I never felt that way.

You see, I was determined to succeed in my career and equally determined to not let my career make me fail in motherhood. So, my days became a relay race.

I’d wake my daughter, give her a bath, help her brush her teeth, and make her a respectable breakfast while babysitting Teams on my phone. By the time I reached my desk, it felt like I’d already lived an entire day.

At work, I’d put out fires and answer hundreds of emails and messages, multitasking through meeting after meeting. I’d borrow a few minutes from the end of one to steal a few bites of food and run to the restroom before diving into the next.

After hours at my desk, I’d head into the kitchen to make my family a balanced dinner, race through the short window between dinner and bedtime, and finally collapse on the couch with my husband, half-watching TV with my phone in hand, looping through email, Teams, Instagram, and back again.

Day after day, through a thousand tiny actions and decisions, I made my life SO small.

Eventually the stress of it all bled into my sleep. Anxiety lived in my chest all day and followed me into bed at night. I was irritable with my husband and on autopilot with my daughter. My hair was falling out, I had to go on blood pressure medication, and I was thiiiissss close to taking a leave of absence just to catch my breath.

Which means, health became another thing on the list. And I was doing all of the things on the list, dammit.

The shreds of free time I had left went to a health rescue mission. Doctor’s appointments. An overnight sleep study. More time at the gym.

Nothing about my time felt like my own.

But I didn’t have a discipline problem, and I definitely didn’t need another planner or task-tracking app.

My problem was that I was time poor.

I was already on a journey to touch back to an older version of myself, so along with reaching out to old friends and colleagues, I decided I should probably pick up a damn book.

One of my early picks was I Know How She Does It by Laura Vanderkam. Vanderkam studies how people actually spend their 168 hours a week rather than how they think they do, and it was through her book that I discovered the life changing magic of doing a time study.

I downloaded her time study template and logged my life in fifteen-minute intervals for two weeks. Every task switch captured in one of the 1,344 cells on the page, with a note about what I was doing, where I was, who I was with.

I felt insane doing it. My margins were already so thin, and here I was spending them on the most tedious task in the world. But I also felt like I couldn’t afford not to. I knew I needed to see where my time was going before I could change anything about it.

When I totaled it up, I cried. Yes, I am a Leo, and yes, we are known to have a flair for the dramatic. But I wasn’t crying because the results surprised me. I cried because seeing it quantified felt like holding a mirror up to my burnout. It was ugly.

I worked fifty-two hours the first week and fifty-five the second. More than half my waking hours were spent on a screen. The extra childcare coverage I was paying for went to more work, not to rest or the gym.

Across both weeks, the time with my family that actually felt nourishing (not tantrum management, not the grueling parts of caregiving, but the good stuff) came to about twenty hours.

And across those same two weeks, the time I spent reading, journaling, or simply existing without input came to less than three.

Despite the grief and guilt I felt for letting things get so bad, I also felt empowered and in control of my time for the first time in years. The beautiful thing about having two weeks of your life color-coded and mapped out in fifteen-minute increments is that it starts to resemble a puzzle.

I started rearranging the pieces and finding new ways for it all to fit together. I asked myself hard questions about why I was doing each task and whether I really needed to be the one doing it, at work and at home.

So much of what I was carrying, I was carrying because I wouldn’t ask for help. I had stubbornly decided, on everyone else’s behalf, that it would be too burdensome to even bring it up, even though nobody had asked that of me, and nobody was holding me to that standard. (Isn’t that wild? When you realize how much of your hell is your own making?)

Sometimes people tell me they’d never do a time study because they’re afraid of what it would say about them. They’re worried it’ll catch them scrolling, or worse, that it’ll finally prove what we’ve always suspected: they’re lazy.

But if you’re anything like me (read: a perfectionist, an eldest daughter, stubbornly carrying way too much for your loved ones and your team and anyone else who leans on you), then I don’t think that’s what a time study does at all.

I think it shows you how little is left for you.

That’s what mine did.

And that’s why I’ve spent the last eleven months building.

That’s right, friends! I’m building an app called Time Spent. It takes what I did with my time study and turns it into something you can do too, but it’s way better than tallying up all of your hours and activities in the tiny cells of a spreadsheet. It does the counting while you log, and what comes back is a picture of your week instead of a wall of cells for you to sort through on your own.

Nobody loses their life all at once. You lose it the way I did. A thousand small decisions, not one wrong on its own, yet, when you look up and you can’t find yourself in what’s left.

So, lets see where your time is going and then start moving the pieces. Let’s get your time feeling like yours again.

Learn more about the app!

If you want to learn more about the Time Spent App and be here when beta testing opens up, subscribe below!

Subscribe now

And if you’re new here, thanks for listening. I’m Tiffany, a multi-passionate mom living in Chicago. I spent the last decade climbing the corporate career ladder, but now I’m officially off the clock and spending my time on the things that light me up the most, like writing this newsletter and building the Time Spent app.

Learn more about me!

More from Tiffany Soroko at Time Spent

“We’re raising a city kid,” he adds, and I’m beaming with my own happiness as we look over to our little girl, her face an expression of serenity as she licks melted ice cream from her hand.

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We’ve just walked a mile through our bustling, vibrant Chicago neighborhood to the ice cream shop. The one with the quirky flavors and neon sign and a window to watch where it all gets made.

I close my eyes and try to remember every detail: the air heavy and thick like a hug, the cicadas humming and pulsing in the background, the way the sunlight brings out the golden strands in my daughter’s hair, the skyline peeking at us down alleyways and odd corners of our walk.

It’s a simple pleasure. A totally mundane evening, but I know we’re both going to remember it forever. That it’ll be a moment we return to again and again.

Summer is coming to a close just as fast as I anticipated. When I quit working in June, I knew it would move like this. And now here we are, just three short weeks away from my daughter beginning kindergarten—her first year of full-time school.

So, August is about savoring summer’s end for me—chasing that feeling from our family ice cream walk.

Speaking of getting into a flow state while creating… ;)

That’s a nod to the thing I’ve been building all summer. It’s an app, also called Time Spent, and at its core, it’s a way to feel more in control over your time and hold onto the evenings like the one my family shared. Those ordinary, joyful moments that so rarely make the to-do list, but are arguably the best investment we can make with our time.

I can’t wait to tell you all about it, same time, same place next week!

Before my nine year stint at Corporate, I had a whole lot of confidence for someone who hadn’t really proven herself yet. I was fresh out of college and working a 9-to-5 I didn’t love when I decided I was going to throw the largest Menstrual Hygiene Day event in the country. No experience, no permission—just an idea and a notebook full of plans.

Not long after, I ended up at a concert standing behind Emily Evans, the Executive Director of the Women’s Foundation of Oregon and someone I really looked up to. So I tapped her on the shoulder. When she asked what I did, I didn’t tell her about my day job—I told her I was launching PDX Red Party, the country’s largest Menstrual Hygiene Day celebration (at the time), and asked if the Foundation would come as a vendor. She said yes, and a few months later, I was watching 150 strangers play period-themed carnival games in downtown Portland.

That same confidence carried me across the country to Chicago, where I signed a lease on an apartment sight unseen. I knew literally one single person in the city (hi, Jen!), and my friends, family, and loose acquaintances all had so many questions about what my life would be like in such a big city, so far away from home. I didn’t know the answers to most of the questions, but I knew that I could and I would figure it out. So I hopped on an airplane with a suitcase full of clothes, a suitcase full of books, my tiny dog, and an unwavering belief in myself.

Because everything was so aggressively brand new to me, I intentionally decided to keep my job as an anchor of stability while I got acclimated to my life in Chicago. My intent was to build up my network for a year or two and then to change jobs to something local.

But soon after I started dusting off my resume and applying for jobs, the world started to shut down as we entered a global pandemic. I was there, you were there, I know we all have our scars, so I won’t rehash that here, but suddenly, changing jobs didn’t seem like the best idea anymore.

A few months later, I got pregnant and then it really didn’t seem like a good idea to leave a job with solid maternity leave benefits.

When I got back from maternity leave, I was offered a leadership position I had been pining after since I started at Corporate, so I stayed and I built a team from the ground up. I loved every minute—watching my team growing in confidence and competence, becoming increasingly independent at a similar rate to that of my child.

What’s that Green Day lyric again?

Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go.

It was around this time my view of my career changed pretty dramatically. I was a young leader who had gone from intern to manager fast, and I led a young team. Somewhere along the way, I got the sense that I wasn’t being taken as seriously because of it.

Instead of shrugging it off, I took it as a challenge and fixated on proving myself to my fellow leaders, surrendering to this deep, almost maddening need for others to see my competence as I saw it myself.

I leaned into the corporate climbing. The schmoozing, the rubbing elbows. I started making long-term plans, envisioning the evolution of my role in years instead of months or something smaller, and viewing my career and my Corporate trajectory as one and the same.

That’s when it stopped being a job and felt more like a marriage.

Like any marriage, it asked for a little more of me over time, and I kept saying yes. Work got the best hours and the sharpest part of my attention, and slowly everything that wasn’t work or my daughter got trimmed away to make room.

Friendships thinned into texts I meant to answer and didn’t. I stopped going to things. I even stopped grocery shopping in person in favor of Instacart and other delivery apps, so every spare minute could go to my daughter and every other minute could go to my desk. In no time at all, I was burnt out, and so far up the corporate ladder I could no longer see that 22 year old girl who’d tapped a stranger on the shoulder and declared herself the founder of an event that didn’t exist yet.

And then Corporate broke my heart.

When you’ve built a whole life with someone, you can’t just grab your keys and go. There’s the lease in both your names, the furniture you picked out together, the friends you’ll have to divide. The months it takes to find a place that’s only yours. Deciding to leave is a single moment—disentangling is the work.

I needed to do the professional version of that.

My professional network, examples of my work and skills, my competency and authority all only existed inside of the four virtual walls of the zoom rooms of my organization. I had not spent any time thinking about what I would do next, and I didn’t have any idea as to how to begin translating any of the work I had done into a new context.

The very first thing I did to change things was sign up for a coworking space. I am a huge champion of remote work. There are so many benefits to working remotely for individuals, teams, and companies alike. But I also know it is imperative that you expand your network in real life—to have an excuse to put on hard pants and get out of your house once or twice outside of weekend plans.

I ended up chatting with the owner for a full hour after touring the space. She asked about my work, about my leadership philosophy, and the conversation was so cup filling, so easy and fun. I felt a little flicker in my soul that I hadn’t experienced in too many years. I have always been good with people. I love to talk and I notice that people seem to enjoy talking with me too. It felt so good to flex that muscle and I felt almost embarrassed that I had let that part of me go dormant for so many years while I chained myself to my desk most days.

Next, I reached out to two of my very good friends who were just beginning their own career transition journeys and set up weekly accountability calls with them. I’ve known these two women for an entire decade and they are two of my most trusted, most respected confidants. They know my working self better than almost anyone—my ambitions, my blind spots, the whole unedited picture—and, over ten years, became some of my dearest friends. So, while we were all in the thick of figuring out our next chapters, I knew we would all be better served to work through some of that together.

Then I started reaching out to people who knew me before I started working at Corporate, before my life in Chicago. And even though I hadn’t done a good job staying in touch and keeping up with any of them, I was delighted to find they all said yes.

These conversations turned that flicker into a flame inside of me. Each call, each conversation was like an opportunity to see myself reflected back to me outside of the org chart, outside the four walls of those zoom rooms.

In the midst of this journey to re-expand my world and find myself outside of Corporate, I randomly opened one of my graduate school program newsletters. I hadn’t opened a newsletter in years, and I was excited to see one of my cohort members, Antha, was the alumni feature—talking about how she was using skills and learnings from the program in her new business Late Breakfast, focused on, of all things, burnout recovery.

I DM’d her and asked to chat.

Like me, Antha had been in her own LTR with a company, having worked there for eight years when she finally took the plunge and left her job to start her own business. I expected her to tell me how much her work-life balance and her mental health improved when she quit, but instead she told me how her burnout worsened when she set out on her own. She said the bad habits that led her to burnout in the first place followed her into her business and that in some ways it was even harder to break them because of the pressure of being a solopreneur.

I remember saying to her on the call, “shit, I think I would do that.”

Some lessons don’t need to be learned the hard way. So, I chose to stay (for a while, anyway—I did eventually leave), but I was no longer in it to prove myself to anyone but me. I put the job on a good-enough autopilot and spent my real energy elsewhere: setting boundaries around my calendar, taking breaks to eat and move my body, flexing muscles I’d let go stiff.

I realized I’d outsourced my self-worth to performance reviews and the approval of leaders I didn’t even respect. At 22 I’d had all the nerve and none of the evidence; by the time Corporate broke my heart, I had the evidence and almost none of the nerve.

One conversation at a time, I got my nerve back.

I remembered my career was never my job title or my place of employment. It’s so much bigger than that. It’s mine.

It turns out that’s a dangerous thing to remember. Because a woman with the nerve and the evidence doesn’t stay on autopilot for long.

She starts building.

(But that’s the next story.)

So, that’s a wrap, friends. If you feel this was time well spent, give this a little heart or leave a comment below. If you think you might want to spend more time with me each week, subscribe to Time Spent.

I’m Tiffany—a multipassionate mom, living in Chicago. I spent the last decade climbing the corporate career ladder, but now I’m officially off the clock and spending my time on the things that light me up the most. Like writing this newsletter. You can learn more about me by visiting my Substack homepage or by visiting my website.

check out my website!

Bye for now.

Before we dig in:

I’d like to invite you to my birthday party. My friends, and , and I all share July birthdays and thought: what better excuse to throw a virtual party? We’ve got cake, we’ve got cupcake, and most importantly we’ve got a little ritual to celebrate our wins and our wishes for the year ahead all together.

So, if you’ve been building in the margins, going through a career transformation, or if you’re just looking for an excuse to dust off your new year’s resolutions, join us! July birthday not required.

You can RSVP here!

My breath is hot against my face as it ricochets off my mask with each exhale. There’s three or four other women, also in masks, spread out across the room. I take an empty seat next to the window, a healthy six foot distance from the others, overlooking a barren Millennium Park.

Sunshine glitters off The Bean as I unfold the paper in my hand to get a better look at my own little bean—a soft white fleck in an otherwise dark and shadowy image.

When I look at the ultrasound, a deep sense of knowing comes over me: you’re a girl. And despite the date printed on the image, I know you’re going to be the birthday gift of a lifetime.

Over the next several weeks, everyone close to your dad and me is placing their bets. There’s a general consensus that you are a boy. But I’m not even a tiny bit surprised when the nurse calls and tells us the good news: that we’ve got a healthy, baby girl on her way to us.

I’m in the shower and your dad is just on the other side of the curtain in our tiny bathroom brushing his teeth as we continue our hours long conversation about what to name you. When he says your name, we know it’s yours. A big name. A name each of the four languages inside you already knows how to say—Polish, Spanish, English, Italian, no translation needed.

When I can’t sleep, I hold my belly and I talk to you. I say your name, and I say my birthday, like a date we’ve already set. Happy, healthy baby. I know you hear me—I know you’ll come.

As we get closer, we start making our birth plan. It turns out you can take the girl out of Portland, but you can’t take the Portland out of the girl. Everyone in Chicago looks at me like I have two heads when I tell them I want a water birth. Everyone from back home shrugs and doesn’t give this second thought.

I’m 39 weeks and just a few days from turning 29. I know first time moms usually go past their due date, but I’m still disappointed there are no signs of labor. My mom flies in for the final stretch. I start my leave early and give myself over to nesting, readying the house for you.

I put up a poll on my Instagram stories and our friends and family start taking bets on when you’ll arrive since my birthday no longer seems realistic. I start mentally preparing for you to arrive past my birthday but I can’t kill the last remaining hope that somehow, someway, I’ll spontaneously go into labor in the next 72 hours and you’ll arrive right on cue.

I’m 39 and 4 when my mom drives me across town for fetal monitoring, at the only hospital in the area that does water births.

“Any chance this baby is coming in the next few days?!” I ask, hopeful.

My midwife laughs — not a chance. I’m not even a little dilated, and you’re still sitting high. She mentions, almost in passing, that my blood pressure is a touch high, but it’s lost in the hour I spend strapped to the monitors with no movement from you. I’m not worried. I know you’re just napping after kicking my ribs all night, but they send us down the street to L&D just to be sure.

“The good news is, your baby is perfectly fine.” The nurse points to the monitor, and there you are, kicking away. Then the doctor picks up where she left off: “But you’ve developed gestational hypertension. We’re going to have to induce you.”

There goes my water birth.

I spend the next two days prolonging my induction, pacing the hospital hallways, and excessively bouncing on the yoga ball hoping that my body will go into labor without having to bring out the big guns of Pitocin.

I wake up on my 29^th birthday in a hospital bed, tired and anxious. Ready or not, my midwife says it’s time to serve you your eviction notice and we make plans to start Pitocin.

“Well, at least she’ll probably come on my birthday!” I say but my midwife quickly corrects my assumption saying that I’ll more than likely labor through the night and not meet you until the next morning.

I don’t have much time to lament this assertion because the contractions start rolling in as if they’re making up for the lost time of the last 48 hours. After several hours, the pain overtakes the greatness of my fear of needles and I’m begging for an epidural.

My husband is relieved to know I’ll have some relief soon and horrified when a woman we’ve since affectionately nicknamed Marilyn Manson strolls into my hospital room, chains clinking against her studded belt. I swear I see cargo pants and combat boots peeking at me from under her hospital dressings as I’m hunched over a peanut ball like a cat, gripping my husband’s hands and bracing for impact.

It doesn’t work.

Everything’s fuzzy after this, but I know at some point I’m in distress and you’re in distress and my room is suddenly flooded with midwives and nurses and doctors and it’s sheer chaos.

It’s four in the afternoon and I’m still only four centimeters along.

We go for another epidural but this time they kick my husband and my doula out so I’m left to face one of my biggest fears alone. This one takes and things begin to progress.

Somewhere along the way, I fall asleep for an hour or so. They wake me up at 9PM and we start the Pitocin again.

At 11PM we start pushing. My husband holds one of my legs up by my ear, my doula the other. Still hopeful and a little naive, I float the idea one last time: maybe she’ll come on my birthday after all?

My midwife laughs and assures me I’ll be pushing well into the night.

You’re crowning now. I ask for the time. 11:45PM.

There’s no way. I’m tired. Having birthdays just a day apart is still cool.

I keep pushing.

When they finally put you onto my chest, you’re covered in blood and vernix and my hands are immediately filled with your shit.

But there you are: the best birthday gift I’ve ever received.

11:56PM.

***

A young woman with big hair leans against the wall, mindlessly wrapping the phone cord around her fingers.

“I don’t know mom. Let me ask him.”

He lifts the calendar off the wall and flips to July. He hovers his finger over the dates, scanning back and forth until he places it firmly on a seemingly random Thursday in the month.

“Here,” he says, “this is when she’ll be here.”

She laughs and rolls her eyes and continues her conversation with her mom.

A few months later, the baby is growing much faster than they expected. The doctor tells her the baby’s coming sooner than the August date they’d planned for and sends her to the front desk to schedule a C-section.

She’s a little stunned, a little unsure but she takes the directive anyway and schedules a date to meet her firstborn child.

“I think I have something that day,” she worries aloud. The receptionist chuckles as she tells her she’s going to have to reschedule whatever it is because now she’s going to have a baby.

When she gets back home, she sees the calendar on the wall. Thursday, July 23^rd is already circled in red.

She calls my dad to tell him the news.

***

Every year on my birthday, I’d crawl into bed next to my mom and she would tell me my birth story. Even though I’ve heard it 34 times now, I still feast on every detail.

I’ve always loved that I was brought into the world in such a mystical, magical way because my dad predicted my birthday. But that sense of magic increased tenfold when my daughter was born on my birthday too.

Some might call it a coincidence.

Some might say my dad and I manifested our babies.

But I say my daughter and I were always meant to belong to each other, our stories forever intertwined.

So, that’s a wrap, friends. If you feel this was time well spent, give this a little heart or leave a comment below. If you think you might want to spend more time with me each week, subscribe to Time Spent.

Subscribe now

And if you’re new here, thanks for being here!

I’m Tiffany—a multipassionate mom, living in Chicago. I spent the last decade climbing the corporate career ladder, but now I’m officially off the clock and spending my time on the things that light me up the most. Like writing this newsletter. You can learn more about me by visiting my Substack homepage or by visiting my website.

check out my website!

Bye for now.

RSVP

Building something in the margins of your life is lonely work. You spend a great deal of time and effort on an article you’re really proud of, hit publish, and it largely vanishes into the feed. You tinker and fiddle with your app for hours, push it live to the App Store and refresh, refresh, refresh, waiting for the downloads to start rolling in. You hit submit on your LLC application between bites of food at your desk between meetings. The milestones are small, sometimes even too insignificant to share to the group chat.

Jen and I had been on our own lonely journeys, building and exploring work outside of our 9-5s for a few months, when we both mustered up the courage to connect with someone in our Substack orbit. Coincidentally, we both took our first shots with the same person: Rebecca.

If you told our moms back in the 90s that we’d be throwing a joint birthday party with people we met on the internet, they would have grounded us for life.

So it’s a good thing it’s 2026 and we’re only getting older and wiser, which means we’re wise enough to know the value of surrounding yourself with people who get it–even if you found those people online!

That’s why we’re excited to invite you (yes, you!) to Wins & Wishes: A Substack Birthday Bash on Sunday July 26th at 4PM EST/3PM CST/1PM PST.

Count me in!

We’re using our July birthdays to share in the celebration of reflecting on our wins from the last year and setting wishes for the year ahead in the company of other women who get it. You know those accomplishment ceremony cakes you’ve seen all over social media? We’ve created a virtual version of that using AI.

So, whether you’re celebrating your birthday this month too, or just want a mid-year checkpoint to dust off your New Year’s resolutions, we’ve got a slice of cake with your name on it.

You don’t want to miss it!

Save my seat!

About the Birthday Ladies:

Jen Nordhem works in tech by day and on the side she teaches moms about AI. She’s building her ideal portfolio career in public, which includes community building and AI education (AI is for Moms) and product building (Moms’ Night Out). She’s a mom to two boys and lives in New York. You can also find her dabbling on Instagram at @jenmakesworkwork.

Rebecca Spitzer is a mom of two who has been building relationship platforms for mission-driven organizations for decades. She’s now building her own apps in the margins: a party planner, an AI idea notebook, and a dashboard for Substack friendships. She has always loved planning birthday parties, especially custom craft stations - including, famously, decorating AOL CDs with puffy paint in 1999.

Tiffany Soroko is a multi-passionate mom in Chicago who spent the last decade climbing the corporate ladder. Now she’s officially off the clock, writing, building, and taking her time back to spend it on the things that light her up.

It’s been a minute. I did the thing I seem to always do when life flings me into a tornado of stress and retreated like a cat in labor. Which is to say I pulled a disappearing act. Which is to say I haven’t posted anything here since the week prior to Mother’s Day.

So, let’s talk about it.

I’ve written about this in different ways over the past year. But basically: one day in 2025, in the depths of burnout, I woke up and realized I’d made my life small without meaning to. Just keeping my head above water—a demanding job, early motherhood—had left me no capacity for the parts of life that really fuel your soul.

I also realized my entire professional network existed within the four virtual walls of the company I had worked at for nearly a decade. Please note: out of respect for the company, I will not be using its name and will lovingly refer to it as Corporate in the rest of this essay.

I realized I had no idea what I would do if I wasn’t climbing the ranks at Corporate as I’d planned, and no idea how to translate everything I’d done there to a new context.

I hated that feeling of being on my back foot. So I resolved then and have invested so much since in meeting myself professionally outside of Corporate in the last year and a half.

I knew burnout had left me in such bad shape and that I needed to buy myself time and space to get clarity around my next chapter, so I declared Corporate my cornerstone of stability—the vehicle for funding my prototypes of a life outside of its ecosystem—knowing that launching myself into scarcity mode by removing my income would only make it harder to achieve clarity.

In other words, and in true millennial fashion, I chose to keep my job and detach from the politics. To disengage from the toxicity, to funnel all of my hunger for growth and development into work outside of Corporate instead of in service of the mission. Basically, to put Corporate on autopilot while I got my life and my spark back.

I believe we’re calling that quiet quitting these days.

Pretty quickly, I realized I don’t really want to be in a 9-5 at all. I started prototyping a portfolio career—trying on business ideas and models in a lower-stakes way. I even invented a physical product meant to foster healthy time and routine management skills in kids with increasing independence (but more on that later).

So when I returned from a long weekend to an 8AM call from my boss, sniffing around my bandwidth to take on an emerging “complex” project, I panicked and spent a week in a liminal paralysis. Which is where you last saw me on Substack talking about perfectionism as a scarcity response from the inside of my own scarcity spiral.

If you’ve ever worked a 9-5 of your own, then you know that sometimes a question is really a directive, and even though this new work was framed as needing only 10-12 hours a week, I knew from the pit in my stomach that I was being voluntold for a 50-60 hour work week to accommodate this new project. I knew I was about to say goodbye to autopilot, work-life balance, capacity to explore a side hustle, and getting dinner on the table for my family on time.

And I was right.

The following week I was officially and unceremoniously oriented to the new work on a half-hour call before my boss went on PTO for a week and was unavailable for questions. The clock started on a four-month project in which I was meant to “fix” an area of the business I hadn’t ever touched before. Had I expressed interest in growing in that business function? No. Was I a project manager? Also no. Have I ever even worked with the teams involved? Nope. Was I expected to hard launch the initiative on a kickoff call scheduled just a week later anyway? You betcha!

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take issue with the fundamental approach to the initiative (I definitely did), but I wasn’t afraid of the work—I honestly think I could have pulled it off. But at what cost?

Quick side note here: if you want my work to keep showing up in your inbox instead of hoping you’ll remember to check in on me, subscribe to Time Spent!

Getting back to the story:

Even though I knew and felt all of that in my gut, it turns out old instincts die a slow death, or whatever the expression is, because I found myself frantically trying to succeed in this new work that was wholesale not mine anyway. I learned that I have a stubborn refusal to fail and when I’m thrown into the deep end without a flotation device, I figure out how to swim.

I ended up beating myself up for about two weeks because I was stressed to the max and all of those mindset, work-life balance things I had been working on (and succeeding with) were suddenly not working at all. I felt like I was failing. Like if I just tried a little harder to disassociate, detach, white-knuckle, and pretend that the project wasn’t a red flag by every measure, then maybe my hair wouldn’t fall out, and I wouldn’t end up grouchy, resentful, on blood pressure meds again, and up all night with insomnia this time.

And then finally the voice of reason cut through all of that noise for me. My life’s lesson was no longer about how to stay and work through it. I had stayed and worked through so much in nine years.

No. My lesson was to trust myself. To trust that the work I had done in the last year and a half would point me to something new.

My husband was traveling for work somewhere in the middle of all of this—his flight canceled due to the Midwestern spring thunderstorms. He arrived home in the middle of my kickoff call and when it ended, instead of turning off my camera and turning to him to greet him with a kiss, I looked up at him and said flatly, “We need to start talking seriously about picking a day for me to quit.”

Flash forward to a week later.

The air in NOLA is thick and damp, and Corporate has arranged for all 1300 conference attendees to march from the event center to The House of Blues for the welcome reception. The weight of my resolve sits heavier here, among people I’ve known and loved working with for years, than it ever does over Teams, but I’m trying to use this rare in-person opportunity as a last hurrah. It’s a chance to say a secret goodbye to my cherished colleagues.

But it also kind of feels like I have a giant sign floating above my head that reads “SHE’S GOING TO QUIT NEXT WEEK” in big block letters. So, I’m trying to act natural.

Luckily, it starts raining as literally a thousand people are desperately trying to enter the building through a single entrance, and by the time I make it inside, my hair and my white shirt are completely soaked through. The perfect excuse for being a little “off” as I make my way through a few hundred Hey! So good to see you! Can you believe this is the first time we’re meeting in the flesh?! Yes, ha ha ha, I totally got caught in that rain, isn’t that so silly?!

Somehow, a friend and I get separated from our herd and we find ourselves in a room with a short line forming for a tarot reading. I’m immediately tugging at her sleeve and convincing her to wait in line with me—we will find the rest of the group later.

After about twenty minutes chit chatting as the line inches forward, it’s my turn.

“Is there anything you want to ask the cards?”

With a raised eyebrow and a smile playing at my lips, I lean into The Reader.

“I don’t know. Are you going to report what we ask back to Corporate?”

She gasps and quickly reassures me.

“No! Of course not. You wouldn’t believe how many people have asked me if they should quit their job with their boss standing right there.”

We both glance over to the line of my fellow 9-5ers. My dear friend and colleague that I had talked into waiting for this tarot reading is at the front smiling and waving at me.

I smile and quickly wave back and then return my gaze to The Reader.

“That’s what I want to ask.”

This time the smile is playing on her lips as she flips the little sand timer next to her and says, “let’s get to work then.”

As she sets the altar and prepares the cards, I take a moment to look around the room. It’s deafeningly loud and there are hundreds of people milling about, carrying small plates of lukewarm buffet food and drinks from the open bar. I see a group of colleagues I’ve only ever seen in the Brady Bunch boxes of a Zoom room before and squint a little at them as if that will help me reconcile the two dimensional version of them I’m used to seeing with the version in front of me now that includes visibility to their legs. One of them is an entire foot taller than I would have guessed.

I turn back to the table and The Reader is ready for me to handle the deck. I close my eyes for a second and take in a deep breath.

I already know I’m about to bring my nine-year career at Corporate to an end, yet I feel the weight I’ve placed on these cards to confirm that for me. I shuffle and split the deck decisively and push it back to The Reader.

She lays down four cards in front of me, beginning at the bottom of the diamond shape and moving counterclockwise. She literally throws her head back to laugh when the second card hits the table.

“Okay,” she says, “this is very clear.”

The Reader points to the first card and tells me to look closely.

“See how he’s holding onto, almost guarding his coins. This card represents stability.”

She points to the second card on the table, names it the eight of cups, and chuckles again.

“Do you see how he’s walking away from all of the golden cups there?” she continues.

“You can’t receive with your hands grasped so tightly around stability. You’re meant to walk away from that stability. You’re meant to go on a journey and see what else is out there for you.”

At the top of the diamond is the Six of Pentacles , which depicts a man holding a scale, weighing coins between two kneeling men. The Reader asks if I’ve felt undercompensated or like my work-life balance has been out of sorts in my current role, and I give her an emphatic “yes” to both.

She explains that this card represents a recalibration of sorts, and that the journey I’m meant to go on should restore a sense of balance for me.

“But,” she cautions as she points to the final card in the spread: Temperance. “This card here is asking you for patience on this journey. And to beware of binaries.”

I feel that in my gut and will replay her words over and over in my head no fewer than a thousand times in the weeks that follow The Reading.

Some more of my work peeps have found my other colleague in line when I’ve wrapped up. They see me beaming as I walk back over and my colleague takes my place. One asks, “what did your reading say?” and I give her a cheeky expression and respond, “it said I should quit!” and we both pause for a beat before erupting in laughter.

The following Wednesday, I’m back at my desk at home, and back to my business mullet which consists of a dress shirt up top and soft pants and slippers on the bottom out of view of the camera.

I’ve just hit send on my resignation email to my boss, with HR copied and I’m cracking my knuckles, limbering up to send the heartfelt letter I’ve prepared to my department colleagues announcing my departure.

My Teams app sprouts a little red circle letting me know I have a message waiting for me.

Just got your message. Can we chat?

My boss asks if there’s anything we can do to get me to walk back that resignation. I guess in addition to being allergic to failure, I also learn I have a hard time closing doors without peeking my head inside to see if I might like to go in.

It takes three business days for me to receive their counteroffer: more pay, more resources, finally feeling heard about my concerns with the project and how we were operating. But I know in my gut when they call with the offer details that I’m not going to take it. I text everyone in my inner circle and tell them the news, but I don’t share that formally with Corporate until I log back on after Memorial Day Weekend.

The truth is, I was going to quit no matter what those cards told me that night. The truth is, even if they came back with an offer too hard to turn down, my staying would have only been temporary. All roads were leading to separation.

Saying goodbye to the place I feel raised me, in a way—the anchor of stability in my life for the past nine years—was not easy. My Corporate journey had many ups and downs—many long stretches where I flirted with leaving. Long stretches where I felt things couldn’t get worse there. I kept enduring because of the people and because I’ve seen things turn around and chaos yield new opportunities.

I started as an intern when I was just 25 and only halfway through my graduate program and worked my way up to management. Corporate and the community I built in it were there for me for pretty much every significant life milestone.

About a year in, I submitted my final graduate school paper, earning me a Masters Degree and the freedom to pick up and move to Chicago with nothing but a luggage full of clothes, a luggage full of books, my little dog, and my Corporate laptop.

“Corporate will be a stable force for me as literally everything in my life is new and I’m getting settled in Chicago” I told everyone.

I didn’t know then that it would also be the stability to get me through the world shutting down, bringing my baby into the world, and raising her up through the toddler years. That my timeline for leaving would be pushed out so many times by new growth and opportunities or by my own need for something predictable and familiar during times where the world around me felt so uncertain.

And I am so grateful I had that when I needed it.

But now I’m walking away from that stability and it’s time to start my journey.

I can’t receive with a hand grasped so tightly around stability.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride as I figure out what I’m meant to receive in this next chapter.

So, that’s a wrap, friends. If you feel this was time well spent, give this a little heart or leave a comment below. If you think you might want to spend more time with me each week, subscribe to Time Spent.

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I’m Tiffany—a multipassionate mom, living in Chicago. I spent the last decade climbing the corporate career ladder, but now I’m officially off the clock and spending my time on the things that light me up the most. Like writing this newsletter. You can learn more about me by visiting my Substack homepage or by visiting my website.

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A note for my longtime readers: you subscribed to It Takes a Mom, and this landed in your inbox as Time Spent. Not a glitch. It Takes a Mom was always really about time anyway: how we spend it, how we lose track of it, how we live whole years on autopilot. The name just caught up to what it was always about. You're still in the right place.

Building trust takes deposits. Small consistent ones. Showing up when you say you will. Following through. Listening. Being honest even when it’s uncomfortable. You build up a balance over time, and that balance is what lets you navigate the hard stuff. When you have to deliver bad news or ask for something difficult, you’re making a withdrawal. And if you’ve been making deposits all along, the account can handle it.

But if you’ve only been withdrawing? If you’ve been taking and taking without putting anything back? Eventually there’s nothing left. The relationship can’t absorb anything. One hard conversation and the whole thing collapses.

I’ve used this metaphor for years, but only ever to look at individual relationships. One account at a time. I’ve never stepped back and looked at my whole life as a portfolio.

Early last year, I was in total despair. I wrote about this recently, how my world had shrunk down to the size of my laptop, how work became the only place I was investing, how a series of curveballs knocked me flat because I had nothing to fall back on.

But it really only took a few months before I felt like myself again. Not perfect. Not finished. But genuinely okay in a way I hadn’t been in years.

How did that happen? Three months from desperate to steady. What changed?

I kept turning it over, trying to understand what I’d actually done. And I kept coming back to this idea of deposits and withdrawals.

I heard someone talking about her life as a portfolio. Different areas she was trying to invest in. And something clicked.

I started thinking about my own life that way. Not just “work” and “everything else,” but four real areas where my time and energy were going every day: myself, my career, my closest people, and my broader community. My health, my ambitions, my marriage and friendships, the world I was building around my daughter.

When I looked at it honestly, the picture was brutal. I’d been treating my life like it only had one account. Career. I was pouring everything into that one place and letting every other area run dry.

I wasn’t just tired. I was bankrupt everywhere except one place.

And then that one place started making withdrawals too.

When work got hard, it didn’t stay contained. The stress bled into my sleep. The anxiety lived in my chest all day and followed me home at night. I was irritable with my husband. Short with my daughter. My blood pressure was out of control. My body was keeping score.

The one area I’d been investing in wasn’t just failing to hold everything. It was actively draining the areas I’d already emptied. I had nothing in the bank and the hits kept coming.

That’s what burnout actually is. Not just exhaustion. A portfolio that’s gone to zero everywhere, with one overloaded area that’s now taking from the rest.

When I started to climb out, I didn’t do it by resting. Rest is important, but rest alone doesn’t rebuild what’s been depleted for years.

I started investing.

I set up weekly calls with my closest friends. That was an investment in my inner circle. In my sense of being known by people who knew me before all of this.

I joined a coworking space and reached out to old colleagues and mentors. That was an investment in my village. In my professional identity outside of my current job. In relationships that reminded me I had value beyond my org chart.

I started talking to other parents at the playground. Setting up playdates. Volunteering at my daughter’s school. More village. Building a life in this city I’d chosen so intentionally and then neglected for years.

I started paying attention to where my energy was going. Not just my time, but my best energy. I stopped giving my sharpest thinking to problems at work I couldn’t control. I stopped spiraling. I redirected that energy into things I could actually affect. That was an investment in myself.

Each investment was small on its own. But they compounded. The more I invested outside of work, the more capacity I had. The more grounded I felt. The more I could absorb the hard stuff when it came, because I had reserves again.

I’m sharing this because I spent years not seeing what was happening. I thought I was just tired. I thought I just needed to push through to the next milestone at work and then I’d feel better.

I didn’t need to push harder. I needed to invest differently.

And honestly, even that’s only half the picture. Where your time goes matters. But I’ve been realizing that how you spend those hours matters just as much. You can pour time into your career and feel alive doing it, or you can pour time into your career and barely remember doing it. Same area, completely different experience. I’m still working through what that means, and I’ll write more about it soon.

But the portfolio piece was the first unlock. Seeing that I had four areas of my life that needed investment, and I’d been pouring into one while the others went bankrupt.

If your life feels like it’s running on empty, it might might be because everything you’re doing is going into one place. And when that place takes a hit, there’s nothing else to hold you up.

The question isn’t just “where is my time going?”, but, “where am I investing? And where have I been withdrawing for so long there’s nothing left?”

You might not like what you find when you look. I didn’t.

But it was so worth it. Because now I can see that in my recovery, I was building something. Every investment I was making—in my friendships, my community, my sense of self outside of work—was developing a capacity I hadn't known I needed. I'll write more about that soon.

I could have gone home to see my family or hosted them here. I deliberately said no. I was too stressed, too overwhelmed, too empty to handle the logistics of being around the people I love most. So it was just me, my husband, and my daughter. A quiet Christmas that felt more like hiding than resting.

I told myself it was fine because she wouldn’t remember.

But I remember. I remember not having the capacity to carry the mental load of the holidays on top of everything else. I remember feeling like even the bare minimum was almost too much. I remember thinking this is just a season, I’ll come back to myself eventually.

I didn’t, though. Not for a while.

So how did I get there?

I had been working remotely for years before the pandemic, but when lockdown hit, I was only about a year and a half into building a life in Chicago. Tentative friendships. The beginnings of a network. Roots that hadn’t taken hold yet.

And then everything froze. The meetups stopped. The networking events disappeared. After being online all day for work, I couldn’t bring myself to log on again for virtual happy hours with friends back home. I just didn’t have it in me.

When your social life disappears, your job fills the space. My coworkers became my only community. My Teams channels became my water cooler. My laptop became the container for almost every meaningful interaction I had. I didn’t notice how small my world was getting because I was still so busy inside of it.

Then I got pregnant.

I think all new parents go through a haze. Your world narrows to feedings and sleep schedules and just getting through the day. You tell yourself you’ll resurface eventually. When the baby is older. When things settle down. When you can think straight again.

But I entered motherhood and leadership at the same time, and that haze never really lifted. Instead of resurfacing, I leaned harder into work. I kept chasing growth in my career, kept saying yes to more, kept thinking that if I could just reach the next level I would finally feel like myself again.

It didn’t work that way.

The more I climbed at work, the more I was pouring my best energy into problems I couldn’t control and ending my day at home with nothing left. I was giving my sharpest thinking to my job and leaving scraps for everything else. My husband and I stopped making plans together because we were both just trying to get to bedtime. I stopped texting friends back because I was too depleted by the end of the day. I stopped doing anything that was just for me because there was always something more urgent.

Unfortunately, even the hours I was pouring into work weren’t good hours. I was getting things done, sure. Checking boxes. Keeping the machine running. But without replenishing myself in any other domain of my life, even the work became grinding.

My world had shrunk down to the size of my laptop screen. That’s not a metaphor. My community, my friendships, my sense of self... they all existed in this virtual ecosystem that was draining me. And outside of it? I had almost nothing.

And then work went from hard to harder.

A series of curveballs hit at the same time. Things outside my control that made my job, the one place I had been pouring everything into, suddenly feel unstable. The details don’t matter. What matters is that I had spent years withdrawing from every other part of my life, and when the one thing I was invested in started shaking, I had nothing left in the bank.

No reserves. No safety net. No other sources of identity or support or joy to fall back on.

My body started keeping score. I wasn’t sleeping. My blood pressure was out of control. I was irritable with my family, snapping at the people I loved most. I was anxious all the time, the kind of anxiety that sits in your chest and doesn’t leave. I was this close to taking a leave of absence. This close to starting medication just to get through the day.

I had built a life with no shock absorbers. And I was falling apart.

One morning I woke up and thought: I’m not going to live like this.

Not “I should probably make some changes.” Not “maybe I’ll try to find more balance.” Just: I’m not going to live like this. Something has to be different. Now.

That wasn’t a goal. I didn’t write down a 90-day plan or set a target. It was more like a direction. A line in the sand about what I was willing to keep accepting. And from that direction, I could figure out what to do next.

So I stopped waiting to feel ready and I started moving.

I set up weekly calls with two of my closest friends. I joined a coworking space. I reached out to five former colleagues from my more entrepreneurial days, including three who had always been like mentors to me. All of this within maybe a month.

I stopped spiraling about things at work I couldn’t control and started putting that energy into things I could. I volunteered at my daughter’s school. I started actually talking to other parents at the playground and setting up playdates, so that I could have community and my daughter could too.

Each conversation, each coffee, each small investment outside of my corporate world felt like coming home to myself. I started to remember who I was before my entire identity got swallowed by my job title. I started to feel more stable. More grounded. More like a whole person instead of just a function.

The more I invested outside of work, the more capacity I had.

I’m not sharing this because I think my story is unique. I’m sharing it because I know it’s not.

I know there are other women whose worlds have shrunk down to the size of their laptops. Other moms running on fumes and telling themselves it’s just a season. Other people pouring their best energy into work and wondering why they feel so empty everywhere else. Other people one or two curveballs away from discovering they have nothing to fall back on.

If that’s you, I want you to know there’s a way out. You have to start looking honestly at where your time and energy are going. You have to start investing in the parts of your life you’ve been neglecting, even when it feels like you don’t have the bandwidth. You have to start believing that filling your own cup isn’t selfish, because it’s truly what makes everything else possible.

The work now is about protecting what I’ve rebuilt. Making sure the new patterns stick. Noticing when I start to slip back into old habits and course correcting before I end up back where I started.

This year was different before December even started.

We put the tree up early. I watched my daughter place the star on top, her face lit up by the glow of it. We had breakfast with Santa. We walked around looking at Christmas lights. I had everyone’s gifts bought and wrapped weeks before Christmas, sitting under the tree like they belonged there. I made the plans for my family to fly in. I had the capacity for all of it.

And then a respiratory virus ripped through our family in the early part of December and a stomach bug meant within 24 hours of my family landing in Chicago, we were all hunched over buckets and passing saltines around. That’s how we spent Christmas day: my whole family sick together in my living room.

I’m not going to pretend that was magical.

But my daughter had already gotten her magic. She’d gotten weeks of it even, and I’m the one who gave it to her.

That’s what this work is for. Not a perfect life. Just enough in the tank to show up for the one you have.

My daughter will remember this Christmas season. And I’m so proud I could give that magic to her.