Marissa Brassfield

@HBCoop_ Hope you’ve been well! 💕

@efficient Hi Marissa! I agree with your assessment and glad to see you on my TL again 😊

In five years, hustle is going to look like a flip phone. The work that used to fill a 60-hour week now fits in 20, and those who see that early get their lives back.

I'm pleasantly surprised by how much joy I've found by protecting a hobby from that spiral. The saying "Do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life" (combined with the new push for everyone to start a side hustle) makes you want to consider every single hobby as your next income source. But there's something profoundly meaningful in doing something just for the love of it.

Every interest I've picked up for two decades got the same automatic evaluation: Monetization potential. Speaking topic, course creation, ebook... The scan ran in the background, measuring each experience against its commercial return.

Question: If you had an extra 10 hours every week, what would you do with it?

I automated our family logistics so well that my husband and I sat down on the couch one night and realized we had nothing to say. The tools give you time. They also make you face what you were using the busywork to avoid.

Set a calendar appointment with yourself for later this week. Thirty minutes. This is where you actually look at the list and decide what happens with each item. Some get done, some get delegated, some get scheduled, and the rest? Cut 'em. Twenty minutes to set up. Thirty minutes to run through it. Your nervous system stops carrying the alarm the moment it trusts something else is holding the list, and trust is built when the appointment actually exists. I bet you'll sleep easier once this is set up.

Open the notes app on your phone and start a new note. Call it "Brain Dump" or whatever makes sense. Write down every unfinished thing rattling around in your head. The doctor's appointment you keep meaning to make, the friend you owe a text, the pile of school forms, the tax thing, the podcast you meant to send your sister. Get it all out. Then leave the note pinned in your recents. The moment you start doing this, more things will surface, so keep adding as they come up. (This is a running list, not a finished one.) Next...

Your brain is not a filing cabinet. It was never designed to be one, but most of us are using it that way and wondering why we can't sleep or fully unwind. The fix is giving your nervous system evidence that something else is holding the list, so it can stop guarding it for you. Here's the setup:

Stop waiting to feel ready. Ready is not coming. Take the fear with you and go anyway.

None of our current rest schedule is a law of nature. The two-day weekend is barely a century old. The word "weekend" first appears in print in 1879, and the Saturday-and-Sunday version only became standard in the 1930s, partly to spread scarce work during the Depression. Someone decided how much rest you get now, and that rule was invented fairly recently, for reasons that had nothing to do with you and your life. What inspires me here is that whatever somebody made up, someone else can remake even better. Especially now, with AI and new ways to make money. I'm reminded of the Maya Angelou line: when you know better, you do better. Yet many of us keep waiting for the people who built the calendar to hand us a better one. They will not, because they are standing inside it, and they benefit from the status quo. If you're reading this, you are among the ones who get to author the next version of work, whether you've done so yet or not. What would you do with 100 or more free days a year?

Did you know that a medieval peasant got over 100 holidays? Let's unpack this, starting with the word itself. Holiday is holy day, softened by time. The medieval calendar set aside over 100 feast and holy days a year, on top of every Sunday. Work stopped and the whole village rested. And the days themselves ran at a gentler pace than we picture. By the economist and sociologist Juliet Schor's account, the peasant's workday paused for breakfast, lunch, a customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Her line: "The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed." Add the seasons, with eight weeks to half the year quiet after harvest and through midwinter, and Schor estimates the whole year came to about 1,620 hours. That's roughly 37 to 60 hours per week during the working season. Now us. Most entrepreneurs don't track hours, but the average American works around 1,800 hours a year, closer to 35 a week, every week, only with no season of rest built in. A first-year investment banking analyst runs 80 to 100. A medical resident is legally capped at 80 hours a week. (That cap was the result of reform.) We tell ourselves the modern workweek is the civilized version. The peasant would laugh. Here's what I'm sitting with this Independence Day weekend...

The to-do list isn't what's breaking you. Trying to carry every bit of it alone is. No help, no systems, running on willpower, and then feeling the exhaustion, guilt, and perpetual depletion like a deep, personal flaw. You can have the things that matter to you. You just build around them. Make the space on purpose, embrace new who's and how's to stop doing it all yourself, and let the structure hold what you were never supposed to hold alone. I've spent two decades helping wildly ambitious humans build lives that don't require their depletion. It's not always easy, but it's often shockingly simple.

Remember that no matter how unsettling the AI takeovers and tech layoffs feel... it's not unprecedented. Every industry has experienced a massive shift. It's just our turn. Detroit auto workers in 80s thought they had jobs for life. Then the plants closed, and a whole city had to figure out what was next. Travel agents in the 90s had busy offices and steady clients. Then travel websites launched, and most of them were gone within a decade. The print journalists of the 2000s worked at papers that had survived a century. Then the internet gutted classifieds, ad revenue collapsed, and the prestige paper laid off half the newsroom. Retail managers in the 2010s ran stores that had been in the mall for generations. Then Amazon took their customers, and retail was never the same. The tech workers of the 2020s thought they'd picked the safest career on earth. Then the layoffs started and the AI tools showed up, and now there's no guarantee. Every one of those was the obvious choice in its decade. Every one of those people watched the floor move. The ones who came through okay weren't the lucky ones. They were the ones who'd built real skills. Genuine relationships, not just connections on a screen. A willingness to learn the next thing before they were forced into it. That part doesn't belong to any one job. It stays with you. You're chasing safety, but it's been within you the whole time.

My husband and I automated our family logistics so well that we briefly ran out of things to talk about. Here is the honest version. I was running our household like a company, and somewhere in the operations I'd turned my husband into an employee and forgotten he was my partner. Who's getting Pierce, what's for dinner. The standup never ended, and it had become our only daily interaction type. Then I automated the recurring orders, the groceries, the activity planning, the whole rolling to-do list of running a family. The logistics started running themselves. Once they did, and once we stopped white-knuckling our way through the week, we sat on the couch and realized neither of us had a question to ask or a detail to confirm. We didn't know what to do with the free time, or with each other inside it. That part was awkward. (No nice way around it.) We had to rebuild a post-kid marriage that wasn't held together by errands. So the Monday hikes came back. Then I picked up gardening, which became a plant propagation habit, and I had room again for my healing work. Those are the highlights of my week now. I don't see enough of us talking about this part of AI adoption. The tools hand you time. They also hand you the question of what you used the busywork to hide from. If you've automated the busywork out of a relationship that ran on logistics, what's underneath when it goes quiet?

Same, and it gets better every day

Be delusional about your potential. Be delusional about your potential. Be delusional about your potential. Be delusional about your potential. Be delusional about your potential. Be delusional about your potential. Be delusional about your potential.

So in 1908, a cotton mill in New England gave everyone Saturday off because a lot of their workers were Jewish and observed the Sabbath. They had to close anyway, so they just closed for two days. That's how the weekend was born: a scheduling fix at one factory. Then in 1926 Henry Ford made the five-day, 40-hour week the standard at his auto plants, and yes he had some great (humanitarian) reasons, but he also literally wrote that workers with leisure time would buy more cars. So was the weekend a gift to workers or more a business strategy that happened to benefit them? Who really knows. FDR locked it into federal law in 1938, and somehow we're all still running on this in a world that looks absolutely nothing like an assembly line from the 20s. Here's where I'm at… You don't have to keep running a hundred-year-old schedule on a body and a life that looks nothing like the ones it was designed for. Your hours, your rhythm, the shape of your week, all of it is yours to design, and what works for you now is going to keep changing. The version of your schedule that fuels you when your kid is two will not be the same one that fuels you when she's twelve, and the version that fits a building phase of your career won't fit a quieter season. So the expectation that a 9-5, 40 hour workweek is required for 50 years? Absurd. If your current schedule is running you into the ground… Congrats, you're human and you're reacting to a system that no longer fits. Social media is far from sunshine and rainbows, but if your feed is anything like mine, you're seeing thousands of people rewriting the way they work and live every day. You're seeing it's possible. And whether you're feeling anger, jealousy, or resentment about it, that's all different ways for your instinct to protect you. Resistance to change is as human as it gets. But change is the only guarantee you get. And there's no reason you can't be next. P.S. The Simplicity Protocol is my weekly newsletter on doing less so you can build the schedule that actually fits your life. Once a week, a five-minute read. Comment "Simplicity" and I'll send you the link.

You can't catch up with AI. Once you start learning, you realize how much there is to know. And it's not slowing down. Tools are evolving weekly. Some of them daily. We grew up before the internet existed. Our kids start coding in elementary school. The next generation is growing up with AI baked into everything, and I mean everything. Classrooms, doctor's offices, the jobs they'll have, the friendships they'll form, the news they'll see (and won't see) in their feeds. So, unless you want to be like Grandma who never learned how to use a universal remote… it's time to start experimenting.

There was a favorite restaurant. A show you'd stay up too late to watch and rant about at any opportunity. A book you reread every fall. A Saturday morning that had nothing to do with anyone else's schedule. It's all still in there somewhere. It's just been a really long time since anyone, including you, asked. You're not boring. You've just been the one holding everyone else's lives together for so long that yours got buried underneath. It's time you found yourself again, don't you think?

There's a difference between being boring and being buried. If having a whole day to yourself sounds equal parts amazing and paralyzing... you've been buried.