How I Lost Track of My Cadences in 2024

Hey there. If you don’t know me, I’m Brionna and I’m the human behind Sustainable Cadences and as of the beginning of 2023, I’m also the owner and operator of The Everyday Lawyer, a legal education platform that teaches freelancers and small businesses to stand their legal ground in the world of business contracts. 

When I launched The Everyday Lawyer at the beginning of 2023 I had a few things going for me:

• Access to an immediate market for my services courtesy of my friend Corrie Oberdin
• Time and space to experiment thanks to my Sustainable Cadences practice.

This meant I experienced almost immediate success. I launched my first service at the end of January and had a new client by the beginning of March and a speaking gig lined up by the end of March. 

At that time, I had been in the practice of creating sustainable cadences for myself for a solid two years and I knew exactly what I needed to live and work at a pace that I could sustain indefinitely. 

Here’s what that looked like:

Mondays: No meetings, ever. Instead, my practice was to create space for magic on Mondays as well as do my weekly meal prep if I hadn’t already done it over the weekend and think about what I wanted to accomplish with my week. 

If you’re neurodivergent like me, then maybe you also struggle with long term planning. For me, I can do a month of planning in advance, maybe a quarter if I really push myself. But planning 6 months, a year, 5 years, or 10 years in advance feels impossible, and if I’m honest, kind of pointless.

So this practice of sitting down every Monday to think about what the most important things for me to do that week were was really grounding. I thought about my personal needs as well as the needs of my business and I made a list of things that came to mind and then I picked the things that met two qualifications: (1) they were a “yes” in my body as in I felt like I could start on them immediately and was excited to do so; and (2) they felt like a priority that would move the needle on something. 

Based on those criteria, I would pick 3 things on my list to prioritize for the week. For example, if the week before had been particularly exhausting, the 3 things might be to take a daily nap, to spend an hour that week commenting on social posts relevant to my work instead of creating original content myself, and to write 1 blog post in response to the themes relevant to my work that I see on social media. 

The rest of my week would be planned around achieving these 3 goals. I’d spend Tuesday strategizing and brainstorming. Which social media platform did I want to show up on and engage with posts? What are some potential themes I’ve been hearing about people’s legal struggles as of late that could be a potential blog post? And what conditions need to be in place for me to get a good post-lunch nap? 

On Wednesday, I’d hang out on Twitter, my preferred social media platform at the time, and search for keywords to see if I could find some interesting conversations to join. I’d engage with folks, offer helpful answers, and then invite folks to DM me if they needed more help. On Thursday, I’d join in on Michelle Garrett’s #FreelanceChat and do the same thing. And I’d write a blog post between Thursday and Friday based on what I learned. 

Each day, I would commit to spend 1 hour after lunch screen-free. If you have kiddos or were a babysitter or nanny like me, then you’re familiar with quiet time for toddlers who don’t want to nap. Essentially, I put myself in quiet time everyday after lunch. I’d lay down, close my eyes, and put on some relaxing music while snuggled under my favorite childhood blanket (it’s Aladdin themed!) and see what happened. Sometimes I’d just lay there and other times I would fall into a deep sleep. 

After about an hour, I’d get up and see how I felt. Sometimes I felt ready to do more work and would get some bonus projects (not on my weekly priority list) done and other times I’d decide to stay on the couch and watch a movie or tv show. And still other times, I’d go for a walk, do a workout, or decide to cook an elaborate meal. 

What’s important is that I was still moving things forward in my business and personal life by doing the bare minimum. The result was I often ended up doing more than I planned to do each week without ever really overdoing it.

So what happened in 2024?

To put it bluntly, I fell for capitalism’s entrepreneur trap. You know the one. That mentality where you're supposed to be working constantly to get ahead and achieve your greatness. Well in 2024, I found myself trying to do my ADHD version of "hustle," which looked like working chaotically without any real strategy.

But I didn't fall into it all at once. It was little by little. The problem was that I started panicking because I wasn't making enough money despite my early success.  

Problem #2 was comparison. I looked around at all these other entrepreneurs online, especially the online business lawyers and I felt way behind. It felt like they all knew way more than me about running a business and also about the law generally. It gave rise to this low-level panic stemming from some old trauma from my days as a corporate lawyer when I felt deeply inadequate, in part because I was still masking my ADHD. 

These two problems had me spiraling. I was pushing my version of hard on social media. Anything to get attention and be able to say I was doing entrepreneurship “right.” And I started to feel so anxious that I woke up feeling like I needed to get to work done immediately because I was “behind.” So I skipped my slow mornings of journaling or reading or moving my body and immediately fired up my laptop to see what could be done. 

Instead of spending Mondays tuning into my capacity and setting priorities for the week, I’d just spend it spiraling. I’d tell myself I had energy (anxiety fueled by lots of cortisol and adrenaline) to do something so I’d just pick something random to do without considering how it fit into the larger picture. And, I’d skip meal prep altogether, which left me scrambling for meals all week. 

Each day, I’d wake up and do the same thing. And because I was so anxious, I’d mistake my high anxiety for “energy” and push myself to keep working after lunch instead of resting. 

The result was a perfect manic ADHD storm: 

• I’d stare at the computer screen doomscrolling on social media for hours each day looking at what other people were doing and wondering what the hell I was doing and whether I should do what they’re doing to make more money.
• I stopped sleeping. I couldn’t get more than 2 or 3 hours of sleep at night and napping felt impossible. I was just wired all the time. In the past when this has happened, I know it’s a sign that I am doing way too much (read: hyperfixated on something) and I need to pull myself out of it. The only problem is that knowing is easier than doing in that situation. 
• I didn’t ever have meals ready to eat so I was scrambling to put something together for each meal, which meant I was eating less nutritious food for my body, which only exacerbated my issues. 
• I had no energy to workout so I worked out less and didn’t burn off the anxiety I was experiencing so it just kept compounding on itself. 
• When I did get a new client, I didn’t have the energy I needed to deliver excellent customer service and I ended up resenting the client for having to do work I didn’t have energy to do and I still didn’t have enough money. 
• I was constantly overheated, even when the weather started to cool down. I was having heart palpitations at night (not to be confused with perimenopause symptoms because your girl is definitely Auntie age, lol) and sleeping with a fan blasting on me and still a furnace at night and during the day. 
• I started getting eczema breakouts worse than I’ve ever had them in my entire life. 
• My whole body was bloated and I was generally feeling very uncomfortable in my own body. 

Then of course on the business side, I made less money in 2024 than I did in both 2022 and 2023. That’s not a result of overall market issues or things being hard for small businesses. It’s a result of me (a) not charging enough and (b) not spending any real time executing consistently on a strategy because I lost track of my Monday cadence where I evaluate where I’m going and what needs to be done next to keep moving in that direction.

Hitting My Breaking Point

The thing about submitting to capitalism’s chaos is that it’s addicting. When you move in chaos and rush from thing to thing, the busyness feels like progress, even if you have nothing to show for it. It can also create sporadic results. So after a summer of basically no revenue, I started getting customers in late August through September such that I hit my revenue goal for both months without a lot of effort. 

I took that as a sign that my approach was working so I dug in harder. I *almost* hit my revenue goal in October and nearly hit it again in November. But by the end of October, I was exhausted. It had been months of not getting a full night of sleep, doing whatever “work” I could think of each day, and scrambling to put meals together. 

Then, in early November, I signed a new client for a new service I launched and the only thing I felt was annoyance. Well, that didn’t make any sense. So then I started asking questions. Why was I annoyed?

One. I was tired as hell. 

Two. I was tired of working with people 1:1. It was never how I wanted The Everyday Lawyer to operate. Even though I’m good at it, it doesn’t bring me joy. 

Three. There was something fundamentally off with my diet and digestion and I remembered after yet another round of horrible eczema on my hands that skin issues are the first sign that something’s not right with your digestion. 

Four. I was angry as hell. At everything. Anytime I feel a lot of anger, it’s a cue for me to slow down, ask questions, and figure out why. 

So that in a nutshell is how I lost track of my cadences in 2024. By Thanksgiving, I felt completely done, burned out, disregulated, and unhealthy. That’s when I remembered that I had an entire methodology designed to prevent myself from getting to that point that I had completely abandoned by accident in 2024 (except for no meetings on Mondays. I kept that). 

Considering that several people reached out to me throughout the year about the program I used to offer about creating sustainable cadences, it’s amazing that I managed to forget my own. At one point, in the middle of the chaos, I even considered bringing the program back because I got so many inquiries about it. But in December of 2024, I realized that more than anything, I needed to bring Sustainable Cadences back not to make more money, but to hold myself accountable. 

Because now I have 2 years of the results of living Sustainable Cadences consistently and the quality of my life and business during those years and 1 year of results where I forgot about cadence mapping entirely and it’s impact on my life and business. 

The differences are quite stark. So this year, I’m relaunching Sustainable Cadences as a blog as an accountability project for myself. I’m sharing how I’m getting back to and living my cadences while I build The Everyday Lawyer to a thriving and profitable business. 

If you want to know what happened next, then I invite you to read about this Cadence Experiment that always brings me back to my rhythm.