The Only One at the Table With a 9-to-5

Last year, I found myself sitting at dinner with the global HeyGen team.

Around the table were people building brands, businesses, and careers in technology.

And somewhere during the evening, something occurred to me.

I was the only person at that table with a 9-to-5.

I was also a mum.

Building a personal brand.

Running a community.

Creating content.

Speaking.

Learning.

Experimenting with AI.

And doing all of it alongside a career.

At some point during dinner, someone leaned over and asked me the question I get asked surprisingly often:

“How do you do it all?”

My answer was simple.

I don’t.

And I think that’s one of the most important things an ambitious woman with a full life can understand.

“How do you do it all?” is the wrong question

The question assumes there is a version of me somewhere simultaneously answering work emails, writing an article, helping with homework, creating a presentation, posting on LinkedIn and attending an event.

There isn’t.

And if there were, I wouldn’t recommend becoming her.

For a long time, we’ve celebrated women for their ability to carry an extraordinary amount.

She works.

She builds.

She raises children.

She remembers the birthdays.

She answers the messages.

She manages the house.

She supports everyone.

She somehow finds time to pursue her ambitions.

And then we call her a superwoman.

I’ve become increasingly uninterested in being one.

Because eventually you have to ask:

At what cost?

The answer to building your next chapter cannot simply be becoming more efficient at exhausting yourself.

I don’t want another full-time job disguised as a dream.

And I don’t think you do either.

Your 9-to-5 may not be the problem

This is where I want to challenge something.

There’s a particular kind of business advice that treats employment like a waiting room.

Build your side hustle.

Replace your salary.

Escape your 9-to-5.

Quit.

Then your real life can begin.

I don’t subscribe to that.

Your career may be funding the thing you’re building.

It may be developing skills you’ll use later.

It may be giving you access to an industry you understand deeply.

It may provide stability while you experiment.

It may give you colleagues, relationships, credibility and experiences that eventually become part of your professional capital.

And perhaps most radically:

Building something of your own doesn’t automatically require rejecting everything you’ve already built.

For some women, the next chapter will eventually mean leaving employment.

For others, it will mean staying and building something alongside it.

For others still, it will become a portfolio career: employment, consulting, speaking, products, advisory work, investing, teaching.

The goal isn’t to make everybody quit.

The goal is to create options.

And options require a different conversation about time.

You probably won’t “find” the time

This is the uncomfortable bit.

If you’re waiting for life to become less busy before you start building, you could be waiting a while.

There will always be something.

A deadline.

A child who needs you.

A demanding season at work.

A family responsibility.

A trip.

An unexpected problem.

A week when you’re simply tired.

The mythical empty Saturday where you wake up refreshed, the house is silent and six uninterrupted hours are waiting for you like a gift from heaven?

Lovely concept.

Rare species.

So I stopped trying to find more time.

I started deciding what my existing time was for.

That’s different.

In the original version of this article, I shared what my week actually looked like: planning content in advance, putting high-value conversations into defined windows, using evenings deliberately for certain activities and protecting Monday mornings for learning and building capacity.

It wasn’t glamorous.

But it worked because the decisions were made before the week started.

That’s the beginning of a system.

A system is simply a decision you don’t have to keep making

We tend to make “systems” sound complicated.

They don’t have to be.

A system can be:

Every Sunday, I plan what I’m publishing.

Every Tuesday evening, I write.

Every Friday, I follow up with people I’ve met that week.

Every article I write becomes three other pieces of content.

Every enquiry goes through the same form.

Every speaking opportunity goes into the same workflow.

Every idea gets captured in one place.

Every month, I review what’s working and stop doing what isn’t.

None of these things is revolutionary.

That’s precisely the point.

A good system removes the need to wake up every morning and negotiate with yourself.

What should I do today?

You’ve already decided.

That matters enormously when you’re building alongside a career, because your scarcest resource isn’t always time.

Sometimes it’s decision-making energy.

Then comes leverage

Systems help you stop repeating decisions.

Leverage helps you stop personally doing everything.

And this is where things get interesting.

There are several kinds of leverage available to us now.

Once I understood that, the question changed.

It stopped being:

How can I fit more into my day?

And became:

How much of what I’m building actually requires me?

That’s a far more useful question.

AI changed the economics of building alongside a career

This is one reason I’m so interested in AI.

Not because I think every woman needs to become an AI expert.

And definitely not because I think we need another 47 tools in our lives.

I’m interested because the cost of turning an idea into an asset has changed dramatically.

Think about what an experienced professional can do now.

You can take an idea from twenty years of experience and use AI to help interrogate it.

Turn it into an outline.

Develop it into an article.

Adapt it into a presentation.

Create supporting visuals.

Repurpose it into social content.

Turn it into a training resource.

Build workflows around how it gets distributed.

And increasingly, create video without having to set up a camera every time you want your expertise to travel.

That’s not AI replacing your expertise.

There’s a difference.

The woman with twenty years of experience doesn’t need AI to manufacture something for her to say.

She already has plenty to say.

She needs tools that reduce the friction between what she knows and what she can build with it.

That’s Build The Engine.

But don’t automate something you haven’t thought through

There’s a trap here.

When people discover automation and AI, they sometimes start automating chaos.

More content.

More emails.

More posts.

More output.

More noise.

Faster.

That’s not leverage.

That’s an automated headache.

Technology should come after intention.

First:

What am I building?

Why does it matter?

Who is it for?

What part of this requires my judgement?

What could be systemised?

What could be delegated?

What could technology accelerate?

What shouldn’t be automated at all?

This is why Build The Engine comes after the other Builds.

Starting with the engine is like buying a very expensive car before deciding where you’re going.

I also stopped treating support as cheating

This one took me a while.

There is something seductive about saying:

“I built this completely by myself.”

We turn doing everything alone into evidence of seriousness.

But eventually I realised that if I remained the strategist, writer, administrator, designer, scheduler, community manager, researcher, salesperson and technician forever, I hadn’t built freedom.

I’d built myself another job.

In the original version of this story, I talked openly about working with someone who helped manage my page, content and community while I brought the strategy.

That distinction matters.

Delegating execution doesn’t make the vision less yours.

Using AI doesn’t make the expertise less yours.

Automating a process doesn’t make the outcome less valuable.

The question is:

Where are you uniquely required?

That’s where your energy should increasingly go.

Build around your real life, not your fantasy life

This might be the most important lesson.

Don’t design your next chapter around the imaginary version of you who wakes up at 5am every morning, never gets tired, has no dependants, never has a difficult week at work and somehow possesses unlimited discipline.

Build around the woman who actually exists.

What hours does she genuinely have?

When is her brain at its best?

What responsibilities aren’t going anywhere?

What does she refuse to sacrifice?

What can she afford to outsource?

What can technology take off her plate?

What activities actually move the thing forward?

And what has she been doing simply because somebody on Instagram told her successful people do it?

Your system should fit your life.

Not the other way around.

The dinner wasn’t the result of one busy week

That’s the other thing I remember about that evening.

I hadn’t magically worked harder that week and earned myself a seat at the table.

That dinner was the visible result of work that had been happening quietly for years.

Ideas shared.

Relationships built.

Content published.

Skills developed.

Experiments run.

Rooms entered.

Consistency nobody applauded.

Systems that kept things moving even when I was busy doing something else.

The invitation was an outcome.

The infrastructure came first.

And that’s worth remembering because we often compare our ordinary Tuesday with somebody else’s visible moment.

The stage.

The announcement.

The partnership.

The launch.

The invitation.

We see the moment.

We don’t see the machinery underneath it.

So no, I don’t do it all

I decide what only I can do.

I build systems around what repeats.

I use technology where it genuinely gives me leverage.

I get help.

I let some things wait.

I say no to things that would make the machine bigger without making the life better.

And I’m still learning.

There are weeks when the system works beautifully.

There are weeks when life laughs at the system.

That’s okay.

The goal isn’t to build a perfectly optimised existence.

Because if you’re an experienced woman with a career, responsibilities and something you want to build, I don’t think the answer is:

Try harder.

I think the better question is:

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