In honor of Labor Day, I'd like to recognize everyone who sat down to do "one quick thing" for their business and resurfaced three hours later with absolutely no idea how this happened.
You know the lie.
"I'm just going to do one quick thing for the business."
Nothing dangerous about that sentence.
Very reasonable.
Very responsible.
Then you open the laptop.
You answer one email.
The email reminds you that you need to update something.
While updating that thing, you notice something else wrong.
Now you're fixing that.
You need information to fix it, so you Google something.
That leads to another tab.
And another.
At some point you open Instagram because you need to check ONE thing.
We all know how safe that is.
Three hours later, you answered emails, updated something on your website, made half a graphic, researched something you didn't know existed this morning and written "FIX THIS" on a sticky note.
The original task?
Gone.
Absolutely no idea.
Welcome to small-business labor.
There Is So Much Work Nobody Sees
When someone sees a business from the outside, they usually see the finished parts.
The post.
The website.
The product.
The service.
The appointment.
The package.
The email.
The final design.
What they don't see is everything sitting underneath it.
The research.
The planning.
The revisions.
The admin.
The invoices.
The emails.
The files.
The passwords.
Good grief, the passwords.
The thing that suddenly stopped working even though nobody touched it.
The software update that moved the button you use every day.
The customer question you need to answer.
The website typo you notice at exactly the wrong moment.
The spreadsheet.
The receipt you were absolutely going to put somewhere safe.
The subscription you forgot you were paying for.
The 23-minute investigation into why something that worked perfectly yesterday has apparently decided it no longer believes in employment.
And eventually, after doing all that...
you get to do the actual thing you started the business to do.
"But I Didn't Get Anything Done Today."
I've had days when I've been working for hours and still looked at what I originally planned to accomplish and thought:
What exactly have I been doing all day?
Then I start listing it.
Oh.
That.
And that.
And THAT.
And the thing I didn't even know needed to be done until it landed in front of me.
That's one of the weird things about running a business.
A lot of necessary work doesn't create a satisfying finished product.
You can spend an hour troubleshooting.
Nothing pretty comes out of it.
You can organize files.
Nobody sees that.
You can research something before making a decision.
No finished graphic.
You can answer emails, check forms, review numbers, update information and clean up something behind the scenes.
At the end, there may be nothing particularly exciting to photograph.
But you worked.
The Job Description Keeps Expanding
Small-business owners have some fascinating unofficial titles.
Founder.
Customer service.
Marketing.
Copyrighter.
Content creator.
Research department.
Bookkeeper.
Website editor.
Tech support.
Scheduler.
File organizer.
Quality control.
Professional Googler.
Person Who Knows Where That One Document Is.
And my personal favorite:
Person Responsible for Figuring Out the Things Nobody Told Me I Would Eventually Need to Know.
There's always another thing.
I run Radiant Rise Creative because I love the creative and strategic side of business.
But running Radiant Rise Creative isn't only sitting around making pretty graphics ad thinking of fun ideas.
There's an entire business underneath the creative part.
Documents.
Systems.
Forms.
Pricing.
Website updates.
Content planning.
Client processes.
Research.
Emails.
Organization.
And approximately 700 tiny decisions nobody would ever know I made.
That's labor too.
And Then There's the Mental Labor
This part is even harder to see.
Remembering what needs to happen next.
Thinking about what you forgot.
Making decisions.
Changing decisions.
Keeping track of deadlines.
Noticing something that needs attention.
Thinking three steps ahead.
Trying to decide whether something actually needs to be fixed or whether you've just been staring at it too long.
Running through tomorrow while you're still finishing today.
Sometimes the workday technically ends before your brain gets the memo.
That's work people don't necessarily see on a screen.
But it takes energy.
So, For Labor Day...
I'm not going to give you another productivity lecture.
I'm definitely not going to tell small-business owners they should use the holiday to "get ahead".
Please.
Instead, I'm recognizing the weird, invisible, completely unglamorous work that keeps businesses functioning.
The email.
The invoice.
The research.
The spreadsheet.
The troubleshooting.
The planning.
The tiny correction.
The decision.
The follow-up.
The tiny thing you had to learn because there wasn't anybody else to hand it to.
And yes...
the "one quick thing" that somehow at your entire afternoon.
It counts.
Even when nobody saw it.
Even when it didn't become a post.
Even when you can't point to one beautiful finished thing at the end of the day.
Running a small business involves a ridiculous amount of work behind the work.
So Happy Labor Day to the founders, creators, side-hustlers, service providers and small-business owners doing all the stuff nobody put on the job description.
Now somebody please tell me:
What business task do you start thinking it'll take 10 minutes... even though history has repeatedly proven otherwise?
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