Last week, 147,739 of you opened this newsletter. For perspective Louisville Business first gets this same audience, but it takes a whole month for them to do it. We do it weekly (4x their monthly volume).
Not subscribed. Opened. Six issues, Sunday through Friday, 326,055 emails delivered, 147,739 unique opens. Put every subscriber in a seat and you'd fill University of Louisville’s L&N Stadium to within 174 seats. Every morning, before most of Louisville has had coffee, more people read this thing than fit in a sold-out Yum! Center. Over the week, it's just about a Derby-day crowd.
And the time. If I use a conservative reading speed and assume a lot of you skim — four minutes an open — that's about 9,800 hours of human attention. Let me do that math out loud, because I had to. 9,800 hours is 410 days. Fifty-nine weeks. One person reading nonstop, no sleep, from last Labor Day to this one and then some. It's 246 forty-hour work weeks — almost five years of a full-time job. If you read twenty minutes a day, it's eighty-one years of reading. A whole life. And every morning, before most of the city has finished its coffee, it's about 1,640 hours — sixty-eight days of reading — spent on one email.
Six years in, I still don't fully understand why you're here. But I know what it is: attention. The one thing you can't make more of. You can make more money. You can't make more Monday.
So — thank you. Again. I mean it every time.
And I'll say the quiet part, because I've never really said it: that's a resource. A room that size, every morning, paying attention on purpose. Most of you are here to read. Some of you are sitting on a business, a listing, a service, an event, that a Derby crowd should know about. I've barely opened that door. Consider it cracked. More at the bottom.
I'm excited about my day every single day, and the reason is you. I hit schedule the night before, I go to sleep, and I wake up curious. What are they going to think? Who's going to push back? Who's going to reply with a story better than the one I wrote? That curiosity is the best part of my mornings. It brings me a lot of joy.
Which is why today I want to talk about where your attention goes when it's not here.
Back in June I checked my screen time and it said four and a half hours a day. A week later I did two things — I muted about twenty words on Twitter and put a red tint on my iPhone. The phone is built to look like a slot machine, and you're allowed to turn that off.
Two months later, here's the update: I'm averaging somewhere between an hour and a half and two and a half hours a day. Down from four and a half. For reference, the average baby boomer is at two hours and eight minutes, and Gen Z is over four. I didn't add discipline. I didn't buy an app. I took the candy out of the screen, the feed got boring, and when the feed got boring I stopped reaching for it.
Here's what I was reaching for, by the numbers. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has been putting stopwatches on people's screens for twenty years. In 2004, the average person stayed on one screen for two and a half minutes before switching. By 2012 it was 75 seconds. Now it's 47. And every time you switch off a real task, it takes about twenty-five minutes to get back to it. The kicker: we interrupt ourselves as often as anything interrupts us. Americans now check their phones 186 times a day — once every five minutes you're awake — and 85% of us check within ten minutes of opening our eyes.
The feed didn't shrink your attention span. It trained it. Which is the good news, because anything trained can be retrained. Mine came back in a week.
That's two to three hours a day. What did I do with it?
Nothing that would impress anybody. I cleaned. I worked on the yard. I wrote a couple of songs. I walked Joe and Frank more than I have in years. I laid in the hammock and let the sun do its thing. I sat in the backyard with coffee and the Merlin app open, waiting on species 47. I lifted.
None of that is productive in the LinkedIn sense. All of it made me feel more like a person.
Here's the honest thing: I'm fortunate to be single right now. I have a lot of time to create, to ideate, to sit and be bored and see what shows up. If I were in a comfortable relationship — the kind where the couch wins every night and Netflix is the default — I don't think I'd be this energized. I think the opposite of depression is creating. I create all the time, and I'm happy, and I'm fired up. People tell me that constantly: "Rob, every time I talk to you, you're excited about something." I hear it enough to think there's something to it, and I don't think it's personality. It's because I cut out the things that don't serve me, and that leaves room to give the good things my attention.
So here's the question I want you to sit with this week.
What's sapping your attention that doesn't serve you? What could you cut — or just moderate?
Start with the phone. Open your muted words. If the list is empty, that's your answer. Mute the five things that spike your blood pressure and give nothing back. Then go through who you follow — not the accounts, the people. Anybody duplicitous. Anybody a little too slick. Anybody whose posts leave a bad taste you can't quite name. You don't owe them a seat in your head. Unfollow. Mute. You're not being rude, you're being a landlord. It's your building.
Then look at your day.
I sat down with Harry Borders recently — my mentor, runs Borders & Borders, one of the best title companies in the city — and I told him, Harry, I bet I could get you four hours a day of your life back. Not by working harder. By building a few more automations into the systems he already has and cutting the redundancies. The report typed twice. The thing checked by hand that a machine could check at 5 AM and leave on your desk.
Four hours might be his number. It's probably not yours. But a couple of hours is, and you already know which two. Ask it plainly: what's taking your attention every day that Claude could do? The follow-up text. The spreadsheet you rebuild every Monday. Every one of those is a machine's job now, and every one is an hour with your name on it.
So what do you do with the hour?
Most people never ask that before they go chasing efficiency. You clear two hours and then what — scroll for two? That's a wash.
Do you learn something? Read the great works — the dense stuff, the Thoreau on the table that takes a decade? Get creative — write, build, play, make something that outlasts a Netflix episode? Take a class? Make time for friends, actual calendar time, like I asked you to on Friday? Join something — a club, a league, a group that meets on Thursdays and expects you there?
I don't know your answer. I know mine is the backyard, a guitar, two dogs, and a bird app, and I like myself more on the days I choose it.
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." — Simone Weil
She wrote that in a letter in 1942. It's the truest thing I know about what you did last week.
Attention is the rent you pay for being alive. Everybody's collecting it. The apps, the news, the group chat, the person you don't even like. You get to decide who's a paying tenant and who's squatting.
So take that into your week. Mute something. Unfollow somebody. Find one redundancy and kill it. Then decide on purpose what the hour is for.
📊 Friday's poll: I asked who actually keeps you current on real estate. A group text with friends won at 30%. Then — and I'm not going to pretend I didn't smile — 20% of you said this newsletter. BiggerPockets, still, got 16%. Podcasts and YouTube finished last at 9%. But the number I keep looking at: 25% of you said "nobody, and I felt that today." One in four. If that was you, the top-five exercise from Friday is still sitting there. Go write the list.
📊 And one I owe you from Tuesday — I asked what your next real estate move is and then never told you how it landed. A flip or a BRRRR ran away with it at 41%. My first house, 19%. House-hack a duplex, 16%. And a full 25% of you said "honestly, I'm just here for the birds." I respect it. Up to 46 species. Still pushing for 50!
Today's poll:
Be honest — what's your daily screen time?
🏆 The Top Five is ready this morning like every morning — five best deals on the Louisville MLS, five ripe for a lowball, my number on every one. Rules say I can't mass-send other agents' listings, so it goes one-to-one. Reply "FIVE" and it's yours.
Jay’s is only open today this week, I’ll be there at noon! Hope to see you!
Thankfully,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company
Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.
PS: Now that you know what this audience looks like — 147,739 opens, 9,800 hours, a Derby crowd a week — here's the seed I want to plant. This is a resource, and it's mostly untapped. If you've got a business, a service, a listing, an event, or an idea that Louisville should know about, there's a way to put it in front of these people, and I'd rather build that with someone I like than sell it to someone I don't. Hit me up. I'm always down for collaborations and synergy. Same goes for the everyday stuff — buying, selling, investing, whatever bottleneck you're stuck on. Need a great attorney? A CPA who actually calls back? A lender — hard money, commercial, DSCR, conventional? I know the people. Book a call or just reply. Don't be a stranger. And remember when you list with a Winner Realty agent you get to tap into this very same audience + MORE (offmarket.deals audience 400,000+ buyers). Not to mention 1% of net profits goes to putting families in homes through Hand in Hand!
PSS: The webinar. Wednesday, September 16, 11 AM, 45 minutes, Google Meet. Steal My AI Stack: What a Louisville Realtor Actually Built with Claude. The actual tools running my business — listing descriptions and comp summaries, the deal analyzer, the one that runs overnight and leaves a report waiting when I wake up. Live and unedited, including the parts that break. No pitch, nothing to buy, no sales call after. Register here: https://forms.gle/veN4hxejizVo7Hg99. Agents, lenders, title, inspectors, appraisers, come on too. Your growth doesn’t hurt me one bit!
PSSS: Unfortunately, I've still got a lot of you hitting me up about needing my attorney — bad-acting business partners, this or that. He's good. Reply and I'll connect you. And no updates on my lawsuit with Joe and Kim Worth, but I'll keep you all posted.
PSSSS: Tint instructions, if you try it: Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Color Filters. Give it a week, then reply with two numbers — screen time before and after.
PSSSSS: “We’re all little little.”