The lessons

Every idea, and the arithmetic under it

Each one is short: what it is, why it matters, the method so you could do it on paper, and one worked example. Nothing here needs the app.

Asked during the diagnosis

• The four ways money arrives

  Money reaches you in one of four shapes. You sell your time to one employer. You sell your time to several buyers. You sell a finished outcome at a price you set. Or you sell a thing, which somebody else could hand over.

• Write the number you would have said yesterday

  Before any counting, this app asks what you think you earn. Not what you can prove — what you would have told a friend.

• What the job actually pays

  Gross pay, before deductions, times the months you are actually paid for.

• Twelve months, not the good one

  Everything that landed across the last twelve months, added up. Not a typical month. Not last month.

• What one piece of work sells for

  The price of one finished job, and how many of them you deliver in a month.

• Price, cost, and what is left

  What one unit sells for, what one unit costs you, and how many go out in a month.

• The hours nobody paid you for

  Your contracted hours, plus the ones you actually work on top of them, plus the commute if you count it as sold time.

• Days booked, and how long a day runs

  How many days you worked across twelve months, and the true length of one of those days.

• Every hour the job really takes

  The hours one complete job consumes — including the parts you never invoice.

• The attention it still takes

  Roughly how many hours a month the product still needs from you.

• What one hour actually earned

  Everything that came in, divided by every hour it took. One number, and almost nobody has ever worked out theirs.

• Essentials are smaller than you think

  Essentials are rent, food, utilities, transport and medicine. That is the whole list. Everything else is spending, and it goes in a separate box.

• Turning any quoted rate into a year

  Lenders quote a month, a week, or a flat extra amount. All of them convert to one yearly figure, and the yearly figure is the only one you can compare.

• A stated share, or an open account

  Money that leaves because somebody can ask for it. Some of it has a fixed monthly figure. Some of it is open — decided by whoever asks, whenever they ask.

• Two divisions that locate you

  Runway is what you could reach, divided by one month of essentials — the answer is in months. Coverage is money that arrives without you working, divided by essentials — the answer is a percentage.

• You aim at what you can see

  A count of people you actually know who are one step ahead of where you are — not famous people, and not people at the summit.

• What a stranger can check in ten minutes

  Three things: somewhere a buyer can look you up, one person who will confirm what you did, and one finished piece of work with a date on it.

• Three questions, multiplied

  Each skill gets three scores from one to five: are buyers paying for it today, can a stranger check your evidence, and how few people around you do it well. Multiply the three.

• Counting who could find you

  The number of people who could come across your work on each platform, written down with today's date beside it.

• Trace one real attempt

  The last time you tried to be paid — an application, a message, a quote — and the exact point where it stopped moving.

Worth reading on their own

• Why one month lies

  The habit of taking a recent good month and treating it as normal.

• When one payer is most of your income

  The share of your income that comes from your single largest payer.

• The number of units that pays your fixed costs

  How many units you must sell each month before the line earns anything at all.

• Why the order matters more than the effort

  The same handful of sensible actions, done in different orders, produce completely different results.

• Where this data lives

  Everything you type stays in this browser, on this device. There is no account, no server, and no database.