Yesterday I sat in a cafe in the centro of San Miguel de Allende for almost an hour with nothing to do. No laptop open. No message waiting. I watched the plaza fill up with the morning market, finished my coffee, and stayed a while longer anyway.
Three years ago that would have felt indulgent. Now it is a normal Tuesday.
I want to be careful about what I am actually saying here, because it would be easy to read this as a highlight reel. It is not. This is the time architecture underneath an ordinary week. The actual structure holding it up, not a curated version of a good month.
What filled the space instead
When I look back at the last two weeks, almost none of it looks like traditional work. I had my coaching calls. I hosted a live session. I had the blocks of time I protect for client strategy. That was the business.
Everything else was something I used to file under someday, if I let myself think about it at all.
I spent whole afternoons in my studio finishing the first draft of a fantasy novel I have been building for months, hand-drawn map and all. It is with beta readers now. I had a long lunch with a friend in her seventies, just talking about the different seasons of a life. I walked through the city with nowhere I needed to be. I napped in the middle of the afternoon and did not feel guilty about it.
None of that happened by accident. I built my lean days so it could happen on purpose.
The conversations that mattered more than the calendar
The other thing that filled the space is harder to schedule and harder to talk about publicly, so I will keep it general. Conversations with family about health, and about what they actually want next. Long conversations with my partner about parenting teenagers through a hard stretch. Time spent helping him think through the first big project of his own consulting business, from the systems underneath it to how his team communicates.
None of that shows up on an invoice. All of it is the actual point of the architecture.
What this looked like for a client
One client came to a recent live session I hosted and had a private call with me right after. She did not leave with a five-year plan. She left with one decision: to start building small, ordinary moments back into her days with her partner on purpose, not as a reward for hitting a goal first.
Then she sent me a photo over the weekend of her enjoying time exactly as she had decided days earlier. It gets to happen that fast, changing your life.
That is the whole model in miniature. Not a bigger vision. One decision, acted on this week.
Yes I’m still ‘serious’ about my business
I know how this can read from the outside. Fewer hours on a calendar can look like a business that is shrinking. It is not. The Design Room opens its founding cohort in a few weeks. The Residency, my most private and highest-touch work, has one seat I am actively protecting for the right person.
My business goals and ambition did not shrink. The relationship between my time and my income did. That is the design decision underneath everything else in this post.
The question underneath all of this
So here is what I actually want to ask you. Not what you would do with more time, because that question is too easy to answer in the abstract.
What would you design space for, on purpose, if you decided it was allowed to be normal? Not earned. Not a reward for a harder quarter. Just normal, the way a Tuesday afternoon in a cafe is normal for me now.
If you already know the answer and you do not know how to build toward it, that is worth an actual conversation, not another framework to read. Reach out and let’s talk about what your version of this could look like, including whether the Design Room’s founding cohort is the room for it.
Katrina Cobb is a Business Architect for women founders generating $300K to $1M+. She helps leaders redesign the architecture of their business, lifestyle, leadership, and identity so growth feels spacious, sustainable, and deeply aligned with the life they actually want. Explore her work at katrinacobb.com.