How to Take a Sabbatical & Prioritize Projects that Resonate with Amelia Hruby

Kate Henry [00:00:07]:

Hi everyone. Welcome back to Honing In. I’m Dr. Kate Henry, and I was just having some ha-has with our guest today, which is someone that Many of you may already know, and if you don’t, you’re going to get graced with her presence today. I’m talking to Amelia Hruby, who is a feminist writer, educator, and podcaster with a PhD in philosophy. She’s the founder of Softer Sound Podcast Studio and the host of Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media.

 

Kate Henry [00:01:23]:

Her new book, Your Attention Is Sacred Except on Social Media, is out now. Hi, Amelia. I’m so excited. This is gonna be a lot of fun.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:01:33]:

Hi, Kate. I am so thrilled to be here. For listeners who don’t know, I edit all the episodes of Honing In, so I love when I get to be on the other side of the mic with my clients and friends like yourself.

 

Kate Henry [00:01:46]:

It’s gonna be fun, and I cannot speak highly enough about your amazing skills at editing. As you know, the first question I like to ask folks is what they think about the language of a project, like a capital P project, and if it’s something helpful or appealing for you for your professional work or even maybe for your, like, personal or creative work. Yeah.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:02:09]:

So I love projects, both the language of them and the ways that I relate to and use them in my work. This really started, I think, when I was in graduate school, and I taught at the university. I had a part-time staff position there in their McNair Scholars program, and I worked for other people outside of the university to, like, sort of cobble together a living. Livable wage in Chicago when I was in graduate school. And during that time, me and one of my best friends, her name’s Caro, and she has a lot of great projects of her own. We would always joke that like our favorite things that we did, we did so many things, but our favorite things were our personal projects. And we many times almost made like sweatshirts that said, ask me about my personal projects. I still wanna make these.

 

Kate Henry [00:02:56]:

I would buy that shirt.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:02:58]:

Yeah, so we, in that friendship, there was this embrace of like personal projects as the creative outlets that we got to have and share alongside all of the just like straight up wage labor that we were doing. So of course, projects exist within work, right? Like project manager is a job title. Many people have probably worked in settings where your projects are tightly managed by your employer, but that was never my experience. You know, I was an academic, I worked in restaurants, like the work I was doing was not project-oriented in that way, or I didn’t understand it that way. And so, yeah, projects for me became like the really fun personal side quests that I got to go on. And even to this day, I have personal projects, some of which are public and some of which aren’t, that live like in the sort of nooks and crannies of my work. They’re the things that I tend to, without really emphasizing profit or ROI or business as usual, Yeah.

 

Kate Henry [00:03:56]:

Oh, this is delightful. And I know too, with projects, like, you have like multiple fun little podcasts that you’ve done, you know? Like, I remember going and listening to your tarot podcast when I’m like, “Ooh, I forget what this card means,” and being like, “I’m gonna go look at Amelia’s tarot podcast,” and like, you know, remember what it is there.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:04:12]:

Yes, I think I have like 6 active podcasts right now. It’s a little ridiculous, but I love it.

 

Kate Henry [00:04:17]:

Mm-hmm. That’s so fun. This is a little, like, side question to dive deeper with it. Gretchen Rubin, who’s like a habits researcher, she talks sometimes about like, the way that we can approach projects, like, are you like a starter or like a finisher for it? And like, not that those are the only two ways that we can like enjoy our projects, but like for me, I’m much more of an I love starting a project and have a much harder time finishing a project, especially when I get close to the end. I’m like, “It’s done,” right? So do you feel like your personal projects…do you like starting them? Do you like finishing them? Or are you like, “No, I’ve started and I just, this is part of my life, and I do it now and it’s my daily practice?”

 

Amelia Hruby [00:04:56]:

I think I have this like magical, like, birthright of some kind that I am an Aries Sun, Capricorn Rising. So I love to start a project, and I have the fortitude to bring things through to completion. And I encounter so many people who really do fall into like a starter or finisher camp, and like they excel at one part of that process. But for some reason, I am just always like sparking new ideas and then really able to like, take them to the finish line. That said, sometimes I will, it’s like a very forceful process. It is not always easeful or fun. I need to quit a lot of things a lot sooner, actually, and I have gotten more careful about committing to projects because I’ll have a lot of ideas that seem fun, but I’ve really tried to build in some, I guess, guardrails for myself around like, “Okay, I’m gonna sleep on this. I’m gonna give it a week or a month and see if it still feels resonant and interesting and a supportive way to like spend my time.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:05:57]:

Or I’m gonna ask myself like, who is this for? Do I really wanna do this? Did someone ask me to do this? Where is the sort of motivation coming from? I respond really differently to like internally motivated versus externally motivated things and projects. And so I would say like, I can start and finish, but the task for me because of that has been to really move slower and get better at only taking on projects that I really wanna do. Because, you know, life is full of so many projects we have to do, like go to the DMV and get my tires rotated and all that stuff that like, meh.

 

Kate Henry [00:06:33]:

Yeah, totally. Do laundry, which is like an all-day event.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:06:37]:

Like laundry is the bane of my existence, hence why my partner does almost all of it in our house.

 

Kate Henry [00:06:43]:

I like what you shared around being very thoughtful around the projects that you take on and taking time to consider your reasoning for that and that. Is such a lovely transition into something I wanted you to come on the podcast and talk about, was thinking of this concept of a sabbatical you’re taking in 2026 throughout the year. And I wanted to talk to you this time specifically so that it could be a quarter into the year and to hear how things were going with that. So could you tell us how you decided that you wanted to make a shift in 2026 when it came to the work that you were doing and what has quarter one of this looked like for you so far?

 

 

Amelia Hruby [00:07:26]:

Yeah, yeah, gladly. So, for listeners who aren’t so familiar with my work or with the idea of sabbaticals, or maybe you only know them in one context, I have been running my podcast studio, Softer Sounds, for almost 5 years now, and I’ve been editing audio for almost a decade. So I’ve been podcasting for 10 years. I’ve been editing for freelance clients for almost all of that time. And then for the past 5 years, running Softer Sounds Production Studio was my full-time job. It was the thing I was doing. It’s how I made all my money, supported myself and my family. Like, that is my work. And last year I started to notice that I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:08:04]:

I was really burnt out. I had to force myself to show up on client calls. I was slogging through all of the editing. And audio editing is something that requires a lot of attention. And so if you’re not present, it’s very hard to do well. And for me, a big sign that I am checked out or overworked is I start making mistakes. Like, things start getting left in the audio that I didn’t notice, or, you know, that starts coming up. So all of that was happening last year, and I was just realizing that I didn’t want to edit anymore.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:08:36]:

The other thing that was happening was that, frankly, my business was declining because we’re in economic crisis, we’re in political crisis. There’s so many things happening, and there’s a lot of just insecurity and unsureness, especially with the like brilliant, creative, progressive people that I work with. And so I had a lot less work and I was sort of hitting this point of like, I’m burnt out. And if I want to keep doing this, I have to like hustle harder to get more clients. And so I, instead of doing all of that, instead of leaning in even harder, I decided to sort of take a step back. And I was talking to my friend Nick about this and I was like, am I going to shut down my business? Like, I don’t think I can afford to do that. I’m not sure what to do. And Nick very nicely suggested to me, like, what if you just take a sabbatical? Like, what if you give yourself this container of time that you’re not going to do this particular type of work anymore? You don’t have to commit to forever.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:09:27]:

You don’t have to say you’re closing up shop. You can just tell your clients and your potential clients that you won’t be editing for 6 months. And so I really sat with that and thought about it and decided that it was what I needed. For me, like the initial impulse of the sabbatical was actually just to set a boundary for myself and with my work to say like, okay, I’m not gonna edit for 6 months. And I let that sort of settle into my nervous system and let myself feel okay with it. And then I looked at my finances, and I was like, okay, can I actually afford to do that? Because I was making all this money podcast editing. Can I actually afford to not podcast edit for 6 months, especially when This wasn’t super planned. I hadn’t like saved up all this money for it.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:10:14]:

And as a self-employed person, it’s really hard to take time off your work. And so what ended up happening is that I sort of laid off like 75% of my clients, and I kept working with, I think, 3 people. I kept 2 of my longest-term clients, and then yourself and one other client who have more sort of every other week or once a month shows that just felt really manageable. We had an established working relationship that felt really good with a lot of flexibility. And so I was like, even through the sabbatical, this feels like work I can do and I, I need it to stay financially solvent. So that was sort of how the sabbatical came to be. What actually happened has been interesting. So it was hard to let go of all those clients.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:10:56]:

That was really challenging. I had to like give myself a pep talk to send those emails and tell people that like they needed to find new support because, you know, taking a 6-month break like they’re not going to take a 6-month break from their podcast. So I had to help people find other editors, other producers, and that all went okay. And then my sabbatical started in January of 2026, so at the beginning of this year. And I will say it took like 2 months for all of the editing work to even truly go away. Even though I was transitioning people, even though I told them I wasn’t going to edit, there were still all these things that sort of came in sideways or like through the cracks, right? Like people who didn’t actually hire their new editor until January, and I had to get them all these files. A few beloved friends who were like, I’m in such a pinch because you really helped me out. Like somebody’s sick or like I didn’t plan for this.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:11:47]:

And like, I have personal relationships and just chose to do that editing for them anyway. And then also just all of this other work related to that stuff, like my taxes and things had to get done. So I really felt like it wasn’t until about mid-February, so like solid 6 weeks into the sabbatical that I actually wasn’t editing anymore, or like I’d actually fully pulled back the workload. And I think this is really common when people take breaks. It’s actually something, even advice I give to my clients. I’m like, if you wanna take a break from your podcast, think about how long you want off and then triple that because you’re gonna need that amount of time to like come down from the workflow and wrap things up. Then you can have that amount of break, and then you’re gonna need that amount of time to ramp back up into what you’re doing next. And so it’s fascinating to feel that come back to me of like, oh, I wanted a 6-month sabbatical, so it took me 2 months to ramp down.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:12:41]:

I’ll get 2 months off, and then if I’m gonna get back to it, it would take at least 2 months to sort of bring on clients and things. And so as we’re recording now, I feel like I am very much in this phase of like, oh, the workload has shifted, my schedule has shifted. I feel so much more free, flexible with my time, not beholden to so many clients and requests every day, and it feels really good. But as just evidenced, it took like a lot of work to get to this point.

 

Kate Henry [00:13:11]:

That’s excellent. Have you felt that taking the sabbatical is also offering like some working through a burnout recovery, but also is like the spaciousness prompting you to be like, journaling more or like ideating more? Are you trying to like step away from filling that, that space or time with like business development, for example, right now?

 

Amelia Hruby [00:13:33]:

Yeah. So I think I have approached this sabbatical like an academic. And what I mean by that is like, people always think that like academics go on sabbatical to take a break for a semester. And I’m always like, LOL. Yeah. Academics go on sabbatical to actually write the book, to like actually do the deep thought work and creative work that is required of them to contribute to their fields, right? So it’s like, as an academic, you spend like 5 to 7 years just kind of like toiling, teaching, being on committees, doing the work at the university, and then you get these like sort of blessed golden semesters to actually like integrate and create. And that very much feels like where I’m at with the sabbatical. And that’s why I say it’s a sort of academic approach.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:14:19]:

I’m definitely integrating so much that I’ve done. You know, especially through my podcast Off the Grid. So I self-published a book last fall. I’ve released 150 episodes of that podcast, and I think this sabbatical time is very creatively energizing because I finally have space for that to like integrate, and I can see it differently, and I can give my energy to it. I’m not carving out evenings and weekends to make Off the Grid episodes anymore. I’m just able to spend my whole day making Off the Grid episodes, which feels so good and exciting. I definitely am trying to still have space for rest and not just swap like 40 hours of working on sort of 2 businesses for now 40 hours of working on 1 business. I, I’m trying to pull back and reduce my workload overall.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:15:05]:

I think especially when you go on sabbatical, like, or take any break, it can feel tempting to just fill that, the quote unquote void of that time with other work. So I am trying to attend to that, but I would say overall, Some people, I think, thought when I said I was taking a sabbatical that I’d just be like chilling for 6 months, and that has very much not been the case. And I would really contrast that with…so I’ve already mentioned my friend Nick, but Nick Antoinette has written and shared even on my podcast about taking a gap year from their work. And like, what they actually did was stop working, like not reply to the emails, not host the calls, not do the things. That’s very different than what I’m doing, which is just sort of reorganizing my priorities, taking a break from the more perhaps laborious part of my work, and giving myself space for the creative and integrative part.

 

Kate Henry [00:15:50]:

Sabbaticals are like real. Like, I have people who hire me to be like, “Help me do something over my sabbatical,” you know? Like, it is precious time to use well. I love that academia just came up because we both have backgrounds in academia. Yours, a PhD in philosophy. Mine, a PhD in rhetoric and composition. And we could have a whole podcast episode series about academia, I think, just based on like reading that I’ve done of things that you’ve written and talked about with your history in academia. But today is not an episode in that series.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:16:26]:

So. Yeah, we could just have like Ivory Tower Gripes, a season on that. Exactly.

 

Kate Henry [00:16:31]:

Yeah. Okay. This is your 7th podcast that you’re gonna do with me, Ivory Tower Gripes. When I read Your Attention Is Sacred Except on Social Media, I was really delighted at like, especially the early part where you’re like taking a philosophical approach to the work that you’re using, or like using philosophy as a framework. And you say in the book like, hey, if you wanna skip the academic stuff, you can move to these chapters. But I really loved those chapters at the start where you were giving me this foundation in philosophy. So I’m curious to hear, why did you choose to consider attention and frame your book starting out and thinking through this philosophical framework? Tell me a little bit about how philosophy and perhaps your academic training, you know, funneled into approaching the way you wrote your book.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:17:20]:

It’s been so interesting since writing the book. So to provide some more context about my academic journey, I, as you said, have a PhD in philosophy. I went into a PhD program straight out of undergrad, so I was 22 and fresh and got into this program that was very invested in sort of like training up students, so they didn’t require and sometimes didn’t even prefer that you have a master’s degree to come in. They, they wanted you to come straight out of undergrad and go right through. So essentially I just like kept going all the way from kindergarten to PhD, which is hilarious. And I defended my dissertation in June of 2020 over Zoom from my kitchen table, which at the time, I mean, we were doing everything on Zoom, but dissertation defenses were not remote. These were things that, like, even if people had moved away, they came back for it. You’re meant to do them in person.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:18:14]:

And it was really grueling. Like, the normal constraints of a sort of, like, 2-hour reserved meeting room became this, like, 4-hour Zoom call where I got so many questions and so many reflections. And it was really hard. I mean, dissertation defense perhaps should be hard, but it was hard in a different way because there was no interpersonality to it. It was just, like, the early days of doing everything on Zoom. And I share all of that to say that like when I finished my PhD, I was done with academia. I thought I was done with philosophy. I didn’t go on the job market because I was just looking around at A, there being no jobs in 2020, cuz no one knows what’s happening with the pandemic.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:18:54]:

And B, the like almost comically low wages for these like one-year VAPs in, you know, the middle of nowhere small town, which like I live in a sort of middle of nowhere college town.

 

Kate Henry [00:19:06]:

You wanna be in your middle of nowhere college town. Exactly. I don’t wanna move to another one.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:19:09]:

Yeah. Yeah. I, I don’t wanna move to a place where like I have no community and I have to like teach a 6’6″ for a year to make $45,000. Like, I think that just felt very clear to me that like I was not going down that path. And so when I sat down to write my book 5 years later, I was frankly shocked how philosophical it was. I did not set out to write a very philosophical manifesto, and that’s what I ended up doing. And it’s been really interesting to grapple with how deeply the way I think has been shaped by my philosophical training. And in some ways, that’s so obvious, right? Like I said, I went to school from kindergarten to PhD.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:19:54]:

Like, I did 7 years of intensive training in philosophy. Of course it impacts how I think. But because I had moved out of academia, because I never talk about canonical philosophers or philosophical movements, I was like, that’s done. I’m just never going to bring up Kant again and my life will be better for it, right? But it is the entire architecture of how I make sense of things. That’s what I realized. And it’s also become very clear to me that it has a lot to do with what people see as my, like, depth of integrity, because I don’t know how to make a claim that doesn’t logically follow from the previous claim. That to me is what philosophy training is. And so to me, that’s like at the crux of how the book is laid out.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:20:38]:

Like, it’s not simply, you know, thoughts and feelings and vibes about attention. It’s a very clear argument for why our conception of the attention economy is flawed and why algorithms are such false promises. And of course, that comes wrapped in my very, like, gentle and cosmic way of understanding the world. But 5 years ago, I would’ve told you that I was never doing philosophy again, and now I’m a little convinced that everything I do is philosophy, and that feels weird to realize and say aloud.

 

Kate Henry [00:21:12]:

Yeah. Like you said, like, you’re like, you were surprised at how deeply the way you think is shaped by, you know, like your philosophical training. And I feel that hard, and it’s something that has made writing about the thing that I spent, you know, like, I spent 6 years in grad school writing about the topic that I’m still writing about now for a public audience. And like, I’m so entrenched in doing like a discourse and rhetorical analysis through a queer and feminist historiographical lens that it is like, that’s how I know how to think and how I like observe, absorb things. And it makes me think too around like in college when you took like your, or when I took my first like Feminism 101, my first women’s studies class, and you learn how to like apply feminist theory and you’re like, Holy shit, it, like, blows your mind. You’re interpreting billboards differently. That comes to my mind. Like, it’s like this shifting of your thinking.

 

Kate Henry [00:22:05]:

I don’t know. It’s been really hard for me to get out of that. I think that you did it very effectively, not getting out of, like, a philosophical academic framework, but I think that you made it accessible, and it was fun for me, like, who has not read Kant, to read this and be like, “Oh, yeah, cool.” Like, I think you made that accessible. Could you tell me a bit about like thinking about like public scholarship or something like that? Like if that is a term that you resonate with right now, could you tell me a bit about like how you think about writing this through a philosophical framework or lens or using philosophers to inform teaching folks about attention and then, you know, algorithms and et cetera? That’s a whole lot of talking, but the question is like, how do you think about this as like a, a book written for educating public audiences about the things that you wrote about in the book?

 

Amelia Hruby [00:22:58]:

You know, I have conflicted feelings about this because in many ways I think that public philosophy is just a way for academic philosophers to be like, “Look, I gestured to the public,” or “I sort of like turned to the public and said all the stuff I normally say in a classroom instead of there.” And I don’t always know that that’s very interesting ultimately. Feels like a way of sort of grappling with the university to be like, this other stuff I’m doing should count for my tenure file. And I don’t disagree with that, but it’s also why when I used to try to, like, go to public philosophy or public scholarship, like, for something as a reader or an experiencer of it, I was like, what is this? This is so strange. That said, I do think that, of course, like, my book is a work of public philosophy. And I think actually really more in the sense of a sort of way of like deconstructing the hierarchy of like public versus academic philosophy. That’s what I’m more interested in. So I guess what I ultimately am trying to get at here is I think a lot of public philosophy and public scholarship just like inculcates or reifies that hierarchy. And like, I don’t want to do that.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:24:06]:

Like, well, I’m like, oh, my academic words are really coming out here. Are they? This is, they feel uncomfortable in my mouth as I use the word reify on a podcast. But I think that for me, like, again, these are the ways that I make sense of the world. So like, of course I’m gonna write about them. And I actually, like, I don’t think I reference very many canonical thinkers in the book. Like, Kant does not arrive there. I do have talked about Kant in other contexts when I talk about aesthetics, but it’s not in the book. I’m referencing other artists and theorists like Pauline Oliveros.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:24:38]:

I’m also referencing like business books and the people who originally formulated the attention economy, which comes out of the world of economics. And business management. So it’s certainly a very philosophical book, and I do reference some philosophers, but I think the other thing for me is like, I tried to write like this in grad school and people were like, this is great, but like, you didn’t prove anything. Like, it’s not enough. It’s not referenced enough. It’s not contextualized enough. It’s not philosophical enough. And so it’s been really sort of a reclamation for me to come back to this sort of writing.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:25:12]:

That is a little more gestural, that doesn’t justify all the way down. But it’s so interesting to see the way that, like, I feel like I’ve backed off the logical argument nature of it so much from my dissertation, for instance. But what other people feel when they read it is that, like, that’s so present because it’s so much more than what might show up in a typical, just like, popular writing on attention. And so, yeah, it’s interesting how all of this comes together. And I guess in summary, I would say, like, it’s absolutely a work of public scholarship, but I’m always just wondering, like, What public are we talking about when we use that phrase? And I just think that’s always worth interrogating.

 

Kate Henry [00:25:52]:

Yes, thank you for that. I think that that is a real responsible encouragement for folks who are thinking about doing public scholarship, particularly like if you are within academia. And like, this also makes me think too, something I really liked about your book is the actionableness of it and like the applicability, like, you know, like As we get closer to the end of the book too, it’s like, okay, what do you want to do with this? Like, here’s step 1 that you can do. Here’s step 2 that you can do. You know, like that’s something that I appreciate as well, that it got me thinking and then it gave me something direct that I could do should I want to take a next step. So thinking about the work that we’re doing now, having left academia and having successful businesses, As I prep for today, I was looking at some of the language you use to describe your work, and I really love this quote from your site. You call yourself a platform critic, an AI skeptic, and an advocate for a non-extractive internet, which is delightful and how I know that I’m working with the right person when I work with you. And something I really admire about your work, and I’m certain I’m not the only person from the Amelia Hruby universe who loves this, is that you share a lot of things from your real material experience of running your business.

 

Kate Henry [00:27:09]:

So whether this is behind the scenes, like you, you’ve shared before on the pod around your experience with earning last year, or you share regularly around how you may use or not use specific tools or technologies and how maybe the nuances of working through those decisions. And I’m curious if this sort of like radical transparency or deciding to share your, your lived experience Is something that you knew that you wanted to do in your writing and in the podcast, or is it something that evolved? Or like, I’d love to hear about how you feel about that because as an audience member, I really appreciate it and value both you modeling that as something to do, and I get a lot out of what you share from your own experience.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:27:55]:

Thank you. Well, when I left academia and I wanted to start my own business, like part of why I did that, I’m curious if this is part of why you wanted to be an entrepreneur, is ’cause like I wanted to do things in the material world. I also just often felt like, you know, in an academic context, like I took a few business classes as an undergrad and I just was looking at these faculty members being like, but you’ve never had a business, so why do I think you can tell me what to do here? Like you’re grading me on a business plan when you’ve never actually put into action any of the things you’re telling me have to be here. And I never liked that disconnect. That was always, just felt false to me. And so when I started my business and started off the grid, it just felt natural to me to be sharing the process, whether that is how I’m putting together a marketing campaign, how much money I made over the past year. I think the deeper commitment for me is that I just like really believe that if you’re going to teach business and marketing, You should have had a successful business that you successfully marketed. And also, if you’re going to do that, I personally believe that like you owe it to your community to in some way share the financial realities of your business.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:29:09]:

Because even if you resist it so hard, even if you’re like, I’m not selling my own success, I’m not telling people they can do what I did, I’m not promising them they’ll get the same results as me, even if you resist that, people buy things aspirationally. People look to the people they learn from and they’re like, I want to be like that and I want to learn from that person. And so to me, it’s just, it’s almost a bit of like just professional ethics of like, I like to be really upfront with people of like, this is roughly how much money I made. This is roughly how much profit there was. These are the ways that money came in. These are the contextual circumstances of my life that are why I only need that much money. Or why this is actually a livable income for me. There are a lot of people who could not live off the amount of money I make and pay myself in my business, but I can.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:29:55]:

And so I try to really paint that whole picture. And I always do a lot of disclaimers when I talk about money on the podcast, but I just really believe that, like, if I’m going to teach these marketing strategies and tell people that they can use them to make money, then I owe it to them to be transparent about how I’m making money and how much money that is in the broader context of my life. So Not everybody does that, but to me it’s really important.

 

Kate Henry [00:30:19]:

It is something that I respect and honor, and I think about this too. Like, I love when business pals are like, hey, can you talk to me about this? Can you actually share your numbers? Like, I’m always very delighted to share that and to be transparent about that. And also to be transparent around like, I’m in year 6 of my business. Like, I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve hit a stride where like, okay, I can expect to make this amount of money a year. I can expect this will be my expenses. We also have my spouse’s income. My spouse is a business consultant.

 

Kate Henry [00:30:47]:

Do you know, like I would not, were we only living on my income, we would not have this 3-bedroom apartment in Boston.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:30:53]:

And also like, you’re not in the business of selling business things. Like if I were gonna hire you, what I would want is like, has Kate actually figured out some productivity stuff? Yeah, totally. Which like you have documented so clearly in your blog posts and your books and your newsletter and on this podcast, right? It’s like. Whatever I want to learn from someone else, I want to know that they have like been in process with it and have not only theoretical knowledge, but embodied knowledge. And again, it doesn’t mean that like what works for them is gonna work for me, but that’s just an important piece of it to me. And so because I am in the business of business, like that feels important to me. I think that like for someone who’s tuned in who is, you know, an acupuncturist, I don’t think you owe it to everybody to tell them how much money you make. Like, that’s not your area of expertise.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:31:41]:

But just especially when we talk about business and money, it gets so hand-wavy and so obscured and so, like, pernicious. I think it’s, like, extra important to have that degree of honesty and openness. And, and I’ve also changed how I do it. You know, I used to just, like, tell my entire podcast listenership how much money I made and break it down on the public feed. And I don’t do that anymore because now thousands of people listen instead of hundreds, and it feels You know, I’ll provide some like high-level context. I have moved most of my like deeper money breakdowns behind a like $5 paywall, so there’s a little more privacy and buy-in. Like, I don’t think we owe it to everyone in the world to tell everybody how much money we make, but to me, to have that transparency with people who want to like hire us or work with us feels important. And having that behind like a low-cost paywall or offering makes sense to me, right? Like, if you want to buy a course from me, investing $5 to really learn how I work and how I’ve built my success is a coherent first step toward that.

 

Kate Henry [00:32:42]:

I also love In the Business of Business. Like, is that the title of maybe something in the future you do or the title of the podcast? You know, like that, that’s excellent. We were just talking about like what we share publicly and what we share in a smaller group. And I’m curious to hear, like Off the Grid is such a popular podcast. I love that so many of your guests are like, this is my favorite podcast. I’m so excited to be here, which is great. How would you decide like, okay, this is something I want to share like publicly through like Off the Grid episode, for example, and what is something that might be reserved more for something like, like the interweb or like a smaller group that maybe group members are in conversation with one another or something that you’re doing more of like a facilitation within that smaller protected space, like enclosed space there. So I’m curious how you approach different topics in different ways for those audiences?

 

Amelia Hruby [00:33:35]:

Yeah, I really love this question because I think what it comes back to is like one of the core practices of creative business for me, which is like mapping your ecosystem and sort of knowing like, what are these different containers and like, how do they interact? So for me, the entire foundation of my current business that runs through Off the Grid is based on this free weekly podcast. And that podcast is an act of radical generosity. You can get an entire business and marketing education just listening to those episodes and like never actually engage with me or pay me a single dollar. And I just like give that to the world. It is also primarily interviews, so that is also how I connect and build my network and feature other people’s work and businesses. Like, you know, so many people have made plenty of money from being guests on Off the Grid and getting hired for things, booking contracts. You know, when people sponsor the show, they have new folks come in. Like, I love that the podcast and the guests and sponsors on it have become this like beautiful web of sort of reciprocal support.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:34:44]:

And so that is like literally the bedrock of my entire business ecosystem. And then on top of that, as you’ve said, I have like different paid containers. So right now, those are primarily my membership, The Interweb, which is an annual membership where people can come to learn marketing and business skills. We have like live calls and classes. We have resource portal, we have a Slack community. It’s a pretty traditional online membership model. And that’s the primary place you can learn from me. Like, I don’t do a ton of other teaching or sharing.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:35:14]:

The exception to that is the other container I have is the Off the Grid Clubhouse, which is more of a paid content model. So the interweb is like courses and community. The clubhouse, I always say, is like episodes and emails. And so it’s hosted on Substack currently. I plan to move it off there later this year, but that’s bonus episodes. It’s content behind a paywall. It’s where I put my annual earnings report. Reports and things like that inside the Clubhouse.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:35:37]:

And so right now, like, that kind of is the business ecosystem and how I decide what goes where. Well, typically interviews are gonna go on the public feed because they’re about shining light on other people, opening up the network, having these conversations and sort of co-constructing what online business without social media looks like. Inside the Clubhouse, I do a lot more just like behind the scenes and notes from me. So if people love the public show, but they wanna like hear from me more often or get some more like solo episodes with me, then they can join the Clubhouse. And again, it’s like very affordable. If you only have $5, great, you can come in. So I guess what I’ve said so far is there’s like the free public show, there’s the like hear more directly from me solo in the Clubhouse, and then all of the teaching I do at this point right now happens inside the interweb. So if you actually want to like learn from me, like a how-to, And you wanna be like in community with other listeners of the show and really meet them and be with them as creative artists and business owners, then that’s what goes inside the interweb.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:36:40]:

And so for the most part, what happens is my public episodes book up so far in advance with interviews, and then I sort of like cram in some solo stuff. I need to sell something or like what I really wanna say something to the people. And then the Clubhouse is where I just share more of like what’s coming up behind the scenes and for me and my own business practice regularly. And the interweb is where I teach. So I guess that’s sort of how I think through what goes where.

 

Kate Henry [00:37:09]:

I learned so much from you. And again, like, just to reiterate, like, I really appreciate your opinion and I trust it. So to, like, hear your, like, opinion pieces or hear thoughts or hear your, like, business predictions, which if we have time today, I’ll ask you to share one later, you know, like, I really look forward to those. Off the Grid’s been 4 years running, correct? That sounds right. I literally went in when I was prepping this, I was like, go into question, flip reverse order. When did it start? I think it was March, you know, like, so I think it is 4 years.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:37:41]:

Yeah. I always have to think through like, okay, I left social media in 2021. I started Off the Grid a year later. That was 2022. What year is it? Let me, let me like subtract the years.

 

Kate Henry [00:37:49]:

Yeah. You’re like, and is it March? You know, like, but. With social media and like technology is consistently changing, like what has it been like running a podcast about, you know, leading social media, thinking of like how this can support small business owners, you know, like with apps and technologies like that are just like morphing and changing and like how we feel about them is changing. Like, do you see folks or hear from folks who are encountering similar challenges or like new challenges now? Or like, are the questions that folks are asking shifting over time?

 

Amelia Hruby [00:38:26]:

You know, part of the, like, fun and challenge of running this project for so long now is that I haven’t been on social media in 5 years. And so sometimes people come in with like a lot of big feelings, or they like, they arrive to the show in a sort of place of like emotional turmoil around their relationship to social media. And it’s not that I haven’t been there before, but I haven’t been there in a long time. And so I don’t feel very close to what’s happening on social media, even though I talk about social media regularly. And that is an interesting place to reside, I think, especially like when you quit doing something, often like it can just sort of leave your consciousness or like you just, you know, when I quit running, I just stopped thinking about running and I never ran again. Like, that was just it. And that is not the case with how I’ve, you know, built this podcast. That said, I do think so much has changed.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:39:21]:

Like, I’ve just expanded the scope, right? So I kind of started with leaving social media, but then I started talking about Big Tech and, like, leaving Google and Amazon and Spotify. And then now I’m currently, as we’re recording this, releasing a big series on AI. And I think everyone is shaping their relationship to and boundaries with AI in real time. And so there is so much space for, like, thought leadership and nuanced conversations around that. And so it’s been interesting to like let myself evolve and also stay close to questions I was asking so many years ago that aren’t as present for me personally. It’s also been really interesting to track the shift in public sentiment toward these tools since I started off the grid. You know, the first season of the show was not that popular and people were kind of like, interesting marketing podcast, Amelia, but I’m never gonna leave social media. And then last year, 2025, people were like, “I have to leave social media.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:40:17]:

Thank God off-the-grid exists.” Like, the sentiment shifted so much because the platforms changed, and the algorithms got more and more intense and feel bad, I think. And that has been, more than anything else, kind of affirming and interesting to track for me. So, I think that folks are definitely facing similar challenges as they were when I started the show, but there’s a new intensity to them. And then I think AI has brought up so many more questions. So I’d say like maybe the social media-ness of it all hasn’t changed entirely, but has changed in intensity. But yeah, everything that people are asking around AI is just like new and different and perhaps even harder to grapple with.

 

Kate Henry [00:41:02]:

As someone who has approached AI in a I’m just like, well, I just don’t use it. Which is like, I’m really looking forward to your series because I know that it is much more nuanced than that for many people. And as someone who runs my business, that I can make that choice and I have the capacity to delegate and pay folks to do labor that many folks may not have the capacity to do. And AI can provide that. Like, it’s like, is there, like, does it provide accessibility support for some folks? Like, for me, like, it is so tricky because then it becomes ethical and then it brings me back to conversations of like, oh, like, okay, like, yes, I wanna make sure I recycle my glass, but like, what do I do with the, you know, companies that are dumping oil into the ocean, right? Like, it’s much more complicated. So I can totally see that being something that’s rapidly morphing and changing right now.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:41:56]:

Yeah. And I’ve really refused to like approach it with urgency. I spent all of 2025 in a very much like listening and learning phase. I read a lot of books. I talked to a lot of peers. I tried out some of the tools and it’s interesting, like, as we’ve said, like the series is just going live right now. And in all honesty, it’s like 4 conversations with people who have quit using AI and all the reasons we are opting out in the ways that you’ve said, including some nuanced conversations around like, what does accessibility really mean when it’s created by AI and what’s the difference between generative AI and large language models that do things like transcription. I think there are meaningful differences there, and it’s challenging in a new and different way.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:42:41]:

It’s definitely an edge for me.

 

Kate Henry [00:42:42]:

Yeah, that’s a good way to put it, thinking about an edge. I feel like if I were just starting my business instead of being like comfortably 6 years into my business, I might also be like, feel urgency or feel scarcity or feel like a hurry or feel like much more of a hunger to try using AI. But like, because I already have my systems in place that work, you know, like I don’t feel the urgency to be like, I gotta get this out, I gotta do this quickly, I have to do this well. Like, I suspect I might feel more of a pull for it should that be the case.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:43:18]:

Yeah. You know, I haven’t thought this or said it out loud before, but what’s really coming up for me now as we talk about this and like AI and social media as business owners and what has changed for us, I think there’s something interesting. There’s like an inverse that’s happening between social media and AI for small business, which is that with social media, people who just like had jobs didn’t really have to use it except for personal reasons. But business owners were like, I have to use it because how else am I gonna get people to know about my business? Like Off the Grid was created from this like refusal of the imperative that business owners have to be on social media. But with AI, it’s kind of opposite. Like everyone I know who has any type of like computer-based job is being told by their employers, like, you have to use AI. But business owners like us can actually opt out of it. And so we’re almost in this, like, reverse position where we were with social media.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:44:11]:

But maybe that’s why it feels so different to me, because the imperative is quite different. It’s like, instead of being like, you were told you have to use social media and I’m giving you permission not to, now I’m kind of like, why are you using AI if you don’t have to? And I think that question is, like, really creating more friction for listeners than the, like, usual permission that they’ve been getting from me. And it’s an interesting place to be, I’ll be honest.

 

Kate Henry [00:44:36]:

I feel this way again, like this is again, like being multiple years into the business where like I do post on Instagram sometimes, but like I mainly use Instagram to watch things about heated rivalry. And like I recently followed like an account that like someone makes fake tweets as if they’re the characters. And I was like, like when I’m on Instagram, it’s basically like personal playtime. It’s like. You know, it’s a business account, but I’m like, hmm, let’s follow these things, right? But yeah, I can’t wait to listen. I will certainly link to these things in the show notes. Would you share a business prediction if you have one? I’m always delighted to listen to your business predictions. I’m not remembering right now if they’re in the Clubhouse or if they’re in the public feed, but, and then it’s fun when you like come back and share like, hmm, how did it go? So do you have anything right now for 2026 that you would look into your crystal ball for us?

 

Amelia Hruby [00:45:30]:

The business predictions really started because my friend Amanda Laird of Slow and Steady Studio, like, wrote this great email at the end of 2024 of, like, her predictions for 2025. And I was essentially like, do you wanna come say all of these on Off the Grid? And so we had that conversation at the beginning of 2025, and then we sort of returned to it at the end. We did it again at the start of this year, and that is on the public feed, totally free to listen to. And then I also wrote a separate piece on, like, my sort of predictions for the internet. You know, I think that this year we are going to see a sort of gap open up between the people who are using AI and who are opting out of AI, just to stick with that theme. Like, I, I think that that is gonna become more of a sort of chasm in the way that small business owners do business. I also think this year there’s just gonna be even more of a return to the, like, analog and offline aspects of our work. Even those of us who do all our work on the internet, I think we’re gonna be sending postcards.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:46:26]:

We’re gonna be trying to meet up in person. We’re gonna be, you know, leaning into merch. Maybe I will finally make these “Ask Me About My Passion Project” shirts, right? And I think that like, we’re craving more than just the digital, especially in a world where like, we can’t trust the things we see online anymore because so much is generated by AI and like, convincingly so, right? We don’t know what’s real. And so I think we’re gonna want more of that IRL. In real life-ness, even in online business. So those are just two predictions I would share for now. Mm, that’s delightful.

 

Kate Henry [00:47:00]:

I really want everyone to be doing the analog stuff and to have like the meetups and things like that. And I’ve seen this before, like I’m like on some Patreon, like I’ve been on folks’ Patreons for years who’ve been sending postcards or like parts of their art or something like that. And it’s always such a delight to do. So, Fun. I hope that this business prediction comes true. I suspect that it will. I’ll close this up with a couple of questions. Penultimate question.

 

Kate Henry [00:47:28]:

I always love to ask folks what’s something they’re honing in on, so I’m curious what’s something you’re honing in on right now?

 

Amelia Hruby [00:47:34]:

You know, I think for me, what I’ve been thinking a lot about right now or honing in on right now has been like the sort of art of teaching and what it means to teach and to learn online. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen the entire shift of like university education, their relationship to remote learning change radically, which has been interesting to watch like now from the outside of the academy. But then also over the past year or two, we’ve seen this sort of like online course creator bubble really burst and fall apart. And sort of in the wreckage of those two things, I’m still so deeply invested in teaching and learning, and I think that I’m really honing in on like my specific style of teaching online, and I’m prepping to teach a class all about this. So it’s gonna get very like meta, like teaching online about how to teach online. But that’s something that I’ve been honing in on and thinking a lot about and the role that I just think like human beings have always been teachers and learners, and that’s not gonna go away. It’s not gonna go away because of AI. It’s not gonna go away because people don’t wanna buy courses.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:48:43]:

It’s not gonna go away because we’re all on the internet. Like, It’s still there, and I think it’s still such a valuable skill to learn how to teach. And that’s what I’m really, really grappling with these days.

 

Kate Henry [00:48:55]:

Hmm. Will you tell me more about this thing that you’re working on about teaching? I’m like curious for myself, and I’m sure that folks who are listening, their ears just perked up too. Yeah.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:49:06]:

So my like tentative title, which I’ve not settled on yet, so listeners, if you go to the show notes and find something totally differently titled, that’s what happened. My tentative title is Come to Class: How to Teach and Sell Online with Confidence and Care. And I really wanna sort of carve out this path and like help people really see like, how do you like to learn and can we build your teaching style from that? How do you hold space online, you know, in Zoom rooms in a way that you feel good about it? How do you create curriculum where people actually get results? Not that everything’s about ROI, but I think the purpose of teaching is to help people transform, whether it’s transform how they think about something, transform how they experience something, transform how they do something. Like, without transformation, there hasn’t been effective teaching, in my opinion. So I really want to help people, like, see this and learn how to do this. And so I think that this will be, like, a 2-day workshop intensive where we will walk through all of that over the course of a weekend and then some, like, follow-up coworking Q&A stuff. My goal is to really make it approachable so like people who have never taught online before can feel really good about getting started, or people who teach online all the time but wish that it felt better, wish that they got better results for their students, wish that their testimonials actually said something. Like, I think it’ll be able to span different skill levels.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:50:26]:

And you know, I’ve been teaching since I was in high school and I started teaching at like my local dance studio. I’ve been teaching at least 20 years now in so many different contexts on so many different topics. And so I wanna really integrate all of that and bring it in alongside the, like, ways that I have quote unquote mastered the Zoom room over the past 5 years. So yeah, that’ll all kind of come together. There’s another tiny piece of it that’s like, I think when you learn to teach better, you’re able to sell better. So for like online business owners, I think that actually, like, instead of working on sales skills, which to me has always been boring, if you actually work on teaching skills, they’re so transferable. Like, if you can, if you can make big ideas easily understandable, That’s what you’re doing in class and it’s what you’re doing on a sales page. So like instead of learning sales, you can learn teaching.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:51:13]:

It’s more fun. It’s more interactive. It feels less like, I don’t know, slimy in some ways. And then we can transfer it over to the selling process. So all of that is somehow going to be wrapped into this class that I am hopefully going to teach in May.

 

Kate Henry [00:51:27]:

Yay. Okay. Well, I can’t wait for this class. And also I love that you’re approaching this with like teaching folks skills or a lens or practice that they could apply to selling or to marketing or to teaching. Like that, to me, it’s like if I understand something well enough that I can see like how I would use it in this context and how I would use it in that context, that tells me that I’ve really absorbed and understand the practice that I’m doing. So I, I really appreciate that you’re doing that and you’re setting a high bar for yourself in wanting that to be the outcome for students. So I’m excited for that.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:52:01]:

I am also very excited. I really do believe if you can teach it, you can sell it, at least on a skill level. Sometimes there’s like a visibility gap there. There are some like emotional needs that people may have to get met or healed outside of this class to make that leap. But I do think on just the level of like the skills you need, if you can teach it, you can sell it. And that’s what I really wanna walk people through. I’m thrilled.

 

Kate Henry [00:52:24]:

There’s so many things today that have gotten me like, oh, I, I love to like be like, how am I feeling somatically? And I’m feeling like really like excited and like, I like wanna follow you down like all like 4 or 5 of the different paths of things that you’ve shared today that are very exciting for me. I’ll close us today. Our final question is, where can folks follow you? And we know that you just shared this exciting thing that this Come to Class class that will come out in May, we’re planning for, but where can we follow you? What would you recommend folks check out?

 

Amelia Hruby [00:52:55]:

Yeah, so you could find my personal website at ameliaphruby.com and that kind of gathers everything I’m doing online, including my personal projects. Projects and the, like, more professional ones. You can also listen to my podcast, Off the Grid, anywhere you get your podcasts, or you can find it at offthegrid.fun. And I’ll make sure the link to the waitlist for that teaching class also ends up in the show notes so that folks can get on the interest list if it sounds like a good time to you or like something that you need in your creative work or online business. And yeah, those are kind of the best places and ways to find me these days.

 

Kate Henry [00:53:29]:

And your little tarot podcast if folks wanna learn about tarot. Oh yeah. You know, like you’ve got all these different pods out there too as well. Yep.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:53:36]:

That one’s called My Tiny Tarot Practice, and you can also find that anywhere you get your podcasts.

 

Kate Henry [00:53:41]:

Delightful. Well, thank you, Amelia. This was truly a delight. I’ve been looking forward to this for months, and thanks for taking the time today.

 

Amelia Hruby [00:53:48]:

Thanks, Kate. I’m so grateful that you had me on.

 

Kate Henry [00:53:56]:

I know that I am honing in, honing in. Yeah, I know I’m honing in. Thanks so much for joining me. You can learn more about Honing In and my work as a productivity coach on my website, katehenry.com.