The cuts you have to make to run a part-time search.
The honest math nobody publishes: a search needs hours you do not have, so something has to go.
Hello {{ subscriber.first_name }}, and welcome back to Buyout Diary.
Last week the issue was about how to build a network from zero in European acquisition entrepreneurship. The replies that came back, and the conversations I have had this week, almost all returned to the same question. Not “how do I network.“ Not “where do I find the people.“
How on earth do I find the time?
So this week the topic is time management for a part-time, self-funded search. The version nobody writes honestly. Not the productivity-tools version, not the morning-routine version, the version that admits what the math actually requires and what you are going to have to stop doing.
A part-time search needs fifteen to twenty hours a week to actually move. Those hours have to come from somewhere.
If you do not consciously choose what to drop, your brain drops things for you. Usually the things nobody chases you for. Sleep, exercise, friendships, mental quiet. The things you cannot recover quickly. You will not notice it for months, and then one day you will wonder where six months went.
This is not a discipline problem. The diagnosis “I just need to be more disciplined“ is the diagnosis that gets you another six months of the same. Most senior professionals are already excellent at productivity. That is how they got senior.
The problem is a refusal to choose.
The Reframe
Stop trying to be productive at everything.
Choose two or three things to be excellent at, this season, and accept that other things will visibly suffer. Name them out loud. Tell the people affected. Stop apologising for it.
Three principles for the rest of this issue.
Productivity systems do not solve a math problem.
The wrong cuts are made unconsciously. The right cuts are made out loud.
What you keep matters less than what you stop.
1. Productivity systems do not solve a math problem
Notion will not save you. Pomodoro will not save you. Time-blocking, calendar colour-coding, habit trackers, the latest method from the latest productivity author. None of them will save you.
These tools optimise the hours you already have. They do not produce new ones. If your search needs fifteen more hours a week than your life currently contains, no system will create them.
I use Notion. I use Otter for recording, Claude and ChatGPT for processing transcripts, Google Workspace for everything else. These tools are useful. They are not the answer.
For my first six months, I tried to fit a search into a full life by being more organised. Better calendar discipline. Earlier mornings. A clearer weekly plan. I would have told you the system was the problem and a better one would fix it. It was not, and it did not.
The contrarian piece in this section is uncomfortable to say. Most senior professionals already know how to manage their time. Optimisation is not the gap. Acceptance is. The work is to accept that something genuinely useful and genuinely important is going to have to stop, not to find a clever way to fit one more thing in.
2. The wrong cuts are made unconsciously
Here is what gets dropped when you do not choose.
Sleep. In my first six months I went from seven or eight hours to roughly six. I did not decide this. I just found myself getting up earlier and going to bed later, and one day realised it had become normal. It is not healthy, and I am not recommending it. I am naming it because it is exactly the kind of thing that gets quietly dropped when nobody is watching.
Exercise. I stopped going to the gym. Again, not a decision. Just a thing that did not happen one week, then another, then five months had passed.
Friendships. This is the cost almost nobody warns you about.
When you are running a job, a partner, a search, and any kind of media or community-building, the social calendar narrows. You see your closest friends less often. You stop replying to messages within the day, then within the week. Some friends understand and stay. Some drift, because you did not give them what a friendship needs. And honestly, some turn out not to have been close friends, they were proximity friends, and they fall away once the proximity goes.
The friendships you keep are the ones with people who respect what you are building. Some you cut on purpose because the energy was wrong. Others you cut by accident through neglect, and you regret it later.
These are the wrong cuts. Not because the things themselves are easy to protect, they are not, but because they are the cuts you would not have chosen if you had been asked. They are the price your brain quietly paid because you would not name a price out loud.
The right cuts look different. They are things that feel productive but do not compound.
For me the clearest example is the messages-and-meetings churn. As your audience grows, your inbox fills. Every coffee request, every “would love to pick your brain,“ every LinkedIn message from someone with a “quick question.“ Each one feels productive because it is a real human being asking for your time. Six months later, you cannot tell anyone, including yourself, what any of those conversations produced.
The same logic applies to monthly meetups, to the third coffee with the person who has been “almost ready to talk” for two months, to the conference that you should have skipped, to the call that should have been an email.
The contrarian piece here is that the wrong cuts are usually invisible (sleep, friends, mental quiet) and the right cuts are usually visible (a recurring meeting, a public commitment, a coffee on the calendar). Cutting visible things requires explanation and feels like backing out of something. Letting invisible things erode is silent and feels like nothing. That asymmetry is exactly why most people drift into the wrong cuts.
The work is to reverse it. Cut the visible thing. Let it look like a withdrawal. Protect the invisible thing because nobody else will.
3. What you keep matters less than what you stop
Almost every part-time searcher I talk to can list five things they want to do more of. Almost none can name three things they have stopped this quarter.
The asymmetry tells you something. Addition is loud. Subtraction is quiet. The subtraction is the actual work.
Here are the cuts I have made in the last nine months.
The hardest one was the monthly meetups. ETA Europe runs in Amsterdam and Brussels, with Paris later in the year. I started with a monthly cadence in Amsterdam. It almost killed the format. The quality of an event cannot survive monthly frequency when one person is organising every part of it, the venue, the catering, the speakers, the moderation, the follow-up. By month four the events had become routine for the audience and exhausting for me. I made the call to drop to twice per year per city, with the option of one larger annual gathering. Six well-run events a year beats twelve hurried ones. The hard part was admitting that more was not better, because making events is something I genuinely enjoy. The right move was to do fewer of them and protect the quality.
The cut that surprised me with how much it improved my week was open inbox response time. As the LinkedIn audience grew, the messages multiplied. I used to reply within hours to almost everyone. I do not anymore. Some messages get a reply within a few days, some within weeks, some never. This is a real cost. People notice. Some of them think it is rude. I have decided it is a cost I am willing to pay, because the alternative is the inbox running my week and the search not moving at all. Almost no newsletter writer in this space admits this publicly. I am admitting it because anyone reading this who is building a similar audience will hit the same wall, and pretending otherwise does not help.
One exception, and it matters. If you reply to this newsletter, I read every one and I answer personally. The newsletter is the conversation. The LinkedIn DMs are not.
The two smaller cuts. Twitter, gone entirely. The account exists but I do not post. Reach in Europe was not there. Easiest cut of the four. And daily coffee chats, cut not entirely but as a default. I now ask what someone specifically wants to discuss before agreeing, and I say no more often than I used to. Coffee in a calendar is two hours including travel and recovery, and most of those conversations did not move anything.
If you are reading this and have not made any real cuts yet, the method is simple. Name three things on your calendar that have felt productive over the last 90 days but have not actually produced anything. Pick one of them. Drop it this week. Tell the people involved that you are narrowing your focus and it is no longer where you should be spending your time.
The other two stay on the list, and you watch them for the next thirty days. If they are still unproductive at the end of that, they go too.
What my week actually looks like
This is not a template. This is one version of the principles in practice. Your week will look different because your life is different.
Monday. Full work day. Newsletter publishes in the morning. Evening is light, light reading, no commitments.
Tuesday morning. Acquisition work. Outreach to potential sellers, follow-up with people in the network on specific deals, the kind of work that requires daytime hours because that is when sellers actually answer their phones.
Wednesday. ETA Europe day. One to two hours on the community. Planning the next event, replying inside the WhatsApp group, the work that keeps the community alive.
Thursday. Media. Recording interviews, working on the podcast launch, longer LinkedIn pieces, the parts of the writing that need uninterrupted blocks.
Friday. Writing day. The bulk of the next week’s newsletter gets written on Friday.
Saturday. Family. Wife, dog, no work commitments before the evening. Saturday evening is sometimes prep for Sunday, sometimes not.
Sunday. Final newsletter pass and scheduling. LinkedIn posts for the week prepared. The week ahead mapped.
Mornings before work. The hour before the day job starts is the most reliable productive block I have. Monday is LinkedIn posts for the week. Tuesday is outreach. Wednesday is community. Thursday is media. The day job starts properly around 7:30 if I am home, 9:00 if I am in the office.
The single habit that I will not skip, the one that if I missed for a month would unravel everything, is the Friday writing block. Skip a Friday and the newsletter goes out late or thin, the community goes quiet, and the audience growth stalls. The whole stack depends on one block, which is exactly why it is non-negotiable.
The principle, useful for you: every part-time search has one habit like this. One block, one hour, one rhythm that, if it holds, the rest holds. Find yours. Protect it the way you would protect a paid client meeting, because that is what it actually is.
The contrarian piece worth saying here. Most time-management advice for part-time searchers assumes the search happens outside working hours. In practice, the search needs slots inside working hours, because the people you need to reach, sellers, advisors, lenders, are at their desks during the day. Phone calls to a 65-year-old business owner at 8pm do not get answered. You will need to be willing to take some search calls during work time, which means being honest with your employer about flex, or being deliberate about which job will tolerate it.
What you can do this week
Three actions, scaled by ambition. Pick the one that fits where you are.
Smallest step. Identify one thing in your evenings that is consuming two hours and producing nothing. Netflix is the easy example, it is not the only one. Replace those two hours, just one evening this week, with one piece of search work. A read of someone’s exit interview. A draft of an outreach email. A conversation with one person in the space. Two hours is more than enough to start.
Bigger step. Drop one recurring commitment this week. The one that has been on your calendar for months because you said yes once and never said no since. Tell the person involved that you are narrowing your focus and this is no longer where you should be spending time. Use that exact phrasing if you want, it works.
Boldest step. The structural cut. Go from full-time to part-time at work. Four days a week instead of five. That recovers eight hours plus the energy of an entire day, every week, every week. It is by far the most powerful single move a part-time searcher can make.
Read the next sentence twice. Do not make this cut without a financial runway in place, and by runway I mean at least twelve months of living costs sitting in your bank account, not projected, not “I will earn it from the search,“ not “my partner can cover us.“ Sitting there. A part-time search that turns into a part-time income crisis breaks more searches than no search at all.
I want to be honest about this one. I have not made the part-time cut myself. I am still full-time. The reason is that I need to cover my personal living costs in another way first, and I am not there yet. The boldest move is sitting in front of me too, and I have not taken it.
I am writing about it anyway, because that is what an honest scoreboard looks like.
If you take one thing from this issue, take this.
The math of a part-time search does not work without cuts. You can pretend it does for a while, six months, maybe twelve. You will pay for the pretence in sleep, exercise, friendships, and mental quiet, and you will not notice the bill arriving until it has compounded.
The cuts you choose out loud are the cheap ones. The cuts your brain makes quietly while you are looking the other way are the expensive ones.
Choose what to be excellent at, this season. Two things, maybe three. Accept that everything else will suffer. Tell the people who need to know. Stop apologising for it. Then watch how much the search actually moves.
Before you go, hit reply and tell me one of two things.
The cut you have already made this year that compounded more than you expected.
Or the cut you know you need to make but have not.
Both replies are useful, both teach me something I will write about. I read every one.
See you next Monday.
Alexander