Week after week, you block out time to work on your own brand — only for it to get pushed off, more often than not, for everything else. Between clients, kids, cleaning, content, sick days — the time you set aside for your own brand is almost always the first thing to get cut. It doesn’t have to get done right now, so it doesn’t.

And next thing you know, it’s July, and you still haven’t made much time to work on your brand this year.

I know this cycle intimately, because I lived in it for years. It’s the whole reason I created something I call a CCO Week — and the reason I now share the framework for it for free.

Why “an hour here and there” to work on your own brand never actually works

Here’s the thing no one tells you: one day a week is not enough to make real progress on the work you have for your brand.

Just when you get the gears turning in one direction, you have to stop, leave it, and switch directions — back to client work, back to life. The next time you sit down, your brain needs half the session just to get back into the deep-work groove. Then time’s up again.

That’s the real reason my own brand repositioning and website redesign took so long. I was only ever chipping away at it. What my brain — my creativity — actually needed was more time, more focus, a longer stretch to get into it.

The #1 thing I have to thank for finally finishing my website and rolling out one offer after another? The CCO Week. Because one day at a time was never enough for me to make the kind of progress that gets me excited about my brand again.

So what is a CCO Week?

A CCO Week is a 7–14 day stretch where you get to be your own client. You get to make time to work on your own brand. You clock in as the Chief Creative Officer of your own brand and give it your full, focused attention — the way you’d show up for a paying client with a deadline.

(I call it a Chief Creative Officer Week because, let’s be honest, that sounds a lot more fun than “CEO Week.”)

It doesn’t mean clearing your whole calendar. Maybe there are still a couple of meetings on the schedule — but the work you’re doing for your own brand is the main character that week, instead of the thing that gets squeezed into the leftovers.

The core idea is simple: you get more done behind the scenes of your brand when you create focus by going deep on one big project instead of scattering yourself across a dozen unrelated tasks. Your brand can’t thrive on leftover time and energy. It needs its own routine.

Here’s what I’ve actually used my CCO Weeks for:

• Rebuilding my entire offer suite
• Redoing my brand strategy and messaging
• Rewriting my website copy
• Redesigning a whole website
• Updating resources like my Color Kit to make the system more strategic

I discovered this out of necessity (not strategy)

I didn’t design the CCO Week in some clever brand-strategist lab. I needed more time to work on my own brand.

I’d been pushing off my rebrand and website redesign for so long that it became a genuine problem — my services weren’t even on my site anymore. So, naturally, leads dried up. When I finally blocked out real, uninterrupted time to fix it, I had this almost embarrassing realization: this was an option the whole time.

Because I know how I work. I do my best work in long, uninterrupted periods of focus. Expecting myself to “fit in” my own website between everything else was never, ever going to happen.

So now, each quarter, I block a whole week just for my brand.

Doing the real work behind your brand: projects, not tasks

This is where most people go wrong. A CCO Week is for projects, not tasks.

• A task = update your Instagram bio, reply to an email, organize your Canva folder.
• A project = design your website homepage, write all your offer copy, build your quarterly content plan.

Tasks are quick. Projects require sustained focus and creative thinking. A CCO Week is for the projects you keep pushing to “someday.”

So you pick one main mission for the week, then break it into daily chunks. If your mission is “design the main pages of my website,” your daily missions might be: Monday, homepage copy. Tuesday, homepage layout. Wednesday, about page. Thursday, services page. Friday, polish and finalize. One focused thing per day. That’s it.

And a warning from experience: watch out for pseudo-productivity (looking busy without moving the needle) and productive procrastination (doing useful work that isn’t the priority work). Both will eat your CCO Week alive.

It’s never going to be perfect — and that’s the point

Every single time, I want my CCO Week to be perfect. No client work. No meetings. No other commitments. Ideal conditions, cleared calendar, the whole fantasy.

It never is. This most recent one sure wasn’t.

We’ve had “build a brand in a day” shoved down our throats so hard that we think we should be able to build a brand, rebrand, or make a big brand decision in a single sitting. But I can tell you — from five years of doing this and working 1:1 with over 30 brands, many for years on end — it just isn’t that simple. And no robot is going to fix that for you.

So instead of chasing perfect conditions, my best advice is this: find your pockets. Find the times of day and the conditions where you know you work best, and protect them fiercely — especially if, like me, you’re juggling client and family obligations alongside your own brand work.

You don’t need a full week off client work to do this. An hour a day of genuinely focused attention on your brand adds up. I’ve built both flexibility and structure into how I run a CCO Week — whether you’ve got one hour a day or the whole week, you can still get something real out of it. The goal is finishing one thing each day, not starting ten.

[DROP IN a real before/after — a specific project you finished in a CCO Week (or a participant win from the live challenge). The concrete proof makes this whole post land.]

How to run your own CCO Week

Here’s the process I walk through every quarter — you can steal it exactly.

1. Understand your time first. Before you pick a project, get honest about your actual capacity this season. When do you work best — mornings for deep work, afternoons for admin? Do you have childcare for half the day? Account for any time off you already have planned so you’re not setting yourself up to fail. This is the step I skipped for years, always setting the bar way too high for the time I actually had.
2. Pick ONE focus and find your baseline. If you could only do one project this quarter, what would it be? Limit yourself to a single main mission. Website, offers, strategy, or content — pick one lane.
3. Brain dump everything. Grab a pen and paper and dump every task, question, and unknown related to that project. Make it messy. Mind-map it. Then — if you can — sleep on it before you try to organize it. You’ll think of more overnight.
4. Sequence it into a plan. Turn that brain dump into an order of operations: what has to happen first, second, last. Assign the chunks to days. Block the time in your calendar (I love Notion Calendar for this because you can move blocks around freely as life happens).
5. Protect the time like a client meeting. Say it out loud — “I’m doing a CCO Week and I’m working on [your thing].” Block your calendar so no one can book you. You have to protect this time if you actually want to get anything done.
6. Anchor it with a few small rituals. The habits are half the magic: keep a daily done list (celebrate what you finished, not a to-do list you’ll never complete), take a daily walk, do morning pages to clear the mental clutter, and show your work — a story, a done-list post, a quick behind-the-scenes clip. Progress over perfection.

Making time for your brand part of how you run your business

A CCO Week isn’t a one-off. It’s part of a rhythm.

Each quarter, I do a brand reset — I look at my data, then decide on the two or three strategies I’m going to execute to move toward my yearly goals. Then I schedule a CCO Week as the dedicated chunk of time to actually do the biggest one.

We all think brand strategy is your mission statement and your values. But that’s just the foundation. The real impact comes from the execution — and executing in a way that still leaves room for experimentation and creativity. A CCO Week is how the strategy stops living in a document and starts becoming real.

And here’s the part I have to be honest with you about: no one else can give you clarity. You can absolutely pay someone to help you find it (that’s literally what I do inside a Studio Session). But you still have to go looking. You have to do the work. You have to make the time. That’s the hardest — and most fulfilling — part of running a brand.

Ready to run your own CCO Week? I’ve turned my entire process into a free framework — prep guides, journal prompts, daily focuses, and a Notion dashboard to plan it all. Grab the free CCO Week framework here and become your own client for a week.

Want help figuring out what to focus on first? A Studio Session is where we diagnose what’s actually stuck and map out your CCO Week focus together — so you spend your precious brand time on the work that’ll actually pay off.

Or steal my full brand-planning system — yearly missions, quarterly resets, and CCO Weeks — inside The Brand Roadmap Template.