Multiple times in the last few months, I have found myself rewriting another bio.
Then I reconsidered my publication description, my audience, my content pillars and whether my link was sending people to the right place. Next minute I was analysing my pinned posts and considering how I could make them stronger. And one thing led to another until I began to confuse myself.
None of those are unreasonable things to think about when you are building an online business.
The problem was that I could no longer tell whether I was clarifying my direction or desperately trying to control the result.
Every post gave me something else to analyse.
If it received views but no comments, I questioned the call to action. If it reached thousands of people but gained one follower, I questioned my positioning. If people followed but did not enquire, I questioned the offer.
There was always another adjustment I could make.
Because there was always something to optimise, I never felt finished.
I wasn’t running out of content ideas. I was running out of space to hear myself think.
I understand why I fell into this pattern.
I know content can build a business because I have already done it. I grew an education brand to more than 6,000 followers, built an email audience of almost 4,000 people and gained 65 paid subscribers here on Substack.
More recently, my story-led reels have reached millions of non-followers and brought more than 1,200 new people into my audience.
Content works.
That made it easy to believe that if I could find the perfect combination of audience, hook, story, offer and call to action, everything would finally click into place.
So I kept refining.
I kept testing.
I kept looking at what the algorithm rewarded and trying to give it more.
But somewhere in that process, I stopped asking a much more important question:
What do I actually want to build?
Not what could attract the most views. Not what might grow the fastest. Not what another person thought I should sell or how I should market it. Not what the algorithm seemed willing to distribute that week.
What did I want my business and life to look like?
I had not given myself enough quiet time and space to answer that.
When the business stopped fitting around real life
I started building online because traditional work no longer fitted neatly around my family.
I am a former teacher, a medical mum and a homeschool mum. Our life includes appointments, therapies and a level of unpredictability that does not disappear because I have content to create.
The entire purpose of building online was to create more flexibility.
But recently, I noticed that while the business was physically happening around my life, mentally it was taking over it.
Life administration was being postponed. Housework was falling behind. Small tasks were piling up because I was hyper-focused on fixing the business.
Even when I was not creating content, I was thinking about what I needed to change next.
The business that was supposed to support my life was beginning to consume my attention.
A business cannot claim to fit around real life if real life has to keep disappearing to make room for it.
That was when I knew I needed some time away from social media.
Not because I no longer believe in it. Not because I have stopped wanting to grow. And not because I am walking away from my business.
I needed enough distance to distinguish between purposeful work and compulsive optimisation.
Optimisation feels productive because you are always doing something. You are studying analytics, changing your messaging, refining your offer or researching what successful creators are doing.
But continual optimisation can also prevent you from committing long enough to discover whether anything works.
Every disappointing result creates another pivot. Every successful creator presents another model to follow. Every new idea becomes a possible solution.
Eventually, you are no longer building from a clear direction. You are reacting to whatever happened most recently.
I do not think the algorithm created this problem. It simply gave my hyper-fixation somewhere to go.
What I am changing
I still want to build.
I enjoy creating content, experimenting with ideas and understanding why one message connects while another falls flat.
I still want customers, income, impact and growth.
The answer is not to stop caring about results. It is to stop allowing every result to redirect the business.
For now, I am choosing a simpler publishing rhythm: one written article and one Pivot to Impact voice note each week.
I am also learning to record what the data tells me without rebuilding everything around it. A poorly performing post does not automatically mean my direction is wrong. A reel receiving views without enquiries does not require an immediate identity crisis.
Most importantly, I am deciding what I want before asking the algorithm what it wants.
The algorithm may help me distribute an idea. It cannot decide which business I should build, what matters to my family or what I am willing to sacrifice.
Those decisions have to come from me.
Household tasks, homeschooling, appointments, rest and looking after myself are not interruptions preventing me from building. They are the life the business was created to support.
We often describe a sustainable business by asking whether it can keep producing income.
I think we also need to ask whether the woman building it can continue living this way.
Can she maintain her health? Can she remain present with her family? Can she step away from her phone without believing everything will disappear?
I do not want to build a successful business at the expense of the woman building it.
And I do not want to become so responsive to an algorithm that I lose the ability to listen to myself.
So, for now, I am allowing some things to remain unoptimised.
I am creating enough space to decide what deserves my attention before automatically giving it away.
Because the goal was never to build a business that took over my life.
The goal was to build one that could genuinely fit inside it.
Have you ever found yourself stuck in an optimisation spiral? Tell me in the comments what you are reconsidering or stepping back from.
Hi, I’m Trudy
I’m a former teacher and lesson designer, medical mum and online business builder. I write for burnt-out women in online business. About how to build a personal brand and a sustainable business around real life, whilst prioritising the habits that help you age well.
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