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How long does it take you to respond to your emails in the morning? Roughly, I mean.
What about scheduling your newsletter? Or scrolling LinkedIn while telling yourself it's "research"?
I ask this question to nearly every client I coach and to our members during office hours. And every single time, I see the same reaction:
Sheer bloody panic. I get it. Because I used to be the same.
I'm somebody who gets very lost in deep work — especially the stuff I love. Editing videos. Writing copy. Refining a course module until it's just right.
I had no idea how long any of it actually took me.
Until I had a baby - also known as Her Royal Highness.
There's nothing quite like nap time to make you brutally aware of how long tasks actually take. Because suddenly, you've got a hard deadline.
Not the "soft deadline" you set for yourself that slides by three hours. A proper, non-negotiable one: Royal Highness wakes up in 90 minutes.
And that's when I realised: what I thought took me "just a few minutes" was actually taking me forever.
That quick edit? Thirty minutes, minimum. That "quick" caption? Fifteen minutes if I was lucky, more like twenty-five if I got distracted by choosing the right emoji (it matters, okay?).
Having a set amount of time to work before the chaos resumed taught me more about my actual working patterns than any productivity course ever did.
From wild guessing to massively underestimating, most of us have absolutely no clue how long our recurring tasks actually take.