What the Countdown Is Selling

Every week in the summer, the City of Moncton and the YMCA put on a party in a different park. Bouncy castles. A big foam pit. Glitter tattoos and snow cones. You show up, your kids vanish into it, and you stand around on the grass with other parents for a couple of hours. It's honestly one of the better things about summer in this town.

I was at one of those last week, standing with a few other moms, and the conversation turned to school.

They were worried about it. Not the excited kind of worried. The grind kind. The lunches, the supply lists, the alarms, the whole machine starting up again.

And I said, guys. It's August 3rd. We have five weeks. We have tons of time.

I meant it, too.

---

Then the week went on, and I let it in anyway.

Not all at once. But land on my chest it did. That feeling. That worry. Five weeks. And then the other list started running underneath it, the one made entirely of what hasn't happened.

I'll just tell you what's on it.

I had a notebook for this summer. An actual notebook, made in the spring, with a whole curriculum in it. Organized, peaceful, semi-structured activities to do with the kids. I thought it through. I wrote it all out. I was proud of it.

We did none of it.

I started writing a book in June and told myself I'd have it finished by the end of the summer. It's fourteen chapters. I have written one.

And then there's the one that actually stings, because it's my job. For months I've been meaning to build a proper system for our content. Batch it, plan it, get ahead of it, stop living post to post. Instead, everything you see from me online is written the day it happens.

Which is a slightly awkward thing to admit in a newsletter about systems.

---

That's the part I've been chewing on, so let me say it out loud rather than leave it politely unsaid.

I write to you every week about what systems did for our business, and I'm not exaggerating a word of it. The operations side of this company runs. The administration side runs. Colin handed the weight to Judy, and then Judy started handing pieces of it to automations, and both of those were genuine turning points that changed our evenings and our marriage and eventually the whole business.

And then there's my side of it. The writing, the content, the brand. The newest part of what we do and the part with the least structure underneath it. Some weeks I look at that and think, what on earth am I doing. Why can I not get myself into the same easy, quiet, automated place that the rest of this company got comfortable in years ago.

So the raw material was all there this week for a proper pile-on. Five weeks out. A notebook I never opened. Thirteen chapters. And a woman who talks about systems for a living, posting from her phone in a parking lot.

Today I'm consciously deciding not to go there, and I want to tell you why, because I don't think the pile-on is a personal quirk of mine. I think it's being sold to us.

---

Scroll for about eleven seconds right now and you'll find someone telling you the year is nearly gone. Four months left. Most people will waste them. While you're reading this, somebody else is already up. The words change a little and the clock is always running.

And I understand why they do it, because it works. That message converts. It gets shared and saved and it genuinely lights a fire under some people, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend otherwise.

But I want to be precise about what it's working on. It isn't your ambition. Ambition is not in short supply among people who own buildings while holding down a full-time job.

The countdown is only the delivery mechanism. What it reaches for is your shame.

And yes, shame is a powerful motivator. That part is true. It is also one of the worst feelings a person can carry, and it has a habit nobody selling it ever mentions: it does not stay the size you found it. I didn't get to it becomes I never get to it becomes I'm not the kind of person who does faster than you can catch it happening. And once you're at that last one, you are not going to do the thing. Nobody has ever built anything from there.

So here's where I stand, and you should know it, because you're going to keep getting these emails from me. In every document that steers this company, the voice, the marketing, the vision, all of it, shame is the one thing I've ruled all the way out. It doesn't come near this brand. Not as a hook, not as a nudge, not tucked into a P.S. If something I write ever leaves you feeling behind, I've made a mistake and I'd want to know.

---

So here's what I did with the week instead, and it was not strategic.

I got in the backyard with my kids.

That's the whole intervention. I leaned into it on purpose, the way I've had to learn to do, because that is what actually fills my bucket. And an empty bucket has never once produced a chapter.

Maybe the book gets finished in October instead of August. Maybe the content system gets built in September, or maybe it turns out to be a January thing. It won't be on the timeline the woman in the spring picked out for it, and I've decided that's allowed. What I know for certain is which version of me writes the other thirteen chapters, and she is not the one who spent the last three weeks of August calling herself lazy.

Grace, ease, and a bit of compassion are not the soft option here. They're the practical one. They're what produces energy, and confidence, and eventually the work. Shame produces a person who avoids the desk.

That's where I want to be standing when the summer ends.

---

Now let me bring this over to your side of the table, because September does something specific to people who own property.

Your version of my notebook isn't a summer curriculum. It's the refinance you were going to look into in the spring. The conversation with your accountant about your structure that you have now moved forward three separate times. The tenant files you were going to get out of the shoebox and into something searchable. The insurance review. The will. The spreadsheet you were going to rebuild properly instead of patching for the fourth year running.

And in about three weeks, all of it is going to land on you at once. Not because anything actually changes on the first Tuesday after Labour Day, but because September is when we all quietly grade the year.

Here's the thing almost nobody does with that list, and it's exactly why the list is so heavy.

Nobody ever checks whether the items are still true.

You put them on there, and they stay on there. Something you decided in March gets to keep issuing orders in September, carrying all the authority of a decision and none of the information. The version of you who wrote it didn't know what the summer held. She didn't know about the vacancy, or the roof, or the thing with your mother's health, or what rates were going to do. She was guessing, reasonably, with what she had. And you have been treating her guesses as instructions ever since.

Some of what's on your list genuinely still matters, and you'll feel the difference when it's done. Some of it stopped mattering months ago and has been sitting on your chest anyway, because the only person who could retire it is you, and you've been too busy feeling behind to look.

You're allowed to find out which is which before you try to cram any of it into the fall.

The Install

The Expiry Check. One small thing you can put into your business this week.

This takes about twenty minutes, once. There's nothing to set up and nothing to maintain. You need a page and a willingness to look at the list you've been avoiding.

Step 1: Write down everything that didn't happen. All of it. Business and personal, they're on the same nervous system and there's no point separating them. One ugly line each. "Never called the mortgage broker about the renewal on the triplex." "Was going to get the receipts out of the shoebox." "Said I'd take the kids camping." "Meant to sort out the corporate structure question."

Do not explain, justify, or apologize on the page. You're taking inventory, not standing trial.

Step 2: Beside each one, write roughly when you decided it. This is the whole move, and it's the step you won't want to bother with. Do it anyway. June. Last January. Two springs ago. That vague ages ago that means you genuinely can't remember.

Now look at the dates instead of the tasks. Every one of those is a decision made by a person with less information than you have today. Some of them were made by someone in a completely different situation. They've all been talking to you in the same tone of voice regardless, and it's time to find out which ones have earned it.

Step 3: Let AI sort them by whether they're still true. Open any free tool you've already got, ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, and paste this in above your list:

I'm a Canadian real estate investor with a full-time job and a small self-managed portfolio, and my time is the scarcest thing I have. Below is a list of things I told myself I would do and have not done. Beside each one is roughly when I decided it. Sort every item into exactly one of three groups: STILL TRUE (doing this now would genuinely change something for me), EXPIRED (it made sense when I decided it, but the situation has moved on and it no longer earns a place), and NEVER MINE (I took it on because I thought I should, or because someone else made it look necessary). For anything in EXPIRED or NEVER MINE, give me one plain sentence on what changed or why it was never mine, so I can close the file on it. Then pick the single item from STILL TRUE that would take the most weight off me, and give me one small first step I could do this week in under thirty minutes. Do not tell me to do all of them. Do not add anything I did not write. No pep talk and no productivity advice.

My list: [paste]

What comes back is usually about half the length of what you sent, and that is the entire point. The dread was never about the work. It was about the volume, and a good chunk of the volume expired months ago without anybody noticing.

Then do the part that isn't logistics. Go and delete the EXPIRED items from wherever they actually live. The note on your phone, the whiteboard, the back of the envelope, the notebook. A list you keep is a list that keeps asking, and if you leave them sitting there, they will be back on your chest by Sunday. Close the file properly. Then give the one survivor an actual date in the next two weeks, and let the fall have the rest of your attention.

The Expiry Check is a real brick, and it's yours now. Run it once and September will arrive smaller than it looks from here. But a list you audit by hand only stays audited until the next one quietly builds up behind it, and it will, because commitments accumulate in your head faster than any of us clear them out. The layer underneath is the one where the things you've taken on have dates and owners and a place to live outside your memory, so the stale ones surface on their own instead of surviving for years on the strength of never being looked at. That isn't a brick you install from a newsletter. That's the house.

---

So that's the story this week, and it started in a foam pit.

I still think I was right on August 3rd. Five weeks is a lot of time, and it's a lot of time whether or not I write the second chapter in it. What I got wrong was assuming I'd be able to hold that position for a whole month without anything trying to talk me out of it.

I'd like to know what's on your list. Hit reply and tell me one thing you were going to do this summer that didn't happen. That's it, that's the whole ask. You don't have to explain it and I'm not going to hand it back to you with a plan attached. I just think there's something quietly useful about saying it to one other person who isn't going to flinch, and I'd like to be that person this week.

I'll tell you mine again so you're not going first: thirteen chapters, one notebook, and a content system that lives entirely in my head.

The summer isn't over. Neither is anything else.

Next Sunday, I'll be back.

I'm glad you're here.

— Nicole