It's Sunday 9pm here when i'm writing this. Kids are in bed. The Atlantic does that thing where it goes loud right before it goes quiet, and the house has the kind of Sunday evening stillness anyone who works for themselves knows.
I've been doing this version of work for almost three years. Months of MBO planning, then two and a half years as a co-owner of erlich, full skin in the game. Most of the week is fine.
What I rarely write about is this Sunday hour that almost every person who is building something has, the one that too long for a LinkedIn post. So i’m going to.
On a hard Sunday, this is what shows up.
A small voice asking whether I'm actually good at this or whether I'm just one of the early people who got into a room that's about to get a lot more crowded. The fear that the call I made on Thursday afternoon, the one I felt confident about at the time, is actually going to have some unforeseen consequences i'm not aware of yet.
Loneliness, sometimes, which surprises me every time because the team is great and we do sparring in our individual disciplines all of the time, but the truth is that that team looks to you for everything marketing and you don't really have someone in that same marketing chair to look back at. Which is the nature of the beast if your work in a tiny team.
And occasionally the adidas comparison, which is mostly useless and shows up anyway. Still, my mind is constantly comparing. What could i achieve with just a fraction of that budget, with just a few of those creators under contract, with just a few more people on board.
Mostly that's just the system processing the week behind me. It looks like information until I poke at it. Took me about a year to stop treating this hour as a sign something was wrong. Most Sundays, it isn't.
Five things I've learned to do with it instead:
1. Skip the week-planning impulse.
Almost nothing useful gets decided on a Sunday after 7pm. The calls that feel urgent at this hour feel obvious by Tuesday. If I need to write something down so the brain stops thinking about it, I write three lines in my notes: what I'm afraid of, what I'm probably exaggerating, and one small thing I can check on Monday morning. Twenty minutes maximum.
2. The teams message can wait until 9am Monday.
I learned this the hard way. A sunday message from the boss reads "we're in trouble" even when it isn't, and it ruins someone else's sunday too. Schedule that message if you need to get it out of your brain, but don't send it.
3. One phone call to someone outside the company.
A good friend usually. Sometimes an old adidas colleague. Twenty minutes, mostly about their stuff. Resets the part of the brain that's been the CMO all week.
4. Tell a bad Sunday from a real problem.
A bad Sunday has a soft, diffuse quality. A real problem is specific. There's a name attached, a person or a number or a deadline. If I can write the thing down in one sentence, it's a real problem and Monday gets it. If I can't, it's just your monkey brain.
5. Sports. Every single time
Jesus, that's the oldest advice every but i cannot not add it to the list as it works 9/10 times. Everyone's different, thats my recipe: running if i'm overthinking stings, lifting weights when anxiety is creeping in. Surfing for both and everything else but thats not easy to pull off on a sunday evening.
A quick honest caveat. Most Sundays at this hour are actually fine. We had dinner outside, the kids made a mess, we play a silly card game before bed time. The Atlantic is doing its thing. It's a good life. The reason I'm writing this anyway is that I keep meeting people considering a founder path who only see the LinkedIn version, and I'd rather have them see the Sunday one too.
If you're a founder, an operator, an owner, or someone considering becoming one, you have your own version of this hour. Maybe yours is the drive home on Friday. Maybe it's right before you fall asleep.
Reply with where yours sits and what shows up for you when it does. I read every one.
Until next week, Philipp
P.S. If your Sunday hour is currently a real problem and not just the hour, hit reply. About half my advisory conversations start exactly there.
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