Yes, I’m Tired All the Time. I’m Also Building a Business. Here’s How.
Let me paint you a picture.
It is a Tuesday afternoon. I have slept anywhere between 6 and 10 hours the night before — genuinely, it varies that much. I woke up tired. I will probably feel tired around 2pm. And at 3pm. And honestly, by 7pm too if I sit still long enough. My natural resting state is sleepy. It has always been this way. I have never been a bounce-out-of-bed person. I do not drink coffee. I do not drink energy drinks. I have no caffeine safety net to reach for because I am caffeine sensitive. If I drink any form of caffeine, even the smallest amount, I will be awake for 48 hours straight and feel MISERABLE the entire time!
Here’s the other truths: I am building a business from scratch. Not a stay-small, cozy-for-the-sake-of-it business. I want financial freedom. Time freedom. Location freedom. I want to hire a team one day. I want a warehouse. I want a studio, a culture, and the whole shebang! I want a big business I’m proud of! I am technically a micro business at the moment, but for the long term I am not thinking small. Therefore, my business model has to reflect that future vision.
So how exactly does someone who is perpetually, genuinely, baseline tired run a business and actually get things done?
That is what this video — and this post — is about.
Not a hack. Not a morning routine that requires you to be a different person. Not toxic positivity dressed up as productivity advice. A real system, built by a real sleepy girl, for actually getting things done without losing your mind or your energy in the process.
Because here is the thing nobody says out loud in the small business and entrepreneurship space: managing your energy is more important than managing your time. And if you are a small business owner who is constantly tired, you are not broken. You are not lazy. You are just running on a system that was not built for how you actually work.
Let’s fix that.
There Is Nothing Wrong With You
Before we get into anything else, I need to say this clearly: being tired all the time does not mean something is wrong with you.
I spent a bit of time low-key believing there was something wrong with me. Something I had to fix with medications or I was deficient in something! That I had to wake up early and get my day going! And I’m not going to lie, I used to be one of those people who woke up at 6am was at the gym by 7am. Got done by 8am, and then headed home. All this did was make my day longer and make me more fatigued sooner! I came to realize, I do better working out and having my daily movement in the middle of my day or at the end of my workday and not at the beginning of it.
Do you know how they say, we’re all different. YEAH, THAT’S EXACTLY MY POINT. We can’t nor should all function the same way. Just like those “One Size” clothing pieces do not actually fit all.
The idea that real entrepreneurs are the ones who spring out of bed at 5am, drink their greens, and attack the day is false. Real entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes! Look at Aileen Xu from Lavendaire, in one of her videos she mentions she gladly wakes up at 11am because that’s what her body needs. Are you going to call her “not a real entrepreneur?” No.
I don’t live in that type of reality where 5am wake up calls is my thing. I love being cozy and I love my bed. I don’t reach for my phone upon waking up, I snuggle up some more before eventually hauling my ass out of bed and opening the curtains to start my day.
My energy is dynamic, not static. It shifts throughout the day. It fluctuates day to day, week to week, season to season. Some days I am sharp and high-functioning. Other days I am operating at 40% and I have to work with what I have got. Both are real. Both are valid. Neither makes me less capable of building something meaningful.
Snowboarding days are a perfect example of how my energy actually works. I will wake up on a snowboarding day having gotten maybe 4 hours of sleep — genuinely, sometimes more or less — and I will ride for 9 hours straight!!! I start the morning tired as hell. But I have systems. I have music, I have movement, I have things that shift my state. And eventually I come alive. I push through the initial tiredness and get to the other side of it, where I am fully present and riding hard all day. And I love and live for every second of it! I will never stop talking about snowboarding!
That is not because snowboarding magically erases fatigue. It is because I have learned what it takes to get from the tired starting point to the alive and moving version of myself. And I built the same thing for my business.
This is what I mean when I say I work with my energy instead of against it. I am not waiting for the energy to show up on its own. I am working with my systems to get myself moving, even on the days when everything in my body wants to stay horizontal. But I know myself, 1000%, I will regret it if I stay horizontal because I always do. Life’s too short to sleep it away no matter how much you love it!
For small business owners especially — people who do not have a boss clocking them in, people who are self-directed by design — understanding your energy patterns is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation of everything. You cannot build a sustainable small business on willpower and self-punishment. It runs out. Every single time.
The Hustle Culture Lie I Am Done Entertaining
If working harder was the actual answer, our immigrant parents (mine are from Poland) would be the wealthiest people in every room. No one out-hustled them. No one sacrificed more, worked longer hours, or pushed through more obstacles, and yet hustle alone did not guarantee the outcome they were working toward. Hard work matters—I’m not saying it doesn’t—but how you work, the systems you build, and the sustainability of your approach are what create longevity.
Toxic productivity culture wants you to believe that tiredness is weakness, that if you’re tired, you’re not committed enough, and that the answer to feeling depleted is to push harder, sleep less, and grind through it. That’s not a strategy—that’s a fast track to burnout. I don’t operate from that place, and I refuse to. Not because I don’t want success—I want it deeply, more than most people probably realize—but because I know the version of me running on empty, forcing output, and pretending to be someone I’m not does worse work and builds worse things than the version of me who is honest about her energy and works intelligently within it.
That’s also not the life or business I’m building. Your system—your routine—has to match your future vision. That’s what “acting as if” actually means. Not that things magically fall into your lap, but that your business model reflects the life you’re trying to create. I see so many small businesses chase virality, trends, and the algorithm—sell a lot or nothing at all, build big followings without a real foundation—and eventually quit, not because they weren’t capable, but because they burned out and never built something that could actually sustain them.
I’m building in pajamas, from 92 square feet, without caffeine, fully aware that I’m going to feel tired at multiple points in my day, every day. Am I always in pajamas? No, obviously. But I’m not going to force myself into discomfort when I know I do my best thinking and work when I’m comfortable. And I’m still building, because I built a system that doesn’t require me to be anything other than exactly who I am.
The Methods (Watch the Video for the Full Breakdown)
I cover these in depth in the video, so I am not going to over-explain them here — I want you to actually watch it. But here is the quick list of what I use to manage my energy as a small business owner who is sleepy all the time:
Timers.
Small wins.
In-between moments.
Starting sooner.
This is probably the biggest mindset shift in the video and the one I see small business owners get wrong the most. It is not about being impulsive. It is about understanding what waiting actually does to your resistance levels.
Music and movement.
A flexible to-do list system.
Digital. Has to be. I will explain why paper cannot do this particular job, even though I love paper planning and use a paper planner too.
Top 4 Today.
These methods work together. They are not a stack of isolated tricks — they are a system designed for dynamic energy, built for someone who cannot predict exactly how they will feel at 10am on any given Wednesday. Watch the video for the full context on each one, because I go deep on the reasoning and the how behind all of it.
What I Learned Making This Video
This is the part that is only in the blog post. The lessons behind the lens. The stuff that happened before, during, and after that shaped not just this video but how I think about my work.
The idea came fast. I moved faster.
This video started as a statement. I was talking to my man and I simply said, “running my business as a sleepy girl.” He followed up with, “That would actually be a really great video idea.” At the time that I said it, I was like… Nahhhh. But then the more I thought about it, the more the idea grew on me because I think it’s very relevant to me, to others I feel, or maybe will be relevant or more relevant in the future.
I scripted it the same day. Filmed the hook that same day. I was still sick during part of this. I had a baby shower over the weekend while I had everything going on, in upstate New York no less, and was gone for a few days because of it. I filmed the A-roll April 15th. Organized my files April 15th. And the video was done and published before the end of April meeting one of my goals for the year in uploading at least one video a month. I’m not going to lie, I had ANOTHER great idea during this video, and I started acting on it as well. But it took all of me to pause that, still work on it a little every day to keep the momentum alive, but really give my all to this video and topic.
Starting ASAP though is not by accident. That is the starting sooner principle applied in real time. The second I felt resistance growing — between the idea and the actual making of it — I took one small action toward the video. And that kept the door open. By the time I got to editing, the idea still felt alive and exciting to me, not like a task that had been rotting on a list for three weeks.
If you are a small business owner with content ideas sitting in a notes app untouched from six months ago, I want you to sit with that. The idea is not bad. The distance you put between yourself and the start of it is what made it hard.
Trying new things on youtube, and what that actually means.
Confession: I tried something new with this video.
I really admire creators who make polished, interactive, slide-style videos. A couple of my favorites are MyNameIsDeya and Kelsey Rodriguez—everything they make is clean, visual, designed, and very on-brand. So I decided to try that style for this video. I even spent time making slides that felt pretty aligned with my own branding… I think at least.
But I’m not going to lie, I’ve never been a presentation person. And pretty quickly, I realized how much work it actually is. Not just technically, but creatively. A lot of the time, it felt… off. Like I was pushing against my natural way of creating instead of working with it. I wanted it to feel more interactive and engaging, but something about it just didn’t fully click.
And then I thought about another creator I really enjoy: Monica Razak. Her videos are long, in-depth, and it’s mostly just her talking. The background doesn’t really change. There’s nothing overly interactive. Sometimes she’s packing orders, but that’s about it. Before she moved, she would literally just sit down and talk things through—and it worked. No lie, I LOVED listening to her videos like she’s running a podcast. Her hour long ones were my fave because it gave me a break from listening to my music during my long tristate area drives!
So that’s when it really hit me: I don’t have to try so hard to be something I’m not. Trying new things isn’t bad though! I am trying a lot of new things right now. And I think this is actually the best time for me to do that! When you’re a new YouTube creator, the advice is always to try new things—try everything you want to try—because this is the phase where you’re allowed to explore. Most people think of that in terms of topics or niches, but for me, it’s more about experimenting with editing styles and formats. I’m still learning. Still figuring out my flow.
Because the truth is, I’m not new to what I talk about—I’m new to how I present it. I have so much to share about business, my small business, marketing, making money online—all of it. Just because my YouTube is new, or you don’t know me yet, doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing this for years. I’ve been making money online since I was 13. I’ve spent over two decades learning, testing, and figuring things out. I’ve sold out other people’s brands for them, repeatedly. I’ve created digital marketing strategies that other people turned around and copied.
Now I’m finally taking all of that experience and putting it into myself (or trying because I’m learning there’s only so much 1 person can do in any given day) while building smart and sustainably.
So I have a lot of ideas—videos that fill gaps, things that aren’t really being talked about yet, perspectives that might be early. But the one thing I am new to, and actively figuring out in real time, is video editing and how I want my content to feel.
The slides I spent hours on were fine.
The stick figure I drew in ten minutes? That felt more like me. And I think that says everything.
What that means for future videos… I don’t fully know yet. I’m still figuring it out. Even my next video is in a completely different style. Every video I make will always be business-related, but not every video is going to look the same—and I don’t want it to.
I don’t want to box myself in too early.
This is the phase where I get to figure out what feels natural, what doesn’t, what I enjoy effortlessly, and what I enjoy but might have to work a little harder for. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everything in life comes naturally. Some things take more time, more intention, and a different kind of effort to click.
I’ve done that before. With college algebra, I had to build a system that actually worked for me and put in extra effort just to pass. With snowboarding, it took even longer—it didn’t come together quickly at all, but I stayed with it until it did. Video editing feels similar. It’s something I can do, something I even enjoy, but it’s also something I’m still working at and growing into. And that’s okay. Hopefully it won’t take as long as snowboarding—but either way, that’s part of the journey.
And there’s something in that for anyone building a brand or creating content as a small business owner:
You don’t find your style or brand by thinking your way into it. You find it by creating, by experimenting, and by paying attention to what actually feels like you versus what just looks good from the outside. Because the things you have to force will burn you out, and the things that come naturally—or become natural over time—are the ones you’ll actually be able to sustain and scale.
this is what building looks like before it works.
Four hours after publishing: 4 views.
I’ll be transparent, because I don’t think content performance anxiety is talked about honestly enough in the small business creator space. Four hours after I published this video, it had four views. One of them was mine—from checking that everything displayed correctly. And I am fine. I am genuinely, actually fine (no this is not sarcasm, it’s life!) You win some, and you lose some. Snowboarding taught me I needed to fail and fall many times before I finally could put it all together and make everything I learned make sense but actually do the thing! Three private lessons, one of which was for 7 hours with the guy I now call my significant other! 14 days of showing up through the course of the entire 2023 year and 66 hours total spent putting A through Z together and getting mountain ready! I took on the mountains ALONE that VERY SAME WINTER. And I did it, and it propelled me further than ever!
But anyways! I do relate everything I do back to snowboarding because none of this—my business, my shop, my YouTube, my products—wouldn’t be here without it. It is definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done and accomplished. And if I learned to snowboard in my 30s as a female, and I take on blues and am addicted to the speed, I fully believe I can do anything else. It just takes time, effort, and showing up!
So here’s why I think a lot of my ideas are early: I’ve said things before—years ago—that people are only starting to say now. I deleted some of that old content, and I’ll probably regret that forever. The ideas were right, just ahead of the cultural moment.
Running a business when you’re perpetually tired, building sustainable systems around low-energy states, rejecting toxic productivity culture as a small business owner—these are conversations that are growing. They’re not at peak search volume yet. But they will be.
And when they get there, this video will already be sitting there—indexed, established, waiting.
Evergreen content doesn’t need to go viral the day it’s posted. It needs to exist. It needs to be real, and it needs to be findable. This one is both.
And I’m not new to this.
I grew a blog to millions of views a year simply by playing the long game. There are posts I published a year ago that only started gaining real traction this year—and ended up bringing in partnerships with high-level brands, some of them in the snowboarding space. I knew those posts would perform, just not immediately.
That’s the difference.
I’m not chasing trends, the algorithm, or virality. I’m building around what I know is coming and around ideas I already believe in. And I’m not short on ideas. Not even close.
Because every piece of content is another asset. Another data point. Another door. Another page in a library that compounds over time—where one video leads to another, one idea connects to the next, and eventually the right people don’t just find you once… they stay.
My CTR over the last 28 days is 3.5%. I’m at 501 subscribers. I am building. This is what building looks like before the inflection point—and I’m not embarrassed by any of it. I remember when I posted this short video years ago (Aug 14, 2024 to be exact) and it got like 500-something views. And then all of a sudden this past October or November it just started growing and hasn’t stopped; it’s over 11k now! It’s kind of crazy! All I did was land a park feature my second day in the terrain park in an insanely wide asf stance.
Short-form social media has conditioned us to expect immediate feedback. Numbers right away. Proof right away. Validation right away. But that’s not how this kind of content works.
If you’re creating highly searchable, evergreen content, you’re playing a slower game. These videos rely more on search than on the homepage. It takes time for YouTube to index them, understand them, rank them against massive competitors, and start serving them to the right people. That delay doesn’t mean failure—it means the foundation is still being laid.
These are seeds. And some of them take six to twelve months to grow.
We’re not actually going backwards—we’re just early in a different phase.
“Interest media”—or being a true personality-driven channel where the niche is simply you—is still the goal for a lot of personal brands. But the part people don’t say out loud is that being your own niche is an earned privilege. It’s not where most people start.
When people say “don’t box yourself in,” they’re right about the long-term vision—but they often skip the short-term mechanics. You still have to get people through the door first.
And right now, that’s what I’m doing.
Building, quietly. Early. On purpose.
Building it before it looks like it’s working.
I’m building in 92 square feet. What you see in my videos is real. It’s the actual room I work in, the actual space I have. I’m not covering it with a fake set. I’m not pretending I have a studio. I’m filming at my desk because the lighting works—and because what I’m saying matters more than what’s behind me.
Eventually, I will move. And when I do, I’m documenting the entire thing. Because moving a business—whether it’s within the same state or across state lines—is a process people don’t talk about enough. The logistics, the adjustments, the way your systems have to shift with you. All of it.
There’s a good chance that move will be to New Jersey. My man is there, and I never saw myself staying in Philly long-term. I might spend some time living with my sister just outside the city first—closer, more space, a transition into the next chapter. Either way, it’s a bridge. And that bridge is part of the story too.
Because I’m not going to suddenly start showing the polished version of my life when I get there and pretend the 92 square feet never happened.
The 92 square feet is part of the story.
The pajamas are part of the story.
The sleepiness is part of the story.
And that ties back to everything I’ve been saying.
I’m not chasing fast results. I’m not trying to look bigger than I am. I’m building something that lasts—and documenting it as it actually happens, not just once it becomes impressive.
Because the point of all of this—the videos, the content, the systems I share, the honest look at what small business ownership actually feels like when you’re doing it in your real life, with your real energy levels—isn’t just to build a following.
It’s to build proof.
Proof that you don’t have to be a morning person, or a high-energy person, or someone who has it all together to build something real.
You just have to build a system that’s built for you.
I’m still figuring mine out. I’m better at it than I was last year. I’ll be better at it next year than I am now. And I’m documenting all of it along the way—not because every individual thing I do is groundbreaking, but because the accumulation of honest, real, mine content is what builds trust with the people it’s meant for.
If you’re a sleepy girl building a business—or a sleepy guy, or just someone who’s chronically tired and still trying to build something—this is for you.
The methods work. The system is learnable.
And there is nothing wrong with you.
Watch the video now, but if not, that’s okay too, this is where I leave you.
Till next time!
Diana~
