What twelve to seventeen hours a week actually runs

Four sites run on that time: this blog, jaredhebb.com, the course site, and electricaltoolbox.com. Plus a newsletter that ships every Tuesday. Plus a community with its own training material, its own request board, its own accounts. None of that is a metaphor for busy. It is where the twelve to seventeen hours a week I actually measure goes, and that is the real number, not the one that would sound more impressive.

Almost none of that time is spent typing code or prose. A daily job promotes one approved post at 9:30am ET. A different job stages the newsletter in MailerLite and waits for me to see it before it can send. A hook checks whether a session’s docs still describe what it just built. None of that runs because I am watching it. It runs because I built it once and got out of the way.

There is exactly one place in this whole pipeline with a real, metered bill attached: the Regenerate button that would rewrite a post through the Anthropic API. It costs a fraction of a cent per run. It is still off, because a fraction of a cent is still a bill I did not have before, and I would rather decide that on purpose than back into it.

Time is the actual cost here. Not the infrastructure, not the API calls. Twelve to seventeen measured hours a week is the real price of running four sites off a rotation of small, boring automations.