Today, SaaS loses

Got a few questions about how I manage my time. Rightfully so, it sometimes feels like a miracle I get anything done in any area of life. Here's an attempt to explain how it currently works.

Some questions revolved around making consistent progress while having a family and kids, without sacrificing the rest of life. And then there are questions about switching between multiple projects and getting straight into useful work when you cannot touch every project every day.

They sound like separate questions, but I think they have the same slightly uncomfortable answer: Something has to lose.

Something always falls off the table

I wish I had a clever system that allowed everything to receive the time and attention it deserved every day.

I don’t.

Between a day job, kids, my relationship, renovating a house, and building several SaaS products, there is never enough time for all of it. Something has to suffer and fall off the table each day. Honestly, that was surprisingly difficult for me to accept.

If the house needs more attention one day, I might get two to four fewer hours with the kids than I would have liked. On another day, the renovation has to wait. Some days I cannot allocate any time to Small Software Co. at all.

Those days still hurt. I care about these products and want to move them forward. Ending a day without touching any of them can easily feel like I failed.

The reframe I’m trying to use is:

A dropped obligation is only a failure if it violated the plan.

If I planned to spend the evening with my family and Contentcron did not move, then Contentcron falling off the table was not a failure. It was the plan.

Today, SaaS loses.

The hard part is getting that plan right and then accepting its consequences. It is easy to create a plan in which everything is supposedly important and every area moves forward every day. It is also a plan designed to produce constant guilt. Saying that nothing is ever sacrificed would be a lie. I think the more useful distinction is between things that can wait and things that cannot. Code can wait. A launch can move by a week. An unfinished wall will still be there tomorrow.

Kids only grow up once. Relationships matter more than code.

That does not mean SaaS always loses. It means the consequences are different when it does. That's also why I try to squeezy most work ont he portfolio into very early morning hours or late at night. Mornings are great. Usually there's nobody awake. Even the baby seems to hate getting up early, so it's my favorite time these days to get stuff done. Evening are usually slower, since I'm already fairly exhausted. Either way, I try getting some work done on the projects and always having a clear next todo helps (one todo, not five!)

The goal is to be able to do it again next week

I also think about energy more than hours.

There are ways to squeeze more work into almost any week. I can sleep less, work out less, remove every empty moment, or push through when I’m already exhausted. That might produce a few more hours now, but it takes them from somewhere else.

A good week should end with the feeling that I could do it again next week.

If I reach Sunday completely depleted, the system is not working, even if I shipped a lot. I have merely borrowed energy from the following week.

None of the important areas of my life is a sprint. Raising kids takes years. Renovating the house takes a long time. Building and growing software products takes much longer than building their first versions.

There is no finish line close enough to justify burning all the available energy getting there, so consistency, for me, does not mean giving everything attention every day. It means returning to the important things often enough, for long enough, without destroying my ability to continue.

Multiple projects give me energy

This is where the second question becomes more personal.

The usual advice is to focus on one thing. I understand why. Every additional project divides attention, creates more decisions, and increases the chance that none of them gets enough distribution or care.

However, working on multiple projects gives me energy. Moving between different problems, products, and stages of work keeps me interested. I have always been good at keeping a lot of complexity in my head, and that has become an important asset at all my jobs, as well as for running a portfolio.

I tend to retain a pretty deep architectural understanding of each product, even when I have not worked on it for a few days. That makes it easier to see how a new decision fits into the rest of the system and to plan the next steps without rediscovering the entire codebase. (Or the need to le agents do that)

This is probably not universal advice. Some people do their best work by going very deep on one thing and staying there. For me, forcing that kind of focus indefinitely would remove some of the energy that lets me keep building in the first place.

The challenge is making sure a change of project does not consume the entire window I have available.

Always leave the next action open

The most useful habit I have for reducing that re-entry cost is simple: I always leave “what to do next” open.

When I stop working on a project, I want to know the exact next useful action. Not “work on Leadrack” or “improve onboarding,” but the specific piece I can pick up and start immediately. This matters because a lot of my work happens early in the morning. At 5am, I don't want to spend the first half-hour deciding what I meant to do, reconstructing yesterday’s thinking, or browsing around until something catches my attention.

I want to sit down and begin.

This does not remove the cost of context switching. It removes the blank page at the beginning of the next session.

I also use AI heavily here. It is an external thinking partner for research, planning, challenging ideas, and quickly exploring the edges of a problem. I can ping-pong an idea until it becomes concrete enough to build, or use it to recover surrounding details without manually retracing every step.

AI makes re-entry faster, but it does not decide what deserves my limited time. That part still depends on understanding the products, knowing what matters next, and making the uncomfortable decision about what will not happen today.

Controlled imbalance

I don’t think I have found balance, at least not in the way people usually describe it. Feels more like I have controlled imbalance.

Some days the portfolio moves quickly. Some days the house does. Some days almost all the available time belongs to the kids. The balance only becomes visible across weeks or months, not inside every individual day.

The aim is not to prevent anything from falling off the table. With enough important things in life, that is impossible. The aim is to choose what can fall, protect what cannot be replaced, and leave yourself enough energy to return tomorrow.

Today, SaaS might lose but tomrrow at 5am the code will still be there, and so will the next todo I've planned ahead.