WHERE DO YOU FIND THE TIME?

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Honest reflections. Practical frameworks. Lessons learned the hard way, written by someone who's been in the trenches and is still learning.

Whether you're learning to deliver under pressure or protect your energy during busy seasons, this newsletter is here to help you play the long game.

This week…

The honest answer to the question I get more than any other: where do you find the time?

Three things: a system that clears your head, partners who carry the load, and the hours nobody sees.

Let's get to it!

Aaron

First, thank you. To everyone who reached out, subscribed, and signed up after last week's launch, I see you, and it means a lot. The question I got more than any other was some version of the same one: where do you find the time? So that is where we are starting.

I get this constantly. About the course I run at Wall Street Prep, the nonprofit boards, the side quests like this newsletter. It's a fair question. From the outside it can look like I have more hours in my day than you do.

I don't. We all get the same 24. What's different is how I use them. For me it comes down to three things: a system that keeps my head clear, partners who carry what I can't, and a willingness to work when others won't. Let me take them one at a time.

The single most important thing I do is refuse to keep anything in my head. Every task, every idea, every follow-up, every "I should really get to that one day," goes into one place. For me that place is an app called Todoist, and it is the backbone of how I operate.

The logic is simple. Your brain is good at having ideas and terrible at storing them. When you try to keep forty things in your head, you don't actually hold any of them. You just carry a low hum of anxiety that you're forgetting something. The moment you put it somewhere you trust, it stops taking up space.

I've tried it every other way: Notion, Google Tasks, a notebook, an iPad. Todoist is the one that stuck, because capturing a thought takes two seconds from my phone or my laptop, wherever I am. The second something lands in my head, I get it out and into Todoist. There are dozens of things in there at any given moment, and that is exactly the point. None of them are rattling around in my mind.

That is what actually frees up the time. Not the app itself, but the trust that nothing is slipping through the cracks. When I believe everything is captured, I can give the thing in front of me my full attention instead of mentally juggling everything I'm not doing. A clear head is the foundation everything else is built on. I'll go deeper on exactly how I use Todoist in a future issue. For now the principle is the part that matters: get it out of your head.

If you want to try Todoist, check it out. Yes it’s an affiliate link, but I genuinely use it.

TRY IT FOR YOURSELF

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We've all heard some version of it. Almost nobody actually lives it. I didn't either, not really, until an executive coach pushed me hard on the point.

Two things I'm proud of exist only because I didn't build them alone. The first is my Real Estate Certificate Program with Wall Street Prep and Wharton Online. I invited one of my best instructors to build it with me, because there was simply no way I could pull it off while working a full-time job. We share the income, and we share the work, and not evenly. I did much of the upfront build, so the ongoing load leans far more on him. That imbalance is the whole point. It is what makes the thing possible at all.

This newsletter is the other one. My friend Nic gets the credit. We were leaving a birthday party in New York in the summer of 2024 when he turned to me and said I needed to start talking about my life, that people would be interested. I told him he was crazy and that I didn't have the bandwidth, but that if he put in the work, I'd play along. He is a creative and has spent years in media, which is exactly what I am not. So this became a new outlet for him and an education for me. Partnership can make the impossible possible, as long as you align the interests, the learning, and especially the earning.

I'll never forget a Saturday morning my junior year of college, meeting a mentor at the community center at Cornell. The conversation drifted to workdays versus weekends, and in not so many words he made his view plain: if I actually wanted the things I said I wanted, every day was a workday. That has stuck with me ever since.

The idea is simple. If you want to achieve what others haven't, you have to be willing to do what others won't. For me that has meant nights and weekends. Early in my career it meant late nights at Morgan Stanley, including one where I worked until 6am, pushed two office chairs together to sleep for a couple of hours, then clocked back in to finish the materials before a meeting. These days my mornings start at 5am, and plenty of my weekends still go to the work.

I'm not saying work should consume your life. I believe in working hard and playing hard, and I protect time for my fiancé, an active social life, and travel. But extraordinary outcomes ask for extraordinary effort. And part of what makes those hours possible is that I refuse to waste them, which is exactly why the first thing on this list matters so much.

Here's how the three fit together. The system keeps my head clear so I can focus. The partnerships let me do more than any one person can. And the hours are where the work actually gets done. Pull any one of them out, and the other two cannot carry the weight.

The mistake is thinking there's one right system out there to adopt. There isn't. The tools and the process that work for me are the result of five years of trial and error, and I'm still tweaking them. What matters isn't landing on the perfect setup. It's being willing to keep experimenting until things click, then keep adjusting as your life changes.

One of my favorite parts of writing this newsletter is hearing how these ideas show up in real life.

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