Office Hours With Yourself

Listen to your readers and build what they need

Office hours with yourself every other week - created by author in ChatGPT

You may not have time to run live sessions every week on your Substack.

Or engaging in your chat on Substack.

Like me, maybe you haven’t started live sessions on Substack yet.

But you can still have «office hours» with yourself.

Think of it as a short, regular meeting where you stop creating new content and instead listen to the signals you already have.

Like what you would get feedback on through a live sessions or through the chat feature on your Substack.

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This is in principle what we do in the Air Force at the squadron, and with our Project Department and our Project team.

We block off time for our own office hours, where we review our work and work on the all the “tedious” background tasks that keeps the project moving forward and keep us up to speed.

Training and practicing karate? The same thing, review your progress etc. without the «noise» of other members of your club or from your Sensei.

Working for yourself, writing on Substack or elsewhere, I would use a similar framework.

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The Office Hours

Once a month, preferably once every other week, for 30–45 minutes, with all external noise shut-off (including closing down 1000’s of tabs that are open in your browser), do this:

1. Review reader input.

   • Replies to your emails.

   • Comments on posts.

   • DMs and quiet notes from people you trust.

   • Which links people actually clicked.
     

2. Capture patterns.

   • What questions keep coming up?

   • What phrases do readers repeat?

   • Where do they get stuck implementing?
     

3. Translate patterns into topics.
   Take each recurring question and write it in your reader’s own words. Those become your next minis, cornerstones, or workshop ideas.
   

4. Decide one adjustment.

   • Write a series on a recurring challenge

   • Clarify a confusing part of your positioning

   • Add a micro‑practice to your next email
     

This short procedure does three things:

1. Keeps you aligned with real needs instead of your assumptions.

2. Prevents you from drifting into abstract content no one asked for.

3. Feeds your idea bank so you’re rarely staring at a blank page.

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Put It In The Calendar

Now it is your turn!

Put “Office hours with myself” in your calendar every other week or once a month and honor it like any other meeting (And don’t forget to write Minutes of Meeting to yourself afterwards).