You can’t grow if you’re drowning in client work.

If you’ve been wondering why you haven’t heard from me, I’ve been experiencing some growing pains. Since moving to ghostwriting full time, things started slow…and then the last couple of months went wild. My priority has been delivering top‑quality work for clients, so I’ve been quieter on LinkedIn and in my own newsletters.

It made me think about the growth paradox: we market to grow, then growth makes the marketing harder.

If you don’t fix it, you burn out or your pipeline dries up. So this week, I want to share some of the lessons I’ve learned over the last few weeks that have helped me to become more efficient with the way I work.

Lesson #1: Quantify your time

How much is your time worth?

Most solo operators guess the value of their time, then wonder why the week vanishes. Without knowing how much your time is worth, you have no clear way of knowing the value of hiring someone else to do tasks for you.

There’s an easy formula you can use to figure it out.

Take your annual revenue and divide it by realistic work hours for the year. Then you can evaluate every task up to that rate and either do it, batch it, automate it, or drop it.

Lesson #2: Stop freestyling

Winging your calendar is expensive.

You lose time switching between roles and reacting to alerts and doing whatever ‘feels ' right in the moment. That’s why calendar discipline is so important.

These are some of the changes that I’ve made:

Grouping client calls on specific days.

Protecting morning hours for writing.

Creating short admin blocks every day to avoid pile-ups.

When the calendar decides your day, you conserve energy for the work that moves the business.

Lesson #3: Build simple systems

Anything you repeat needs a process.

Because systems are the first step towards scaling, it might not be the right time to hire someone, but if you act like you can, then you start to find ways to create processes and systems.

And when you have a system mindset, you will find ways to make your processes quicker and simpler.

Plus, it means that when you are ready to hire a VA, the onboarding will be way quicker.

Lesson #4: Protect time for growth

Delivery pays today. Growth pays next quarter.

It’s rare to speak to a potential client today and they become a paying client tomorrow. Usually, there is a lag period. For me, it’s around 6 weeks.

Which means that if outreach stops today, you don’t see the impact until it’s too late.

I’ve learned to put a recurring slot in the diary for outreach and content so that my business doesn’t dry up, regardless of how busy I am.

I’ve lived this as a coach and now again as a ghostwriter.

The answer isn’t more hours. It’s a better use of the ones you have.

This is an email reminder to myself as much as anything.

Did you find this useful?

Let me know!
Mohammed