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Is the Most Annoying Employee in Your Business… You?

The solopreneur’s silent struggle with the content machine, and how I stopped being my own worst boss.

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I have a little ritual. Every morning, I get my coffee, sit at my desk, and pull up my to-do list. It’s organized. It’s direct and thought through. There are tasks for my clients, including development and invoicing tasks. Then there’s that task. The one that stares back at me like it wants to start a fight.

“Post on social media.”

It sounds so simple. So benign. But for me, and I suspect for a lot of you, that little line item represented a daily dose of anxiety. It was the digital equivalent of a manager who taps you on the shoulder every hour and asks, “Report done yet?” except the manager was me, and the report was a picture of a dog, a motivational quote, or a half-baked thought I could package as “value.”

For months, this was my routine. I’d stare at a blank screen, the cursor blinking, mocking me. I’d scroll through my competitors’ feeds, a toxic cocktail of envy and impostor syndrome bubbling up inside me. I was the founder and CEO of my own small business, Opti Market AI, yet I was letting this one, single task hold my confidence hostage.