I'm bored of Substack.

Here's why, and what I'm planning next...

We’re driving back from Somerset to London, a trip we make multiple times a year having visited family, and I know that the conversation with my husband is going to be deep, and important. We’ve been eager to get into the car so that we can begin.

The kids are in the back, on iPads, but it doesn’t matter if they overhear our conversation. We’re able to cleverly code our language about them, and also: this isn’t really about them. It’s more about us: as partners, as individuals.

We’re ready to talk about work.

I launch into it first.

I explain that I have this hunger to grow my online course and coaching business alongside my writing (as a journalist, author and essayist on Substack) but that life circumstances - having a child at home full-time - are blocking me.

I don’t have a motivation issue. I don’t care about fear and rejection. Not really, not in a way that would stop me from moving forwards with an idea. I’m full of ideas that I’m ready to action. But I have one single challenge: time.

My husband and I are both growing businesses, new iterations of existing businesses, and we are both very present as parents. We are each trying to put the same amount of time into both work/life and this is impacting the growth of our businesses.

It doesn’t create conflict between us but it creates internal conflict for each of us. When you feel focused and driven, but you suddenly have to slam the laptop closed - or down tools - to be with a child, it can feel frustrating.

I decide that if I pull back on my work, for a season, my husband can work more - renovating our house - and the balance might then shift the other way, for the following season. This is how we’ve made it work for the past decade.

So, what do you want to focus on and what can you let go of, my husband asks.

I have so many business ideas.

I write on Substack and I also, as of a few weeks ago, have another mailing list on Mailchimp. I have this ambition to use that list to build my online course business up. It’s expensive, hosting the list there, but already, I’m seeing that it pays off.

Ideas for how to grow that list have been flowing in thick and fast. After all, this is what my husband and I spent a few years doing, together, when we were fully immersed in a shared online course business. We know how it works.

Could you do that, then, and stop writing on Substack? he says.

His questions jolts me. When I sit down to write an essay for Substack, I feel like the purest version of myself, as a writer. There are no rules, no waiting for a commission. I can be poetic and write about work, life, business, feminism, existentialism.

I explain this to him and he says: so, stop the Mailchimp list and focus on Substack?

But that’s what I was doing before. And I felt something needed to change. I needed more control around the backend of the emails. I wanted to venture back into ‘lead magnets’ and ‘funnels’ (in a creative way). I wanted to earn more money.

You know what, I say to my husband, I think I’m just bored of Substack.