Sabrina KlobNo big summer glow-up. Just one small backend fix a week, all summer – and a running list of what might be next.
Every summer I make the same quiet promise: this is the year I finally relax. And every summer my brain answers by producing a to-do list roughly the length of my arm.
This year I'm trying a different deal. Instead of choosing between switching off completely and launching some enormous new project, I've struck a bargain with the restless part of me: one small improvement a week, all summer long. Nothing that eats a weekend. Just one finishable fix that quietly makes the business better – and then back to the garden.
If you want the feelings behind that deal, I wrote about the why over on The Held Entrepreneur. This piece is the how: the actual fixes, in the order I'm doing them, updated as I go. Some are done, some are next on the list, and some are still just ideas I'm weighing up – but all of them are small.
A gentle warning before we start. None of these are dramatic, which is the entire point. "Optimisation" here mostly means removing one small recurring ugh from the week.
What I've already done
1. Left a website provider I'd been resenting for months
My nemesis was Squarespace. Not on fire, not urgent – just quietly wrong for me, because it never handled multiple languages the way I needed. Every time it crossed my mind I filed it straight back under too-hard-for-now.
The switch I'd been dreading since spring took exactly one afternoon and a pot of tea. I moved to super.so, which turns Notion pages into a proper website – which matters, because I already do absolutely everything in Notion. Now the language switch is fast, and I can edit my whole site in the place I already work all day.
Borrow this: pick the provider you've been softly resenting and actually time how long the switch takes. The dread is almost always bigger than the doing.
2. I turned a social post I loved into a whole system
Every so often I come across a marketing approach I genuinely admire – and screenshot it into the void, never to be seen again. This time I did it differently: I rebuilt it as a small set of Notion databases that actually fit how I work, so a fleeting bit of inspiration turned into a repeatable system. In case you’re curious, it was this one.
Borrow this: next time you save something because it’s clever, ask whether it could become a small system instead of another screenshot you’ll never look at again.
What’s next on the list
3. Finally do the course I’ve been hoarding
There’s a course that’s been sitting around for ages, gathering a layer of guilt and virtual dust, as unopened courses tend to. A quiet summer week is the right time to actually work through it. Investing in my knowledge counts as backend maintenance too, and actually using my (financial) investment is the smart move in any case.
Borrow this: the summer lull is a good time to finish something you already paid for, rather than buying something new.
4. A B-roll folder for marketing
If you need footage for your marketing endeavours time and time again, you might be familiar with this issue: illustrating a post means diving into my camera roll. I had the perfect clip in mind, but gosh, when did I film that? Was it last October? I want to finally gather all of my favourite clips and photos into one synced folder I can reach from both my phone and my computer.
Borrow this: I bet you know exactly which ones you’d pick already.
What might come after (still deciding)
I’ve got the rest of the summer to fill with these, and honestly I’m still weighing up what comes next. Here’s what’s on the shortlist – each one small enough to do from the hammock:
- A “small ugh” list. Spend one afternoon just naming every tiny recurring friction that’s been nagging me (the unlabelled folder, the invoice template I can never find, the newsletter footer I keep meaning to update). Then pick the cheapest one to fix each week.
- A calendar sanity pass. One afternoon reviewing every recurring event and asking: is this still earning its place? Kill or shrink anything that isn’t.
- A tiny template kit. One Notion page I duplicate every week (a discovery-call note, an onboarding doc, a proposal draft) turned into a proper, tidy template with placeholders instead of ghost-copies of last month’s work.
- A “client love notes” folder. A quick capture spot for the nice things clients say, so future-me isn’t scrambling for a testimonial when I need one.
- One stale email flow, cleaned up. Not the whole automation stack. Just one welcome sequence, one follow-up, one reminder – whichever one currently makes me wince most.
If any of these speaks to your own backend, borrow it. I might get to two of them, I might get to five. That's part of the point: no big plan, just one small thing at a time.
Where to start yourself
If you're reading this thinking "yes, one small thing at a time – but which small thing?", you're not alone. That's usually the hardest part of a slow summer: not the doing, it's picking one thing that's actually worth doing.
The Seven Systems Scan was built for exactly that. It walks through the seven systems that quietly leak time in most solopreneur businesses, tells you which one is costing you the most this quarter, and points you at your first small fix. Five minutes, mostly from the hammock.
Whichever one it lands on, the whole thing works the same way: fix one thing, well – then back to the garden.