Scaling servers is easy. Scaling yourself isn't

When a server is struggling, I know what to do.

When I'm struggling, I check the server.

That's a joke. Mostly.

I spend a fair part of my working life looking after machines. Disks, memory, backups, updates. If something is running out of room, there's an alert. If the alert fires, you add capacity, move things around, clean up. It's not always easy, but it's always clear.

There's one part of the company that doesn't have any of that.

Me.

No alerts, no upgrades

Nobody monitors the founder.

There's no dashboard that turns orange when I've been answering emails for too long. No warning when my attention is nearly full. Nobody writing to say "you might want to look at this before it runs out".

And even if there were, what would I do? With a server, I can pay for a bigger plan. With a person, there's no bigger plan. The day has the same hours it always had. I just keep trying to fit more into them, the way you try to close an overstuffed suitcase by sitting on it.

It works for a while. Then a zip breaks.

You can add memory to a server. You can't add hours to a founder.

Why I only noticed now

This year was the year of delegating. Freelancers, programmers by the hour, more people around the work. On paper, more capacity.

And it helped. But it also showed me something uncomfortable. Delegating creates its own load. Briefing, checking, answering questions, chasing deliveries, holding the client conversation while someone else does the work. You move work off your desk and responsibility stays on it.

So the company grew a bit. My capacity didn't. And the gap between the two was filled the usual way: by me, later at night.

That's how I learned to code, at night, as a kid. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a choice and became the default setting. I suspect that's true for a lot of people who build something on their own.

What scaling yourself actually means

I used to think it meant doing more. Working faster, being more efficient, squeezing a better ratio out of each hour.

I'm starting to think it means the opposite. Doing less of the things that only feel urgent, so there's room for the ones that matter.

Concretely, nothing heroic:

• Noticing which tasks I do because they need me, and which because I've always done them.
• Treating my own time like a shared server: limited, and worth monitoring.
• Accepting that "slow" is part of the deal we chose. No investors means nobody is forcing the pace, including me.

That last point is the one I forget most. We built this company to be free, not to be fast. Burning myself out to grow quicker would be a strange way to use that freedom.

Servers will keep growing. That's the easy part. It's mostly a matter of money and a good backup.

Scaling myself is harder.

The first step, I think, is admitting I'm not infinitely expandable.

P.S. If you're reading this and it's past midnight, close the laptop. The server will be fine.