For a long time I thought being "busy" meant I was building something.
I was checking dashboards before my kids woke up. Sitting in three "stay informed" meetings a week. Spending Sunday evenings manually compiling reports that nobody read as closely as I thought they did.
I wasn't running a company. I was being run by one.
A teacher told me something similar a few months ago. She said: "I spend more time marking and filing than I do actually teaching. I didn't get into this for the admin."
Two completely different jobs. Same exact trap.
I started calling it the Cage — not to be dramatic, but because it's accurate. The work you actually want to do keeps getting pushed to "later." And later never comes.
It wasn't a productivity problem. It wasn't a hiring problem. The model was broken.
I'm sharing what we figured out this week. Starting with the system we built to get out.
Which version are you in? The founder's or the educator's?