The List I've Been Keeping for Three Years

I packed the car at eleven o'clock at night.

Not because anything had gone wrong, but because that is simply how the week before this trip ends every year. Me in the driveway in the dark, working right up until the last possible minute, rearranging the same four bags into a trunk that will not close no matter which way I turn them.

We're at the beach this week. Lockeport, Nova Scotia, which is a tiny town on the South Shore, and we have come here every summer for four years now. We stay in a little collection of cottages right on the sand.

I wish I could properly explain the place to you. It is one of those towns that has quietly collected the most interesting people in the country. There's an old Hollywood actress who walks the beach every morning with a tiny dog. There's a former CEO who now plays the saxophone. There are artists everywhere. Some years we're here for the Harmony Festival of Women and Song, which is exactly as lovely as it sounds. It is genuinely hard to imitate, that town. I've stopped trying to describe it to people and started just bringing them.

---

Here's the honest part, and it's the reason I wanted to write to you from here.

Getting to this week is stressful. Every single year. And even once we've arrived, work still finds its way in. There are always a few things that have to get done, and when they do, they take something away from what this week is supposed to be. Not all of it. But some. And I feel the difference.

I'm also very good at being hard on myself about it. That part comes free. It is so easy for me to look at the stress and the impatience and the eleven o'clock car and decide that the whole thing is evidence of a flaw. That I left it to the last minute again. That a more organized person would have been packed on Wednesday and calm on Thursday and would not have snapped at anybody on the drive.

That's my nature. I suspect it might be yours too, or you wouldn't be reading a newsletter like this one.

So this year I tried something different. I tried to come at it on purpose. And going at it on purpose meant, for once, actually looking at what I was doing instead of just doing it and grading myself afterward.

---

That's when I noticed the list.

I have been keeping a list for this trip for three years. Adding to it every year, quietly, without ever once thinking of it as a thing I had built. It has grown sublists. How many shirts and how many pairs of shorts per person. How many bathing suits, which is more than any reasonable person would guess, because nothing ever truly dries at the beach. It reminds me to bring the little homemade dragonfly pins that, for reasons I cannot explain, keep the black flies off.

And it isn't only mine. Colin's mom and I have worked out a meal plan, so that the week doesn't turn into somebody standing in a cottage kitchen at five o'clock wondering what on earth we're feeding six people. We're lucky enough to have both grandmas here with us. And my mom is the reason our house back home isn't sitting in total disarray while we're gone.

I looked at all of that this year and had a small, quiet realization that I've been turning over ever since.

I'm actually pretty good at this.

Not perfect at it. Good at it. Three years of noticing what went wrong and writing it down so it wouldn't go wrong again is not "leaving things to the last minute." That's a system. I built it one summer at a time, and then I gave myself exactly zero credit for it, because I was too busy grading the last-minute part.

I wasn't leaving it to the last minute. I was running a system I built one summer at a time.

---

I've been reading \Start With Yourself\ by Emma Grede, and there's a line of hers that has been sitting with me all week:

I believe in luck, but I don't believe in accidents. I think that you have to be really purposeful and really focused.

— Emma Grede

She says something similar about manifesting, that you cannot manifest your way alone into anything, and that it has to meet real work. Which sounds obvious written down, and is not obvious at all when you're living it.

Because here's what that means for a week like this one. Nobody gets handed a week where their head is actually empty enough to be at the beach. That week is not luck and it is not a personality trait. It is a series of things somebody set up on purpose, most of them well before anyone got in the car. The meal plan. The list. The grandma who's watching the house. The work you pushed hard to finish so it wouldn't follow you.

And you can't control everything, obviously. We can't see the future, and something will still go sideways this week, and that's fine. But if you've set yourself up for the thing you want, the thing you want gets a lot more likely.

---

Now let me bring this over to your side of the table, because I think most operators I know have this exactly backwards, and I did too.

You've probably had the version of the trip where the business came with you. Rent day landed mid-week. The contractor needed a decision. An insurance renewal came due while you were three provinces away with bad signal. And afterward, you likely filed that under a personal failing. You should have been better at putting the phone down. You should have been more present.

The Install

The Reverse-Engineered Week. One small thing you can put into your business this week.

I don't think that's what happened. I think the week got eaten because nothing was set up to stop it from being eaten, and no amount of willpower on a beach chair was ever going to fix that on the day.

Which means the prep is not the tax you pay for the time off. The prep \is\ the time off. The week you get to actually be in is the week you set up three weeks before you left.

And here is the part I like best about it, because it's the closest thing to compounding you'll find outside a spreadsheet: a list like mine gets better every year and cheaper to run every year. Year one it's a scramble. Year three you're just reading it. The work you did in a previous summer is quietly paying you this summer, while you're on the sand, doing nothing.

You've probably already built more of this than you're giving yourself credit for. That's the other half of what I'm asking you to do this week.

This takes about twenty minutes, once, and it produces something you keep. You don't need to be going anywhere soon for it to work. You just need one block of time you'd like to actually get to have.

Step 1: Pick the date, then name what reached you last time. Write down the next stretch of time you want protected. A week away, a long weekend, one full Saturday. Then, from memory, list every single thing that pulled you back into the business the last time you tried this. Ugly lines are fine. \"Rent day landed on the Tuesday."\ \"Contractor called about the flooring and needed an answer that day."\ \"Insurance renewal notice showed up and I couldn't stop thinking about it."\

Step 2: Mark what each one actually needed. Beside each line put one letter. \\*M\\* if it genuinely needed you, personally, in that moment. \\*D\\* if it needed a decision that could have been made before you left. \\*S\\* if it only needed to not be a surprise. Most people are startled by how few M's they have. Almost everything on the list turns out to be a D or an S wearing an emergency's coat.

Step 3: Let AI turn it into a countdown, and a list you keep. Open any free AI tool, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever you've already got, and paste this above your list:

I'm a Canadian real estate investor with a full-time job and a small, self-managed portfolio. I'm protecting [number] days away from the business starting [date]. Below is everything that pulled me back into the business the last time I tried this. Each line is marked M (genuinely needed me in the moment), D (needed a decision I could have made in advance), or S (only needed to not be a surprise). Do four things: (1) build me a countdown prep list, grouped into three weeks out, one week out, and the day before, (2) for every D and every S, tell me the specific thing to set up, send, or decide ahead of time so it never reaches me, (3) name the one or two things that will genuinely need me, so I can decide in advance how I want to be reachable for those and nothing else, and (4) give the whole thing back to me as a plain checklist I can save and reuse. Use only what I gave you. No generic travel advice, no pep talk.

My list: [paste]

What comes back is not a to-do list. It's a plan for an absence, which is a different thing, and almost nobody at our stage has ever written one down.

Then do the two things that make it an asset instead of a document. \\*Save it somewhere you'll find it again\\, because next time you don't start from zero, you start from this plus whatever you learn. And at the bottom, \\add a line for what already worked.\\* The thing you handled well without noticing. That's your dragonfly pins. You'll want it next year, and you'll want the reminder that you're better at this than you've been telling yourself.

I'll be straight with you about where this stops, because that's the deal I want with you. The Reverse-Engineered Week is a real brick. Run it once and the next time you go away will feel different before you've even left the driveway. But a list you work through by hand before every trip is still you, working it by hand, and it only protects the weeks you remember to point it at. The thing we've actually been building is the layer underneath, where the business doesn't need a countdown, because the decisions and the records and the handoffs already live somewhere other than your head, all year, whether you're at the beach or at your kitchen table on a Tuesday in February. That's not a brick you install from a newsletter. That's the house.

---

Which brings me to the thing I've been waiting to tell you properly.

\\*C2C Foundations.\\* You've seen the name at the top of this email for a while now, and you've probably caught it floating around our socials, and every few issues I've said "more on that soon" and then not told you much of anything.

Here's where it actually is. We're building the website right now. The plan is to open the doors before the fall is out. And what's behind them is the house: the whole operating layer, not the bricks, built for the person reading this. It's the thing I've been circling in every single issue since the first one.

I'm genuinely excited about it, which is not a word I use loosely with you. You'll hear it here first, and you won't have to do anything except keep opening these.

---

So that's the story this week, and it started in a driveway at eleven o'clock at night.

The meals are handled. The house back home is standing. The kids are sandy and salty and negotiating for one more swim. And I am sitting here with a head that's actually mostly empty, which is the rarest thing I own.

None of that is luck. My mother-in-law and I built the meal plan. My mom is holding down the house. Colin and I worked hard right up to the last minute so this week could be what it's supposed to be. And a version of me three summers ago started writing things down on a list she had no idea she was building.

I hope this ends up being the week we all get to relax, and enjoy it, and make the kind of memories that turn into the stories these two tell each other in twenty years.

And I hope you give yourself a bit of credit this week for something you've quietly gotten good at.

Next Sunday, I'll be back.

I'm glad you're here.

— Nicole