2022, the year I learned I can't do it all

I can't do it all.

It took me a whole year to write that sentence without adding "yet".

In January I said this would be the year of delegating. More freelancers, more outside help, fewer things passing through my hands. I thought it was a plan about workload.

It turned out to be a plan about me.

What the year actually looked like

From the outside, 2022 was a busy, fairly normal year for a small studio.

We worked with more freelancers and, for the first time, with a company of programmers by the hour. We made the first real offer for the payments tool we'd been building for sports clubs, and by autumn it was live at a club. I proposed to Yeray that we study changing the company's legal form, and learned something about how big decisions really get made between two partners. We got a ticket sale ready for a queue of people buying at once. And outside the company, I bought premises that came with hidden defects, which taught me more about my own rules than any book.

I've written about most of that already. I won't tell those stories again.

What I want to write about is the thread that runs under all of them.

The thread

Almost every hard moment this year had the same shape.

Something depended on one person. Sometimes a freelancer who was the only one who understood a piece of code. Sometimes a supplier who held the key to a delivery. Often, honestly, me.

I spent the first months thinking the answer was more hands. Then I spent the middle of the year discovering that more hands also means more briefing, more checking, more chasing, and the same single name in front of the client. And I spent the end of it realising that I'd been treating my own time as if it could stretch forever.

It can't. I knew that in theory. This year I learned it in practice.

I didn't run out of work this year. I ran out of me.

What I'm keeping

Not a list of resolutions. A few things I believe a bit more than I did in January.

• Delegating the work is easy. Letting go of control is the real job.
• Trust is cheap, except where a mistake touches someone's money.
• Whatever I delegate, the client still calls us. That doesn't change.
• Every hour on client work is an hour the product waits. I still choose it, but on purpose.

And underneath all of it, the same idea we started with. No investors, no clock, growing on clients' money. This year reminded me that freedom isn't only about who owns the company. It's also about not becoming the thing that holds it back.

A company that can only move as fast as one tired person isn't free. It's just small in a different way.

Next year

I don't have a big plan for 2023. I have a smaller one.

Do fewer things myself. Write down more of what only I know. Let other people be wrong in their own way, and occasionally right in a way I didn't expect.

And when I catch myself saying "it's quicker if I do it", remember that quicker for today is how I ended up here.

I can't do it all.

Turns out that was never the job.