Some weeks, the wheels just don’t turn.
I had a bag of kopi sitting on my desk from lunch. The hawker centre kind — twisted up tight, swinging in that little plastic bag, still warm when I brought it home.
At 4pm, I noticed it hanging there. Cold and still unopened.
I had forgotten it completely. Me. The person who would IV coffee directly into her veins if she could.
That’s how this week has been so far, last week was infinitely better. Sometimes, trying to get the motivation to work when you are running a business alone, is hard.
There’s no shortage of things to do. I know exactly what’s on the list – if I choose to open up my to-do list tracker.
But knowing what needs to get done and actually doing it are two very different things, and this week the gap between those two things has felt enormous.
I’m supposed to be clearing content cards — 50 to 100 a day. Yesterday I got through 14. One four.
And some of them made me feel genuinely stupid, which is its own special kind of demoralising. Reading secondary school content and Googling things I supposedly studied years ago. All that knowledge, supposedly in there somewhere.
Apparently not.
This is the part of running things alone that nobody really talks about. The days when momentum just… stops. Not because anything went wrong. Not because there’s a crisis. Just because you’re human and some weeks your engine runs at 30%, and the work still needs doing anyway.
I think of it like the swan thing. You know the image. Gliding perfectly along the surface, elegant, unhurried. And then underwater, the feet are going absolutely berserk.
Most weeks I’m both at once. This week, I think I’m just the feet. What I’ve learned, after enough of these weeks, is that forcing it rarely works. The 14 cards are still 14 cards more than zero.
The cold kopi is just a funny story now. And the needle, even when it feels completely still, is usually moving in ways I can’t see yet. That doesn’t make it less frustrating. But it helps a little. If you’re having one of those weeks, too. The kind where everything is happening and nothing is moving — you’re not broken.
You’re just in the underwater part. Keep paddling.