I tried to be productive and found a bigger problem

Blog Post Written By: Melrose Michaels

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On October 3, 2026 I locked every social media app on my phone, paused my paid mentorship community and committed to 3 goals until January. What I thought I was doing was bolting a turbocharger onto my business. What I actually found out around day 30 is that I had walked into the mechanic's shop with my car already on fire, and I had been driving it that way for months without noticing.

I was not sleeping properly, I was not eating enough, and I was going to the gym with nothing in my body to fuel it. If you had told me any of that in September I would have looked you in the eye and said I was fine.

Almost nothing about this lock in has gone the way I predicted, and the most useful parts of it are the parts I got wrong. We are going to start with which sacrifice actually hurt, because I guessed that one badly. Then I will get into the metric I use now instead of counting days in a row, and the part of all of this I very nearly did not publish.

I braced for the wrong loss

Social media was supposed to be the hardest part of all of this. Those apps are built by people paid extremely well to make them behave like slot machines, I had never taken a break from them in my entire career, and I assumed I was hooked the same as everybody else. From the second I locked those apps I did not miss them. A month in I still do not, and I am honestly a little bit insulted by how easy it was. I still answer every comment, I just run everything through Buffer so I never open the apps to do it.

The thing that actually hurt was pausing The Boardroom instead. I expected to miss those weekly calls and I did not expect the size of the hole they left. There was guilt in it, and something close to a low grade depression at not having that to look forward to every week.

Then something walked into my house on 4 legs and rearranged the entire plan. His name is Casper, he is a Samoyed puppy, and I adopted him about a week into this. He arrived with a UTI and an antibiotic that turned out to be from a family of medicines his breed cannot tolerate, so the prescription meant to help him was making him dangerously sick. A 105.5 fever, unable to walk or open his eyes, days and nights at the emergency vet.

He is completely fine now with no lasting damage, and that took the first 3 weeks of his life with me and every routine I had built.

I tell the whole story on in this week's YouTube video, including how I worked out what was poisoning him and walked into that vet's office with the right question to ask.

Here is the part that matters for your business rather than mine. A normal September day for me started before 6am and ran until 10pm or later, and I would have called that high intensity without ever asking whether it was high productivity. My October looks different, because a puppy depends on me in a way my cats never have. When it is his lunchtime it is my lunchtime, which means I eat. When he needs a walk I go outside, which means I get air.

Casper became the structure I would not give myself, and I am still getting more done than I was in September.

Stop counting the streak

My first 30 days had 3 weeks where every routine I had was in pieces. If I had been running this as a streak I would have been back at zero over and over again, and somewhere in there I would have told myself the whole thing was ruined and quit.

That story is the thing that keeps people stopped, rather than the slip itself. One missed day turns into a narrative about having failed, and the narrative is far more expensive than the missed day ever was. So I am not counting consecutive days for the next 60. I am counting how fast I come back after the days that fall apart, because that is the actual skill and it is the only one that survives a holiday season.

The next 60 days are going to test it harder than the first 30 did. Black Friday is November 27, Thanksgiving sits the day before it, Cyber Monday comes right after, and then December arrives as both a heavy sales month and a heavy life month. Day 90 of this whole thing lands on January 3.

So go and make that decision right now, while you are still calm. Pull up a real calendar, mark Black Friday and mark every week you already know is going to turn into chaos, then decide in advance what your single step back onto the wagon is when you miss a day in the middle of all of it. In the middle of the mess, quitting is always the easiest available decision. I go deeper into planning for your own collapse in this week's podcast, including which of my own 3 goals I have not even started yet.

What happens when something you built keeps running without you

The real fear underneath pausing The Boardroom was never the calls. What I was afraid of was losing touch with this community. So much of what I do depends on knowing what creators of every size are up against in real time, and that room was my weekly feedback loop into exactly that. I was scared that stepping back would put me out of touch with the people I am building all of this for.

What happened instead is that the members decided to keep the calls going without me until I come back, and they are running them independently. I am more grateful for that than I know how to say on a podcast. It also taught me something I would hand to any creator reading this. If you have built something real, it should be able to run without you for a while, and it is worth finding that out on purpose rather than discovering it at the worst possible moment.

The personal version of that lesson is harder for me. My default structure in life is self sacrificial, which means I am usually the one showing up for everybody else, and watching The Boardroom carry itself reminded me that there are people around me who will carry some of it if I let them.

The part I almost did not publish

I live almost entirely inside my own head, all of the time. I am usually 10 steps ahead of a conversation, running outcomes and weighing the risk profile of each one, which means I rarely feel anything below my neck. My heart does not race when I am excited about something. My stomach does not drop on me when I get disappointed. I had to go and look up what a nervous system actually does, because I wanted to know whether mine was broken.

If you run a business by yourself you are the strategist and the marketer and customer service and the talent, and your head is where all of that lives. I suspect a lot of creators reading this are wired the same way.

What came back during these 30 days was not the dopamine reset I was promised by the internet. The closest I can get to describing it is that a callus came off. I can hear my own thoughts clearly, I feel present, I feel connected to my friends and my pets, and my intuition has gotten considerably louder. When I sat down to meditate recently there were no thoughts to let go of, which has never once happened to me, and for the first time I can remember I could feel my own heartbeat and the cool air moving through my nose.

Your body tells you things your head is too busy to hear. When you are exhausted, when a deal feels wrong, when you are saying yes to something you should be declining. If you cannot feel any of that, you are running your business on half the information available to you, and I did that for years without knowing it.

This week's newsletter is where I wrote about the other half of this, which is gratitude, and I will admit I worried about being taken less seriously for publishing it. I used to consider myself purely logical and deeply skeptical of all of this. The line I come back to on hard days is that things are happening for me rather than to me, and that I am thankful for that. The newsletter covers the 2 Michael Singer books that changed how I think about surrender, why I keep 3 separate journals, and the business case, which is that gratitude keeps you out of the scarcity driven decisions you make when you are operating from fear.

What ties all three together

I went into this quarter trying to add horsepower, and every result I am happy about came from taking something away instead. Less consuming, fewer apps, one fewer weekly commitment, and more rest than I have allowed myself in years. Rest turned out to be the productivity strategy, which is an annoying thing for a hustle culture girly to have to write down.

A CEO has to look up to see what is coming, and that is not possible while you are looking down. I had no room to reflect at all before October, and the reflection is where most of the forward movement actually came from.

Do this today

Find an hour this month to think about your business without working on it. Nothing to film, no messages waiting on you and no fires to put out. Just you looking at what you have built and asking whether it is still taking you where you set out to go.

Then find some quiet where you are not consuming anything and not producing anything either.

A long walk without your phone, or 20 minutes in the car before you go inside. Do it on purpose and pay attention to what shows up, because for me that turned out to be the whole thing.

PS: The 90 day lock in thread inside CEO Society is free and holds everybody's weekly check ins, mine included, and a 60 day version started today still lands you well ahead of where January would.