Your Calendar Isn’t Busy. It’s Broken.

Most business owners I talk to think their problem is time.

“I just need to get more efficient.”
“If I could hire one more person…”
“Once this season slows down…”

But the truth is, time isn’t your problem: your calendar is.

And not because it’s full. Because it’s broken.

You’re Not Managing a Calendar—It’s Managing You

Here’s the test: open your calendar right now.

How much of it reflects what you actually want? Your priorities? The things you care most about?

How much of it is:

• Endless meetings to fix what others broke?

• Calls from your team waiting for you to make decisions for them?

• Commitments you didn’t want to choose?

For most business owners, their schedule doesn’t look like leadership. It looks like survival.

They’re not steering the ship. They’re plugging leaks. They wake up every day reactive, answering other people’s emergencies.

That’s why they’re exhausted. That’s why they’re starting to resent the very thing they built.

The Hidden Cost of a Hijacked Calendar

A reactive calendar doesn’t just cost you time. It costs you clarity. You spend most of your day leaking out focus.

You lose the margin to think deeply, to lead intentionally.

It costs you presence. You come home barely there and mentally gone.

It costs you integrity. If your schedule doesn’t reflect your convictions—if your kids, your health, your faith are always pushed to “later”—then you’re living fractured, successful on paper but misaligned in reality.

And most owners don’t even know what to call this. They think it’s “hustle.”

It’s not hustle. It’s a hijacked life.

Taking Back Your Calendar

How do you fix it?

1. Audit Last Week: Look at every block on your calendar. Was it actually impacting revenue? Did it align with your role as the owner? If not, cut it or delegate it.

2. Block the Non-Negotiables First: Faith, family, fitness. If they don’t go on the calendar first, they won’t happen. And if they don’t go first, they’ll get bumped to never.

3. Design Owner Time: Block deep-work for strategy and leadership—the stuff only you can do. Protect it like revenue.

4. Institute Kill Zones: Identify meetings or tasks that simply don’t need to exist. Say no. Cancel them. Tell your senior leaders to work out get-well plans for them.

This isn’t about squeezing more into your days. It’s about building a week that actually reflects who you are and what matters.

If your days feel out of control, you don’t need more hours.
You need ownership.

Because until you take back your calendar, you’re not leading a business.
You’re being dragged behind one.

Want to take control of this again? Start your Leadership Reset today.

What AI Found in 9 Years of My Private Journals

Using nine years of journal entries in Google Docs, I exported them as TXT files, uploaded the files to ChatGPT, and asked AI:

“What do you make of these journal entries l I've kept since 2016? What are things I might not realize about myself, or goals that it seems like I want but aren't achieving?”

Some of the observations were gut checks!

I pasted the whole reply below, maintaining AI’s emoji formatting. My reaction is at the bottom.

Some stuff that felt too personal was censored with brackets, as in [you’ll never know what this one said] 😉

ChatGPT’s Initial Assessment

Thank you for sharing your journals. After reviewing entries from 2016 through 2025, I’ve pulled together key patterns and insights—some of which may be things you already know, but others you may not have explicitly noticed or connected.

🔍 1. You Have a Deep Desire for Alignment Between Mission, Work, and Spiritual Calling

Across nearly all the years:

• You regularly express discontent with work that feels misaligned or mediocre (e.g., [Company Name], [Military Position]).

• You crave “your own thing” and a sense of mission. In 2025, that centers around Christian leadership and a personal brand. In 2019, it was eBay/Amazon listings, sales, or real estate.

• You often write things like:

  "How can I be so blessed and feel so lost?"
  "I don’t feel like I’m entirely aligned with the correct mission."

🟨 What you may not fully realize:

You’ve already defined your mission multiple times—what’s missing is consistent long-term commitment to seeing it through.

You write with clarity about wanting to lead, teach, and build—yet return to conventional work out of necessity or lack of traction. There’s an unresolved tension between calling and comfort.

🧱 2. You Are Consistently Building, But Often Shift Tracks

From eBay and car sales in 2019 to the 4x4 Recall brand in 2024–2025, you constantly generate ideas and execute with discipline:

• “Day 100 of publishing short-form content”

• “Sold seven cars this month”

• “Paid off both cars, planning rental investment, publishing daily”

🟨 But:

You often hit the "slog" phase—when initial excitement fades—and either pivot or stall.

You write extensively about the middle of the marathon, yet still sound surprised when the feelings of funk or stagnation arrive (e.g., July 2025).

❤️ 3. You Are Highly Motivated by Relationships and Legacy

You repeatedly express:

• A desire to be a better father to [Daughter’s Name]—even noticing when she doesn’t appear on your practical goal lists

• Passion and tension around romantic relationships (e.g., [Woman’s Name]) with deep emotional and practical consideration

• Gratitude for your wife, kids, and the life you’ve built

🟨 Yet:

You sometimes feel guilty or uncertain about how much to sacrifice your personal mission in the name of those relationships—and vice versa. That creates ambivalence and cycles of burnout.

📉 4. Your Health and Energy Correlate with Clarity and Execution

When you feel in shape, you write about clarity, optimism, and drive. When you fall off track:

• You write things like “I found the bottom” or note feeling “tired, groggy, overweight”

• You admit using food or drink as escapism

• There are moments of re-commitment to diet and discipline, but they tend to be short bursts

🟨 This means:

Your body is a feedback system for your mental and emotional state—and discipline here affects every area of your life.

🎯 5. Your True Goals Are Crystal Clear—and Still Unfulfilled

Across the journals, you repeatedly name the same vision:

• Run your own mission-driven business

• Serve a real community (specifically, men and leaders)

• Generate income through value and wisdom

• Lead from Christian principles

• Achieve financial independence with time and space for family and purpose

🟨 What you might not realize:

You’re already capable of the future you want. The challenge isn’t clarity, talent, or insight—it’s persistent execution through the woods, not around them. You crave freedom, but freedom only comes after prolonged captivity to your mission.

🚩 Potential Blind Spots

1. You often chase structure (school, [military], corporate) when you feel unclear—but structure may be the very thing suffocating your deeper drive.

2. You want mentorship and brotherhood, but rarely talk about specific efforts to find it beyond journaling.

3. You delay revenue creation in your own brand, even when traffic and consistency are improving—this blocks your breakout from corporate dependence.

🧭 Summary: Who You Seem to Be

You’re a deeply intentional man with sharp intellect, emotional range, and spiritual awareness. You have lived many lives—and often try to live them simultaneously. You’re seeking integration of fatherhood, faith, calling, and financial freedom. You’ve made enormous progress—and still often feel like you’re behind.

Would you like a structured plan to align your brand, calling, income, and health over the next 12 months based on these insights?

My Response

First off, heck yeah I asked to see what that 12-month Structured Plan looked like! 😉

After I saw its plan, I asked it to create the outline and first draft of the 12-point Lead Magnet it mentioned in that plan.

And then I asked it to outline and draft a book for me based on these nine years of entries, because why not? 🤷‍♂️

Main Take-Aways

1. Overall, I spent about two hours with ChatGPT on 7-23-2025. The output was this full assessment, a 12-month action plan, an outline and sample drafts of a book idea, and instructions on how to continue on the book work.

   1. It’s almost too easy to just say that: “I spent two hours.” That’s really mind-blowing when you consider it. That is almost six months of deliverables by any standard. I’ve done similar work with companies, teams, and other men looking for perspective…this kind of output does not come in TWO hours.

2. In hindsight, many of the observations are obvious. I often look back on my entries over the years, and I too can see the trends and patterns. In fact, that in itself is my number one reason for journaling (besides the immediate clarity effects).

   1. The real power here is that AI did it in 30 seconds. I mean literally. It took all four files, thousands of rows of text, 9 years of driveling, and pulled out concise trends and actionable items to work on.

3. It comes in HIGH volumes of output.

   1. Even as a guy that considers himself “high-performance,” it’s a lot. It’s easy to see it all and then just want to drink a Diet Coke and take a nap.

   2. My advice here is to pause. Stop work at a certain point. The computer can keep going, but YOU need to digest it and let it assimilate. Go pick two key action items from it all and put them in place!

Follow-Ups

Yesterday, I had already build the new landing page from its prompts, and settled on the new direction of the Personal Brand.

AI delivers a huge amount of output. Pick two and got them done.

Today’s main output focuses:

1. Document, draft all these outputs as posts that I can video from [that’s already done, so this action item is sort of a gimme].

2. Organize the Book Folders per ChatGPTs instructions, and get the outline in place. Type the first 250 words of that.

3. Clarify the Lead Magnet delivery and get that in place. Right now, I’m pretty sure it’s just going to be a blog post, and then I’ll let people opt-in if they want to see the polished version I ended up with from all that work.

Conclusion

This is useful and high-powered. It’s leverage.

I recently listened to Dr. Roman Yampolskiy on The Joe Rogan Experience talk through his view of Super Intelligence / AI destroying humanity within 2-5 years. Honestly, he’s got some STRONG points. I’ve been in technology for 20 years. What we built here, we don’t fully fathom.

Still, AI is extremely useful. I tell my employees now it’s like a tractor. If you told me you plowed your 20 acre field by hand, I would not be impressed. We have tractors.

While we still live, breathe, and make our own decisions. I’m still using this.

For a more optimistic view on the doomsday idea, see Dr. Roman Yampolskiy on Lex Friedman’s podcast. That conversation was much more productive, in my opinion.

Overall, this exercise was useful and I got the clarity that would have previously come from reviewing a few fiscal years with a full board of advisors. I’ll continue to lean into this.

Why I Focus on High-Capacity Christian Men—and Not Everyone Else

Journal Excerpt from 7-23-2025:

What’s my purpose, and how do I align myself publicly with it?

I was at Men’s Group this morning. The guy speaking was good. He was a good presenter. It was well organized. His personal stories were relevant and carried the message home. I believe he cared about making stronger men, and he was supporting that mission.

I took some notes on superficial use of scriptures that we don’t understand well enough (like every man quotes “iron sharpens iron” too much. Do you really know what that looks like?). But overall, that was a message worth supporting.

When I looked around that room, I saw a couple hundred men’s lives being improved. That ministry is a net positive. It set out to change lives, and it changes lives. I believe that.

I looked around that room and realized that’s what I’m after. 

I guess I’ve always know that’s what I’m after, but when I started talking about “Strength, Love, and Authenticity” in 2015, which evolved into “Strength, Courage, and Authenticity,” I meant it. And I still mean it. Ten years later, I can honestly say that those core values are what drive my missions, and what have fueled my success in business and life.

So regardless of brand name, I’ve always been talking about Strength, Courage, and Authenticity, which is technically leadership. I talk about leadership.

The brand over the years shifted from various brand names to a “personal brand,”. Today I’m still talking about the same things, I’m just making it more obviously “Chad Tabary,” as the brand. From that, any various offers can take different names, like Forward Facing Business, Forward Facing Church, or Lead Present.

ALSO, I’m on ONE offer. That was the most useful part of the ChatGPT exercise yesterday. I already knew I needed just one offer, but processing 9 years of journal data through ChatGPT helped me align on: 

“I help high-capacity Christian men regain clarity, strength, and conviction without burning their business to the ground.”

That’s accurate. The only significant change in that mission over the last year has been to clarify that I’m helping “Christian” men. 

But why “Christian Men”? Doesn’t God help anyone and everyone? Isn’t the calling of a Christian Man to go out and make disciples and onboard more Christian Men?

Honestly, the qualifier shouldn’t be read into.

My business clients run businesses that are between $1M - $6M and they want to grow between $10M - $12.

Anything under $1M and they don’t really have the pressures of a real organization, and anything beyond $12M ($6M really) and they should be hiring this role full-time.

Does that mean I won’t help a business making $250K - $500K that wants to grow to $5M? No. This is the same problem modern readers have when they get caught up in the book of Leviticus.

Focusing my marketing on “Christian Men” helps clarify where I’m coming from and what kind of “guide” I am, best suited for your Hero’s Journey.

Generally speaking, I’m helping high-performance men, I’ve always known that, and I’m doing it from core principles first, and within the discipline-framework of Christianity.

To support that mission, I’m focusing on long-form content, and probably won’t see a strong return to short-form until I hire someone to sift through the long and break this into shorts.

This gives me five more months in the year (almost two quarters) to double down on that pivot and to build the foundational pieces of that brand and business.

I love you.

Samson: The Bible’s Complex Anti-Hero and His Adult Struggles

“Out of the one who eats came something to eat;

out of the strong one came something sweet.” (Jdg 14:14)

Samson’s "riddle" has two obvious answers from an ancient wedding party:

1. is vomit. Strong men drink too much and vomit back up food and drink.

2. is adult inuendo. Something comes out of the strong man for the bride to "eat." (Constable, Thomas L. Constable’s Notes on the Bible. NETBible.org Jdg 14)

The third point (the real meaning, in Samson's case) is absurd, which makes the wager unsportsmanlike.

Samson took an incident that defiled his Nazarite vow (touching a corpse), ate from it (because he’ll take honey from wherever he sees fit), and he also fed it to his parents without informing them of its origin.

AND THEN he turns it into a trick question to get one over on his new bride’s family.

He carries himself like an arrogant demigod.

When he lost his riddle / bet, he runs off and kills 30 men to rob them of their clothes and fulfill his end of the bargain, and then leaves his bride at her fathers house and disappears for a season.

God's will was still enacted here by striking down Israel’s enemies (planned long before Samson), but my point to the adult reader is that you shouldn't romanticize the strength and character of Samson.

He was despicable and self-centered in every scene, and he exemplifies how NOT to be an honorable man. Even in his death, he killed the Philistines as personal revenge for his eyes being gouged out.

In its best light, the story contrasts David and helps us understand David’s origins and rise to King.

The big lesson of Samson is a story where:

• Talent doesn't overcome discipline.

• Not submitting to authority goes disastrous.

• Playing silly games gets silly prizes.

• Disregarding what is sacred has consequences.

• Enacting revenge stacks problems on problems.