I am not an entrepreneur | Post 4
Three years ago I could run on five hours of sleep and not notice. The terms have changed.
I notice the difference the way you notice a hinge that has started to creak. Nothing has broken. But nothing moves the way it used to, either.
At forty-three I treated sleep as optional. I would stay up late, get up early, and feel, at worst, a bit slow before the second coffee. My body did not send a bill. My body absorbed the debt quietly and let me carry on.
I am forty-six today. Happy birthday to me. The bill comes every time. Five hours of sleep does not cost me a slow morning anymore. It costs me the whole day. My concentration frays by eleven. My patience, which used to stretch generously across a full day of other people’s problems, now runs out somewhere around 6pm. Or, this summer, somewhere around the third consecutive hour of being asked what is for lunch.
I want to be plain about this, because most of what gets written about this stage of life is either a complaint or a triumph, and neither is honest. This is neither. This is a description.
Three lives, running at once
Here is what is actually happening.
One. I run a global legal and compliance function for a company operating across the energy and natural resources sector, through a period of enterprise-wide change that would be demanding at any age, in any decade of a career.
Two. I have two children, ten and thirteen, and for the last six weeks the structure that usually holds the day together has been absent. No school run. No fixed hours. No reliable boundary between the working day and the rest of it. The summer holiday version of parenting is less physical care and more sustained presence, which turns out to be its own kind of demanding.
Three. After both of them are asleep, and after the day job has gone quiet, I build a company. I have been doing this for the best part of a year now, most nights, on a laptop on the sofa.
And then there is perimenopause, which arrived without asking and renegotiated the terms of everything above it.
I have delivered that line like a joke at dinner parties to soften what it actually means. It means hot flushes at 1am while I am staring at a product roadmap. It means a night’s sleep that used to restore me now interrupting itself twice before it has properly started. It means a body that has quietly changed the deal I thought I had with it, without asking, and without much warning.
Nobody warns you about this part. Everybody warns you about the children. Nobody mentions that your own body will start negotiating against you at exactly the moment you need it most.
This has not been an ordinary summer in other ways either. There are things I am carrying that are mine to carry. What I will say is that the building is continuing through all of it, and that continuing is itself a choice, made deliberately, more than once.
What one ordinary day actually looks like
Let me compress a single Tuesday. This one is from July, which means my kids are home.
Alarm. No school run, but someone needs breakfast and has a strong opinion about what kind. A message arrives before nine that cannot wait. I answer it at the kitchen table while trying to be present for the breakfast conversation. A project stand-up call at nine, where I am sharp. A decision at lunchtime about a BYS feature that has slipped, made in eleven minutes because there is no spare hour to deliberate longer. An afternoon that belongs to the children, genuinely, because they have been patient and they are on holiday and they deserve it, my husband’s job pulling as hard as mine, so we trade the afternoons by negotiation and by who has the least left. Dinner. Bedtime, stretched out because summer means later light and later arguments about later bedtimes. Then the house goes quiet, and the laptop opens again.
That is not a special day.
What running three lives has taught me about attention
The lesson is not about time. Everyone tells you time is the scarce resource, and they are wrong, or at least they are describing the wrong scarcity. Time can be found. Attention cannot be manufactured once it is spent. You get a fixed amount of sharp, careful, undistracted focus in a day, and once it is gone, no amount of remaining hours will bring it back.
The children are navigating their own version of this. Routine gone. Friendships paused for six weeks that feel far longer at ten and thirteen than they do to me. The structure that told them who they were from Monday to Friday has been lifted away, and they are working out how to hold their shape without it. Their steadiness is not free either. Some of my good attention has to go to keeping their days shaped and their sense of themselves intact, and that is not a subtraction from the building. It is the same skill, pointed somewhere that matters more.
That single realisation about attention has changed how I build BeforeYouSign. I ship in shorter cycles now, not because shorter cycles are fashionable, but because I no longer have the luxury of holding five ideas in my head across a long, slow build. I ship fewer features at once. I make product decisions faster, not because faster is always better, but because a decision made with the last twenty minutes of good attention in the day, made decisively, beats a decision deferred to a version of me that will be more tired, not less, by the time I come back to it.
Most of the actual building is happening in the small gaps nobody sees. I reviewed the audit of my legal playbooks and prompt engineering parameters with my laptop balanced on the arm of the sofa while my daughter watched a series beside me. I debugged a routing bug at 11.30pm because my paywall page looked live in GitHub but still showed the old version in the browser. It turned out the app was using hash routing, and the real page lived at /#/review/paywall while I was testing /review/paywall. The difference was a single character. The cost was an entire evening of attention I could not get back.
That is the texture of building this around a family and a full-time job. Nothing heroic. Just a long sequence of very small mistakes and very small fixes, made in the last good twenty minutes of the day.
Why this matters for the person signing a contract
Nobody signs a contract at their sharpest hour. Contracts get signed late at night, between other things, by people who have already spent their good attention on a full day of something else entirely. The freelancer signing a new client agreement is doing it after a day of client work, not before it. The small business owner reading a supplier contract is doing it after closing up, not at nine in the morning with a coffee and a clear head.
The tiredness is not incidental to how contracts get read badly. It is the condition most contracts get signed under.
That is exactly the moment BeforeYouSign exists for. Not the version of you with a clear head and a spare hour. The actual version, the one reading this at 11pm with the dishwasher running, who deserves the same clarity a rested corporate lawyer gets at 10am with nothing else on the calendar. The tool does the reading when you have nothing left to read with. That is not a lesser use case. It is the main one.
What I am choosing anyway
I am not doing this well every day. Not perfectly. Not in a way that would survive close inspection by anyone determined to find the cracks.
But the children are fine. Genuinely fine, not performing fine for an audience. The business is moving, slower some weeks than others, faster than I expected in total. The summer, which I had privately worried would derail the build, did not. It changed the shape of the evenings. It did not stop them.
And I am still here, doing both anyway, hormones and all, because the alternative was never really doing neither. It was doing one and quietly resenting the other, and I have done enough of that in my life already.
If you are reading this at the end of your own compressed Tuesday, tired in the specific way that only comes from running more than one life at once, I see you. Keep going. And before you sign anything tonight, let BeforeYouSign read it first.
Louise