More Meaningful Progress in Less Time

by SofiaWren September 17, 2025

🦋 💜 🌿 Hi! How are you?

How has your week been?

Quick note:

I got some bad news about Convertkit – the service I use for my emails that I have recommended to others as well. They are raising their rate for me quite a lot in the next month.

Just sharing in case you are one of the people I recommended Convertkit to, as perhaps this is something you are also thinking about.

Since I am planning a maternity leave, I’m not sure I want to pay extra right now…and making a change may mean moving to a whole different email provider.

Whether I stay with Convertkit and downgrade or choose to change providers will be a lot of work.

It means I’ll have to deconstruct all the systems for optins and email sequences and so on that I have built over many years. I will have to copy out a version of everything.

If I do all that, maybe I should just move.

Many people recommend Flodesk which has an unlimited emails plan available only for the next few months…so I’m considering that as an alternative.

If you have recommendations, you like your email provider, let me know and I’ll add it to the stewpot I am mulling over. I need segmentation, sequences and email automations.

But let’s get into what I really want to talk about, continuing a recent theme I’ve been discussing in my emails:

TIME.

Lately I have been going through a lot of introspection, getting clear on how to prioritize because there’s so much to do, so little time.

I’ve been seriously reevaluating my expectations of myself this week.

For example, when I really sat down to journal and reflect on ALL the things that feel like they are hanging over my head,

I realized that there was a huge writing project from 2021 that I still expected myself to go back to somehow.

I didn’t even realize that expectation was there, but it has been. Consciously, I don’t even want to do it. Subsconsciously, I’ve had a hard time letting it go.

Something that has finally helped me to “ungoal” from this project is some recent knowledge I’ve gained from the last week of introspection.

My Why

I now know what my deeper WHY is for writing.

I have two main reasons why I want to write these days:

A. To share about what I know and my experience as a service to others in a way that supports my business, helping people write for books or business.

B. To write as personal development for myself, i.e. for my own support, learning, self care and growth.

This particular project fits neither category, so I decided it is firmly going on the shelf for the forseeable future. Until things change I will not expect to make progress on it.

What a relief.

The Deep Why

When you know your deeper WHY and what you value, it makes it easier to prioritize.

And you can stop expecting yourself to do everything and anything.

It’s not just me, I see finding your WHY and clarity on your values works for other people, too.

I had a client come to me over the past few months with a lot of ideas and difficulty juggling them, choosing between them and maintaining long-term motivation on them.

Over these past 2 months talking with her, I’ve seen a groundedness emerge as we explored the WHY of all the ideas, and determined what is really most important.

Going Deep

Everyone has different values, we all have different reasons WHY we want to write or pursue different projects.

But the thing is, often, we just think about them. We think about how to get into motion, so we don’t really think that deeply about WHY we want to do them.

One of the things I have been really good at doing with my clients is helping them to nonjudgmentally evaluate ideas and their motivations for pursuing each of them. This helps them know what to do next or what to do first.

This illuminates things lurking under the surface. Often, people reveal that some of their ideas were subconsciously motivated by things that they don’t consciously value.

It’s human nature to do things subconsciously because it will please other people.

But consciously, many of us are aware that people pleasing isn’t that great of a reason to spend a whole lot of time on things that don’t feel fun or exciting otherwise.

It’s not that people are dumb not to immediately realize that these ideas are a waste of time from the get go,

it’s just that the world is fast and it is noisy.

It can be difficult to take the time, and have the space, to sit and reflect and evaluate different ideas and put them under the microscope in a new way.

To ask WHY? What would I get out of finishing this, really?

Once you finally have that quiet to poke and prod, and develop new shades of self awareness, only then can you realize–

“Oh, hey, I really only wanted to do this to raise my value in the eyes of other people. That means this is a form of people pleasing and I don’t feel like this is in alignment with the way I want to move in the world….”

And then it is entirely a no brainer to just let the whole project go.

I hope this is relatable to you, because the truth is we all do this.

I definitely uncovered my own version of it this week!

Try it

Explore the deeper why for your projects and ideas and what is motivating them.

Is there anything you are doing primarily to please someone else or have them think positively of you?

Take some time to write about it and explore, and I guarantee you’ll end up saving a LOT of time.

Because you really can’t control what other people think, right? So you’ll probably need to either dig deeper to find another reason to do that project so you stay motivated OR find another project to focus on.

Maybe you’ll be able to let some things go and remove them from your plate. But regardless, you’ll be able to focus on the things that really matter to you, and not just to someone else.