The most honest market research you will do this year is a list of what you did last week without being paid, asked or persuaded. If you are stuck on how to know what to sell, that list is a better place to start than a brainstorm, a competitor tour or a trending offer you saw somebody else launch.
It works because nobody edited it. When you are tired, your brain takes the shortest road to the work it is good at. That road is information.
Why a plan is a weaker guide than it looks
A yearly plan is written by the version of you who knew the least. It is built from hope, from what other founders seemed to be doing, and from a guess at how much energy you would have. Then the year happens, and the energy arrives in a different shape.
I had end user products and Etsy marked down for the third quarter of this year. The year went to building systems instead, and following that evidence did better than following the plan. It was not close.
If your energy moves around, which is true for a lot of founders who work with a health condition, caring duties or a nervous system that has opinions, the plan is even more of a guess. A rigid plan assumes a steady supply. A capacity-first one, like the approach in capacity-first planning, assumes the supply changes and builds around that.
The ten minute audit
Do this on a Sunday with your last seven days in front of you. You need paper or a notes app and nothing else.
Question one. What did I do this week that nobody paid me for, nobody asked me for, and nobody had to talk me into? Include the silly ones. Colour coding a friend's rota counts. Reading about a tool you have no reason to use counts too.
Question two. Is any of it on this year's plan? Open the real plan. Your memory of it will be kinder than the document.
Question three. If the answer was no, what would this look like as something a stranger could buy? Ignore the price and the name. You are after the shape, which is usually a done-for-you version, a template, or an hour of your attention on somebody else's version of the same problem.
If question three comes back blank, write the activity down anyway. A pattern needs several weeks of notes before it shows.
A real example from a week off
I booked the last week of August off on purpose, because rest is infrastructure in my business and not a reward. I slept in ten hour blocks and could not finish a thought from Wednesday onwards.
In the same week I spent four days building a website with a public page, an admin area behind proper access control, and a gated intake form. Nobody had asked and nobody was paying. It was the most fun I had that month.
Around then a friend ran a logged out ChatGPT session against my public work, no account and no memory, to see who a stranger would say EPIC AI Agency was. The answer was that I looked better suited to building sites and systems for other people than to selling digital products.
My own nervous system and a stranger's reading of my output pointed at the same door. I would not have found that by looking at my plan.
How to tell a capability from procrastination
Some pleasant afternoons are avoidance in a nicer coat, and from the inside the two feel the same. Four checks separate them, and you can run them after the fact.
First, look at what it was standing in front of. Capability tends to sit alongside your real work. Avoidance arrives at the exact moment you meant to do one specific uncomfortable thing. Tidying your desktop on the morning an invoice is overdue says something about the invoice.
Second, ask whether it left something behind. Four days of building leaves a thing that works. An afternoon reading about productivity systems leaves an opinion.
Third, see if it survives the boring middle. A real skill has a dull stretch of debugging, formatting or waiting. If the pull is still there in that stretch, it is probably capability.
Fourth, check whether it repeats without help. One good Wednesday is a story. The same kind of work turning up in three different weeks, each time with a different excuse, belongs on your plan.
You will sometimes guess wrong. A wrong guess costs one small experiment, which is cheaper than a year spent on a plan that only ever lived on paper.
Why low energy weeks give the clearest reading
When you have plenty of fuel you can push through anything, so what you choose tells you very little. With the tank close to empty every choice has a cost, and what you still reach for is the thing that costs least. That is why this audit belongs with capacity planning, and why it connects to the ideas in running a business with fluctuating capacity.
It also helps to do the audit next to somebody else. The thing you find easy looks ordinary from the inside, so another person can often see the offer before you can. Inside Visionary in Progress, the Skool community I run for soft productivity, a Sunday intention post is a natural place to write down your answer to question one and see what other people notice. If you want a wider look at systems that hold when energy drops, why ADHD business systems die covers the other half of this.
What to do this Sunday
Write the list. Check it against the plan. If one item is missing from the plan and keeps turning up in your weeks, write one sentence on what a stranger might pay you to do more of it.
Then keep the page, and ask the same three questions next Sunday. What did you reach for this week, when you were too tired to be sensible?
FAQ
How do I know what to sell if I have no ideas?
Start with what you already do unpaid and unasked. List the last seven days, then check which items are missing from your plan. The offer is usually hiding in the thing you find easy and other people find hard.
What if the thing I enjoy is not useful to anyone?
Ask the third question: what could a stranger buy that looks like this? A skill sells as a finished piece of work, a template, or time spent on someone else's version of the same problem.
How can I tell procrastination from a real business idea?
Check what the activity was standing in front of, whether it left something that works, whether the pull survives the boring middle, and whether it repeats across several weeks. One pleasant afternoon proves nothing. A pattern across weeks is worth a line in your plan.
Do I need to do this every week?
You will see more if you do. The first list is useful on its own, but the pattern shows after three or four Sundays of notes. Ten minutes a week is the whole cost.
Does this work if my energy changes from week to week?
It works better then. On low energy weeks every choice costs something, so the work you still reach for is a cleaner reading of where your capability sits.