Last Friday started with a client clarification call. Then a delivery issue, a payment reconciliation problem, and a client escalation, all before lunch. Lunch itself was with lawyers, walking through due diligence questions. Afternoon was a product review, a governance document I owed the team, then investor follow-ups. At dinner with my wife, my brain was still stuck on an insurance clause from four hours earlier.

That's a normal day now.

People ask how founders juggle so many things at once. We don't. Context switching is the most expensive tax I pay, and nobody sends me an invoice for it. Every jump from a client spec to a shareholder agreement to a product roadmap costs me 20 to 30 minutes of reloading the mental model. Ten switches a day and half the week is gone before any real work happens. It's a shitty way to lose time because it never shows up in any report.

Three things have kept me sane. I stopped trusting my memory and started writing everything into trackers, one per workstream, so re-entry takes minutes instead of an hour. I batch by domain now, so legal mornings stay legal and product afternoons stay product, and I protect those blocks like client meetings. And I finally accepted that some balls are made of rubber and some are made of glass. My job is knowing which is which before I drop one.

If you're an operator scaling past the stage where you can hold the whole company in your head, build your systems before you need them. The switching cost compounds quietly (and insanely), and by the time you feel it, you're already paying full price. So my advice is boring: write things down, batch your days, and stop pretending your brain is a hard drive, because it's not :P

And of course, still here rowing :)

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