Hey Nick, earlier in your agency or automation career, how do you stay on schedule when filtering stuff out like family and other distractions that are out of your control? If you were in this situation, what would you do? I've thought of going to a coffee shop or library, but my PC setup is nice and would bottleneck my workflow on a MacBook. Would love to hear your thoughts.
I find that people generally do not respect my time or schedule, which creates unnecessary emotional issues and problems in the agency itself. It would be ideal for all of us to have our own place with peace and quiet, but the reality is we start in a situation where external distractions or circumstances disrupt the flow of crucial inputs needed like outreach and sales calls. If you were in this situation, I've thought of going to a coffee shop or library to work, but my PC setup is quite nice and would bottleneck my workflow on just a MacBook. Honestly, I think people who make their ergonomic setup super complicated are just coping; I operate fine with a MacBook and make tons of money, so being a bit slower with it isn’t a huge deal—maybe 20% slower at most. Personally, I would just get out of the situation. I lived with my family for a very long time; coming from an Eastern European background, family values are similar to more collectivist and Asian cultures where it's expected that the person in the household lives with family until about 30 before starting their own family. That was never something I could do while taking the risks I wanted to take; every time I tried something, I’d feel a reflexive pullback, like a crab‑in‑the‑bucket effect, not because my family are bad people but because they just want the best for me, and when you risk things it's hard to get the best for yourself. So I just get out. I have many friends who have lived with their families far longer than they should have due to financial issues; I think if they had left earlier and exposed themselves to the need to make a few thousand bucks a month to pay rent, they would have happily traded that money for peace of mind and the ability to control their own life. Let’s be real: most of us have families and other people vying for our attention, so staying on schedule is difficult. You basically need to erect boundaries if you live in the same household, or just get the hell out and find a place where you can spend all your time and energy focused on yourself. Hope that helps and doesn’t destroy your dreams. As an example, my very first apartment was a garage I found on Craigslist for $650 a month—a retrofitted garage with light insulation, a pull‑out bed, etc. I told my family I was moving there, they wanted to help, but I insisted on doing it myself. They eventually came to see it and were surprised, but I really enjoyed it; it was probably the catalyst for some of the biggest self‑improvement I’ve ever done. I had no money but found a way to make it work, and I think everybody else can too.
You know, the reason I've always been hesitant to do a day-in-the-life vlog is because my days are pretty boring. For the most part, I'm just sitting in front of my laptop doing the same revenue-generating activities I tell you to do. These activities might look a bit different now that my brand has taken off and been very successful—I now have more distribution and leverage, so I spend more time on the brand than on my agency. But generally, I wake up, sit in this chair, and type for about ten hours. It's boring, right? There's no real day-in-the-life for people who are 'on the up and up,' at least in my case, since my business model is entirely digital. If I were a door-to-door sales guy or traveling the world for high-ticket deals, it would be different, but I don't really think a day-in-the-life vlog is that valuable. It's more entertainment—like me sucking my own dick, which is pointless. Or like showing me at the gym for two hours, which I get can be motivating for people who want that lifestyle, but I'll be real: I don't think a lot of people want my life. Sure, I have a ton of money and I'm making a big impact; it looks cool from the outside, but there's a lot of work behind it. Work tends to be the separation line between those who don't have stuff and those who do. I could get philosophical, but I won't go super deep. However, a friend once told me something that stuck with me: 'Everybody on earth gets paid exactly the amount they deserve.' It blew my mind because it sounds like one of those unnecessary alpha-male bro sayings, but pragmatically, it's true. You get paid $5 an hour for a shitty dishwashing job you don't want to do; at some level you deserve that because you haven't taken the actions to get a $15 or $20-an-hour job. If you're in a partnership where someone treats you unfairly—giving you 30% and taking 70% while skimming you off the top—it's your fault; you're getting paid exactly what you deserve because you could have avoided that partnership, enforced better boundaries, or become more valuable than 30%. Likewise, if you run a business and your average order value is $500, you deserve that $500 because you were unable to position the product better to make more money. It's unreasonable to assume otherwise—that's how the economy works under capitalism. Just like when you start a new game, if you're bad at it, you just haven't spent enough time getting better. When you get your ass kicked in Super Smash Brothers, it's because you deserve it. That's one thing I'll mention that I don't think a lot of people realize.
I wouldn't do it all at once, as sexy as it sounds and as incredible as the big gurus on YouTube make working for yourself seem. There are a lot of problems with it too. The main one is you're going from an environment where everybody essentially has their day structured for them to an environment where you actually structure every waking moment of your day completely yourself. One of two things happens: it's really overwhelming and you end up not utilizing that time effectively, which leads to you making less money. That's basically the only thing that happens. You're starting this off as an infant — if this is the first time you've ever done self-employment, you have to learn that skill. It doesn't matter how long you've been in IT or how much time or energy you've invested in a specific niche; you're learning an entirely new skill from scratch. So rather than going from 100% corporate to 0% corporate overnight, I'd recommend tranching it or breaking it up. What we'll have people in Maker School do is try to get to 80% of their time in a full-time job. If they can get to 80%, most of their work's already done for them, because the jump from 100 to 80 means you can now introduce 20% of fully self-structured time where you work on your own business. Maybe instead of working 9 to 5, you work 9 to 3:30 — even an additional hour and a half. The second you learn to utilize that hour and a half effectively, it'll carry over to the rest of the time, and usually you don't even have to work a full 8 hours a day head-down after you've learned to be extraordinarily effective with that hour and a half. That's what I would do. I wouldn't go 100 to zero, because I did that for myself and I was completely lost for a very long time — on the brink of eviction multiple times, living in a converted garage, eating rice and beans all day. You don't need to make it that hard for yourself, especially if you're not going to be saving 6 to 12 months of expenses, because it's very difficult and not really worth it. The exhaustion you feel at your current job is probably going to be multiplied tenfold if you do the exact same thing and then switch. Alternatively, you'll make far less money, which leads to a different type of existential threat or exhaustion.
This is a highly specific situation, but I'll help you regardless without speaking in generalities. The way that you're approaching this is good. You have a good mindset. You're not limiting your beliefs as 'oh, I can't do this because I'm doing all these other things.' You obviously understand that you have to give something in order to get something, and what you are going to be giving is a little bit of your time, energy, and sanity. It sounds like your clear constraints are: you need a job after graduation to stay here. So you just need to get a job after graduation. Ideally, the job you should get after graduation should be something that is preferably digital, because the more digital the job is, the less logistical time you're going to have commuting to and from the office. This is all sunk time that you won't really be able to recoup. And when it's remote or digital, you could work on your own business a lot of the time at the same time. Obviously don't be a total [__] about that, but if you need to take a meeting during lunch or whatever, you can do so much easier when you're at home than if you are out and about — you'd have to hide it from people otherwise. So the situation you're in is not really all that crazy. It's the same sort of situation that people have when they just work 9-to-5 jobs or have some sort of full-time thing. I think what you just need to do is get a good job that aligns with your ability to produce the deliverables you want in your agency to make the money that you want. If you scale your agency to $10,000 a month in South Asia, presumably when you are in an area that has significantly higher buying power and an 8-hour time differential between North America — where most of the buying power is going to be — you'll be able to do everything that you've done already just far better over there in Dublin. Not to mention you're going to have a master's degree and all that stuff. So yeah, I don't really think you have anything to worry about. You've already done the most complicated and difficult thing, which is hitting $10,000 a month. You're one in a million, my friend. With all of that in there, yeah, you should be fine.
My typical day starts with waking up—sometimes around 5 or 6 a.m., though today I woke up at 7:45 and felt rushed. On days with seminars, workshops, or community group calls (like last week’s cold‑email workshop at 8 a.m.), I wake up, deliver the session, and finish early. Otherwise, I immediately do my daily actionables: I wipe sleep from my eyes, open my communities, and engage with 50–70 % of posts because I believe the community owner’s presence adds value—most owners just hire a manager and ghost, hurting engagement. Since communities drive most of my income, I invest heavily in them. After community management, I create content (like recording this daily update), then handle client management from 12 to 2 p.m. PT, which is my retainer time for working on client stuff. That block lasts about 2 hours 37 minutes before I’m obligated to do anything else; I then tackle client demands and push any calls to the afternoon so I can do knowledge work in the morning when I’m freshest. I could improve on health—I’ve planned to jog daily for the last four days but keep skipping it because work feels more important. In the evenings, I handle personal obligations: sometimes I spend time with my girlfriend, go on dates, or watch movies (recently we saw Mickey 17 and threw popcorn at each other).
time managementdaily routinecontent creationcommunity management