.

Note: I ended up working for about 2 hours after the kids went to bed on the $1k/Day Membership hub clean up and just trying to get everything organized over there because I think having the data from this is going to be really helpful for me in deciding future promos and how I want to price/run things.

I think having Claude to help us make sense of so much data has been a real game changer for me in making decisions. It sees things that I never would’ve been able to put together on my own and helps me make truly data-informed decisions based on what’s actually happening and not just what I feel like is going on. I like to follow what feels good, but feelings are not facts and often if I make decisions based on my thoughts (this isn’t working, ie) I end up pulling the wrong levers and solving the wrong problems, aka spinning my wheels.

I’ll record a loom tomorrow showing you my Claude dashboard for the membership hub. It’s amazing!

Day in numbers
Revenue Earned
$1,680
Orders
29
AOV
$57.93
Hours worked
7.5 hours

Friday Aug 21, 2026

Today is my play and flex day, which is to say, I don’t have any required work on Fridays and often do not work at all. If I do, it’s usually playing around with new AI things or doing more of the dreaming and planning in my biz than actual “work work”.

Regardless, I am still super wiped this week, so I slept until 9:30 and then got up and took a shower, played with Fergus for a bit (he had the zoomies and I joined him!) and then recorded my weekly loom for Evelyn, my ads mentor.

I’m heading to therapy in a bit for EMDR, and then going to get my 8th tattoo in the afternoon. I’m still feeling a bit anxious today, and just trying to remind myself that these feelings are just weather, they come and go, they never last forever, and using the tools I have (both holistic and meds) when I need them. I know that in a few more days time, I’ll wake up and forget to check whether I’m anxious or not and realize later in the day, hey I feel great. It always happens like that. But when I’m in it, it’s easy for my brain to spiral into thinking I’ll never feel better. Again, feelings aren’t facts. Don’t believe everything you think. Applies to so many things!

Anyway, it’s 11 now so I’m off to therapy and tattoos… theratoo? LOL. I do feel like body art is a form of therapy for me.

Hope y’all have a great Friday. I’ll check back in on Monday to report back on what happened this week as a whole and do some looms and recaps for you!

Tell me what you want to see more of so I can create it for you!

Day in numbers
Revenue Earned
$2,640.00
Orders
39
AOV
$75.43
Hours worked
0 hours
Weekend in numbers
Weekend Revenue Earned
$7238.75
Orders
115
AOV
$64.78
Hours worked
0 hours
Wrap-up

Weekly Revenue Debrief

Week in numbers
Revenue
$18,315.25
Per day
$2616.46/day
Sales
282
AOV
$64.96
Hours
24.75
Hourly rate
$740/hour
Ad spend
$5,606.07
30.6% of revenue
ROAS
3.27

Wrap-up

End of Week Reflection, Decisions + Takeaways

I did my usual journaling with Claude about my time tracking this week. Asked a pile of questions, got a pile of data back, argued with some of it, lost most of those arguments.

$18,315.25 in revenue. Ad spend was $5,606.07, so if I pull the ads out, I’m still at $12,709.18, or $1,815.60 a day. My goal to make $1k/Day in profit requires roughly $1700/day in revenue so I cleared that. AND not during a launch week.

Where the time actually went

This is reconstructed from the timestamps in this diary, not from a stopwatch, so treat it as close-enough rather than exact.

WhatHours%
Client + community delivery (Room call, VIP day, Telegram, Voxer, Skool)4.7519%
Ads + paid acquisition (mentor call, building campaigns, landing page)4.518%
Admin, affiliates, banking, inbox4.016%
Data, dashboards + cleanup (metrics review, membership hub)4.016%
Writing (WSL, promo emails, this diary)3.514%
Tool tinkering + evaluation (Fathom MCP, Littlebird, Obsidian, transcripts)2.259%
Peer mastermind2.08%

1. What my calendar says I value, versus what I say I value

Strip out my opinions and read only the hours: I value serving the people who already paid me (19%), and I value getting new ones (18%). Those are the top two. For a business, that's a healthy answer and I'll take it.

The part I don’t love is where, at the very end of the week, I realized that I felt like I wasn’t getting to some of the bigger projects in favor of some of this tinkering and admin stuff. And it’s true. It’s hard because when you only have 2 humans on the team, sometimes I do just have to do some of those tasks.

AND I also know that if I don’t create the time to work on those bigger projects, I’ll never move forward on them because I need blocks of at least 2-3 hours at a time to move any of them. They’re too overwhelming for me to try to fit into the margins of my days, and the context switching would kill any chance of real sustainable success.

So. Monday morning, first hour: five of the twelve get real dates between now and October 31. The other seven go on a written not-now list so they stop charging me rent. Third time might be the one, or I might be typing this same paragraph in November. Ask me then.

The other thing I notice is that I’m in CEO mode more than I have ever been before, despite dealing with admin stuff, because those data/dashboard tasks are me looking at the information and making strategic long term decisions for the business based on that. Claude is making that easier than ever to do and yes, it took longer this time because we had a big clean up, but it won’t always be like that and sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. That’s also what my peer mastermind is for.

Replicate this: the exercise isn't the percentages, it's the comparison. Write down your top three priorities for the quarter from memory. Then add up the hours you actually spent on them last week. If any of them got a zero, that's not a motivation problem, it's a calendar problem, and calendars are fixable in about twenty minutes.

2. Fifty-four percent of the money came in on days I didn't open the laptop

Friday: $2,640 from 39 orders. Zero hours logged. (Technically I recorded one Loom for my ads mentor before therapy, so the zero is a rounding decision I made in my own favor.)

Weekend: $7,238.75 from 115 orders. Also zero hours, truly.

That's $9,878.75 of an $18,315.25 week arriving while I was in a therapist's office, then a tattoo chair, then a weekend I did not spend thinking about any of this.

I want to name what produced it, because "the money comes in while you rest" is the kind of sentence that sells courses and teaches nobody anything.

Five things were running:

  1. Meta ads driving cold traffic into funnels I built weeks/months ago.
  2. This Is How We Claude in its third week, affiliates sending buyers and the contributors promoting to their own lists, with tripwires/bumps/upsells converting really well
  3. Recurring membership payments billing on their own schedule
  4. Blog posts I wrote years ago still getting found and cited.

Every one of those took work. None of it took work that day.

The mix moved too, and it's worth seeing. In May I did 92 orders at a $130.86 AOV. This week: 282 orders at $64.96. Three times the volume at half the average order. That's the low-ticket event doing exactly what a low-ticket event does. All-Access Pass $47, the $27 bump, the $297 upsell, all stacking up order count at small dollar amounts.

So my revenue line and my AOV line are telling two different stories this week and both are good news. Know which lever moved which number, or you'll panic about an AOV drop you engineered on purpose.

3. The crash showed up after the good month, not the bad one

Monday I was fine. I'd been more than fine for weeks. My head was the quietest it's been in a long time, we'd just closed our second six-figure month in a row, and This Is How We Claude was mid-flight and working. Then somewhere between tweaking a Question Block for Tuesday's BlockBuilder demo and feeling pretty good about my whole life, I went clammy, then hot, then shaking, and then I was throwing up.

The strange part was that my brain never joined in. Usually a panic attack arrives with a story attached (something terrible is happening, and here is the terrible thing). This one had no plot. My body was in full fight-or-flight and I was off to the side watching it happen with mild interest, like it belonged to a coworker.

I've had a week to think about where it came from and I don't think there's one answer. Some of it is July catching up with me, because my nervous system files its paperwork about six weeks late. Some of it is my meds, which I’ve known make me nauseous and I had just taken a larger dose of on Sunday night. Some of it is ordinary worry about my family. And a good chunk of it is OCD doing the thing OCD does, which is wait until nothing is wrong and then turn up to ask whether I'm sure about that.

That last one is the part worth handing you, because it isn't really about health.

The crash tends to come after the win. Not after the failed launch or the bad month — after the good one. You brace for a long stretch, the bracing works, the numbers land, and then your body finally has room to process everything it was too busy to feel. Almost everyone I know running a business has some version of this, and almost nobody plans for it, because we're all braced for the hard part to be the hard part.

Which is why I'm not going to hand you a self-care tip here. The useful move is structural. Build the thing so it keeps running on the days your nervous system doesn't.

Mine did. I lost the middle of Monday — bed at noon, Zofran, asleep before my head finished landing (two hours I did not schedule and would not trade). Then I came back downstairs, reconciled affiliates, built a Claude Skill to check Kartra's commission math, and paid Rachel her July bonus. Monday closed at $2,396.50 on 4.75 hours, which is an entirely ordinary Monday around here.

There was a version of this business with five people on payroll and a calendar that needed me upright and pleasant on demand. That Monday would have cost me considerably more than a nap.

If your business can't survive you getting sick on a Monday, that's a structural fact about the business, and structural facts are fixable. Your body isn't the thing that needs fixing in that sentence.

4. Join EverAds

Wednesday I built two campaigns with my ads mentors containing over 100 new ads, then built three more campaigns for the AA Guide and BTS Challenge funnels. By 4:15 I had a new problem, which I typed into this diary with what I now recognize as unearned delight: I have to narrow these down so I don't hit my account maximum of 250 running ads.

This is cracking me up. Not that long ago the reason my ads weren't working was that I couldn't produce enough creative to find a winner. I couldn’t get myself motivated to sit down and create the ads. I turned both of those funnels off for exactly that reason. Now, thanks to EverAds, my problem is narrowing it down from all of the amazing choices. I much prefer that problem. So really my advice to everyone reading here is, if you have trouble actually finding time to create the ads, the graphics, the copy, and you just want someone to do it for you and do it better than you could… join EverAds.

Question on this?

Drop it for the next office hours.

Ask Kate →