Chill Labs is a boutique consultancy helping companies think strategically, solve business problems, and streamline operations utilizing Product Management, Software Engineering principles and AI. Combining a decade of experience running complex, globally distributed software products with expertise in product discovery, user research, and strategy, Chill Labs helps companies build products that users want and do so in a way that supports growth and scale. Dina Levitan, Founder and Principal at Chill Labs, based out of Seattle, WA, brings over 15 years of experience as a product and technical leader ranging from startups to companies like Google.
What if you had to disappear for 3 weeks?
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Hi Reader, Here's a thought experiment. Or it was, until I ran it on myself a few weeks ago. What if you had to be completely unreachable for three weeks, starting next Monday? It was clarifying in ways I didn't expect. Would your business hold? Most people pause when I ask that. Then they start listing the things that would break. A client expectation that's never been written down. Content that only exists in their head. A monthly deliverable that quietly stops going out. "Automate yourself" is easy to say. Three weeks of unreachability is a good way to make it real. What has to be in place Client work comes first. It's relationship-dependent, so it's the least automatable and the highest-stakes piece. But there's usually more that can be wrapped, paused, or handed off than you think. A short note - "here's what continues, here's what pauses, here's when I'm back" - does most of the work. People appreciate the clarity most of all. Content is secondary. Newsletters, social posts, the stuff that keeps you visible: it matters, but it can wait, and it's the most automatable of the three. A queued calendar, a clear handoff to a VA, and whatever agents you have running gets you most of the way there. Operations tends to be overestimated as a problem. Most backend stuff just doesn't need to happen in a 3-week window. The pieces that do can usually be automated or pre-handled in a day once you're looking at them clearly. The part I didn't expect The hardest part wasn't the logistics. It was the mental side: being confident enough to stop monitoring everything and trust that what I built will hold. That's the test that matters. Not whether things run when you take a Friday off, but whether they hold when something big is happening in your life. A question for this week: If you had to disappear for three weeks starting next Monday, what's the first thing that would break? That answer is your next system to build. Work with me directly. If you want a thinking partner on your product strategy, AI rollout, or building your fractional practice - here's how I work with people: https://gamma.app/docs/Chill-Labs-Coaching-Information-ifjuyb0hjgw9xtb Let's Chillaborate, Dina Founder, Chill Labs PS: Catch up on the latest episode of Automate Yourself: Danielle LaFleur rebuilt a 22-person agency into a 4-person AI-powered one: https://www.chillaborate.com/podcast/danielle-lafleur 💙 |
Chill Labs
Chill Labs is a boutique consultancy helping companies think strategically, solve business problems, and streamline operations utilizing Product Management, Software Engineering principles and AI. Combining a decade of experience running complex, globally distributed software products with expertise in product discovery, user research, and strategy, Chill Labs helps companies build products that users want and do so in a way that supports growth and scale. Dina Levitan, Founder and Principal at Chill Labs, based out of Seattle, WA, brings over 15 years of experience as a product and technical leader ranging from startups to companies like Google.
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