(alarm clock rings)
(light electronic music)
- Hello.
Good morning.
Today, I'm gonna be bringing
you guys along with me
and showing you what a
day in my life looks like.
I've obviously seen plenty of people vlog
their days in the past and everyone's day
is so, so different, and recently,
I saw a few entrepreneurs
vlogging their days
to show you the behind the
scenes in their businesses
and it just struck me how
different their days are
than my days, so I wanted
to show you one of my days.
The first thing, thanks light,
but the first thing that
I think I should say
is just to acknowledge
that every day is very,
very different.
Today's Wednesday and when I
thought of filming this video
and planned to film it
on this particular day,
I did so because I normally
record podcasts on Wednesdays
and I thought that that
would be an interesting
thing to see because on Mondays,
we do YouTube videos and
that's just like an intense,
a lot of hours of filming
smack in the middle of the day
and that's like all we do,
and then on the other days,
I'm often just sitting at
my computer typing and that
doesn't look very
interesting, so I thought,
Wednesday's recording podcasts.
That'll work really well.
That'll make for some good,
interesting video content,
but then a couple of podcasts guests
ended up booking their
interviews for this week Tuesday
and this week Thursday,
so I'm not gonna record a podcast today
because my week ended
up getting full of that.
This day isn't gonna
look all that interesting
from the work perspective.
I'll still explain to
you guys what I'm doing,
but it's mostly gonna look
like me sitting and typing,
but I'm also going to bring
you around so you can see the
whole rest of my day and kind
of get a complete fixture,
when I woke up and when I go
to bed and when I take a break
and when I stop working,
what I do with my kids,
just all that sort of lifestyle
stuff that you guys don't
normally get to see.
Plus, you will see what I
get to do to run my business
on a Wednesday, except
without the podcast recording
that I often do.
Anyway, that's kind of what I have planned
for my day, kind of.
What I'm gonna do right now
is it is about eight o'clock.
I got up around seven.
It was a little after this morning.
I slept in a little bit
more than normal, and also,
I didn't sleep very much the night before.
I was tired, I slept in, but now I'm up,
it's about eight o'clock.
That's when I normally
try to be in my office by,
sit down to get some work done.
I often end up taking a break
a little bit later in the
morning to eat some breakfast
and stuff like that,
but I try to be in my office
working by about eight o'clock.
The very first work task
that I'm going to do
on my computer over here is to plan out
my tasks for the day.
That's what I do almost every day first,
is I go through Asana, I
sort through all the tasks
because a lot of the time...
- [Device] Connected to
D-E-S-K-T-O-P 94137L0.
- I gotta just sort through all the tasks
that people have assigned
to me and make sure
that they all have the right due date
so that I have a very simple,
organized agenda for the day
instead of an agenda
with millions of things
that will be super overwhelming.
One other thing that I should say is,
what are my kids doing right now?
They woke up just a few
minutes ago and right now,
they're just getting
themselves ready for the day.
They're pretty good at getting
themselves up and dressed
and using the bathroom and all that.
The older one helps the younger ones
to get those things done and then
they'll just come up and they'll
start playing by themselves.
I think it's good for
them to have some nice
independent play time.
I'm keeping an ear out the whole time
and I've got the baby monitor too.
Then at nine o'clock, my sister-in-law,
who is nannying them two days a week,
is gonna show up and she's going to keep
taking care of them because
they're playing happily
would devolve if I just let
them do that all day, obviously,
so they're gonna need a little
bit of structure later on,
but for now, they are A-okay.
I just sorted through
my Asana to-do list and
there is a lot on it today.
Honestly, more than I'm
gonna be able to get to today
and so what I should do is
I should really prioritize
and reschedule some things for other days.
I'm not the best about doing that because
I kinda just wanna get
through as much as I can
and then I'll reschedule
the rest that I don't get to
once I see what I actually don't get to.
I think that's what I'm gonna do.
It would be less overwhelming feeling
if I did reschedule the stuff right now,
but I did wanna see how much
I can get through today.
Of course, there's only
so many hours in a day
and I've got other things
I need to do today,
aside from just work anyway,
so now, it's about 8:30,
so I'm just gonna get to work,
get as much done as I can,
and we'll see how this goes.
(upbeat electronic music)
(baby giggles)
Good morning, Zack.
- Good morning.
- Good morning!
- [Gillian] Can you go say
good morning over there?
- Good morning!
(upbeat electronic music)
- I wish we were eating
something prettier,
something nicer than cereal this morning
'cause we only eat cereal
once a week and of course,
it would be this morning that
this is what we're eating,
but I just don't really feel like
there is enough time this
morning to make something else.
The frustrating thing about vlogging,
and part of the reason
I don't normally do it,
is because I find that
it takes me a long time.
It takes so many hours
out of my day when I do it
and it means that I get
about half as much done
as I normally would.
We're eating cereal
because if we're vlogging,
then there isn't time
to also make breakfast.
You are taking the PLT today?
- Yes.
- Tomorrow, I'll tell you
to give me two verses.
- I've skipped back to my office.
It is 9:09 now.
I'm just gonna get to work.
Whenever I am sitting down
to do some serious work,
I always try to prioritize, do first,
any sort of content creation
or creative work that I need to do because
I find that that is the part of my,
the thing that I need the most energy for,
so if I wait until later in the day
when I have worked a fair amount,
then I might still have enough
energy to do easy things,
but I won't have enough
energy to really tackle
a creative project.
I'm just looking down
my to-do list right now
and it looks like the most creative,
highest priority things I need to do are
outlining video lessons for our new
Video Creator Academy program,
I also need to film a video for our
Startup Society members,
we're re-filming the welcome video
just to give them the best like
initial experience possible,
and then I need to
write a bunch of emails,
and this is a really important task.
It's definitely not urgent
at all, but it is important,
and that is the thing that will take
the most creative energy,
so I think I'm actually
going to start with that one.
(upbeat electronic music)
I'm writing these emails
to welcome new members
in Startup Society after they join.
One thing that I wanna share with them and
really help them with is thinking about
the reason why they joined so that
they're really clear on
that and so that they have
that reason why that they
can keep coming back to
so that they'll be able to keep working
towards their goal of being
able to work for themselves
and work from home.
What I wanna do is I wanna share with them
some reasons why some members have decided
to join Startup Society in the past
to kind of get their
wheels turning so they can
think about what their reason is,
but I'm a little bit
stuck on it because while
I know in general reasons why people join,
I would love to have their actual words.
What I decided to do is I'm
going to do a Facebook live
in our Startup Society forum group,
our Facebook group, for
the Startup Society members
and I'm just going to explain to them
exactly what I'm doing
and ask them to tell me
why they joined Startup Society so that
I can just plug their exact
words into these emails and
have it be completely authentic and real.
Testing, testing.
(woman clears throat)
Good morning.
I'm popping in here today
because I'm working on writing
some new membership welcome emails,
so these are emails that
new members get right after
they join Startup Society.
One thing that I really
wanna do in these emails
is encourage the new
members to think about
the reason why they decided
to join Startup Society
so that they can be clear on that, sorry,
my kids are in the other room,
and so that as they
continue to work through
the action plans and they
have to put in the work,
that they can come back to that reason why
and use it as inspiration
and as their motivation for
continuing to do that
work that's required.
I finished up that Facebook live.
Children, my goodness.
They all decided to start screaming
right when I decided to do that.
I could have waited a little bit.
They're gonna be headed out to,
they're going to a learning co-op today.
The nanny's gonna take
them to a learning co-op
for a few hours, for most
of the afternoon, really.
I'm planning to get
that video recorded then
that I need to get recorded,
and I'm just waiting
because it'll be much easier
to have quiet at that point.
(upbeat electronic music)
The kids are being just
a little bit too noisy.
I'm very easily distracted
by auditory things,
so I'm gonna pop on my headphones here.
I work with my headphones on
a lot because it really helps
with that noise distraction,
so that's what's going on here.
(upbeat electronic music)
I have finally finished
writing these emails
for new Startup Society members.
It honestly took way longer
than I thought it was going to.
I'm stopping my timer right now.
It took me two and a half
hours to write those emails,
which is a very large trunk
of the time that I normally
spend working in a day,
so I wish it hadn't taken that
long, but at the same time,
that was a really
important thing that needed
to get taken care of
because Startup Society
is our main program that we offer
and I think that those new
emails that I just wrote will
really help them in those ways.
Finally done with that.
I think that I'm going to
take a little break now and
grab a quick snack
because it is almost noon.
My house is quiet now because
the kids left for their
learning co-op.
This is what they did to the
living room before they left.
Of course, you need to have
stools on the couch, you know.
That's always super useful.
It's not too bad.
It could be worse.
This is actually the part
I'm more bothered by.
Right now, my sink is full of dishes,
which is something that really bothers me,
kind of a pet peeve.
Normally I take care of
them every single evening
before I go to bed.
Now I have a sink full of
dishes, which isn't very cool.
Hopefully I have time to
deal with that later today.
(light electronic music)
I got my snack and oh my
goodness, this camera is crooked.
I got my snack.
Normally if my family was here,
then I would go out and eat
lunch with them at about noon
'cause I realized earlier,
I said, it's about noon,
so I'm gonna go get a snack,
and that was a little bit weird
'cause wouldn't you get lunch at noon,
but because my house is
completely empty right now,
I might as well just get work done.
I've gotten myself a
snack and I'm going to get
some work done while I'm eating the snack.
There's a lot of things, of course,
that you can't do while you're eating,
but one thing that I have
to do every single week
is review the edited
videos that we recorded
the previous week.
I don't typically edit
my own YouTube videos
or the videos for my courses.
I have an editing team that
takes care of that for me,
but I do have to review them afterwards,
make sure that everything's
okay and ask them to change
anything that I want to change
and it just takes a fair
amount of time to go through
all of that video that we
create every single week,
but it's something that I
don't really need my hands for
'cause I'm not typing.
I'm mostly just watching a video.
That's what I'm gonna work
on while I eat my snack.
(upbeat electronic music)
With that done,
I have now assigned those requests
for final edits back
to the editor in Asana
so that he can take care of it
and now I am going to get
into the more important video
I needed to review.
Video went pretty well,
but I was recording my
screen the whole time
so that I could be showing you guys
inside my YouTube analytics dashboard
and I thought everything was great,
but then when I went to get
to that recording I had made,
I found out that it
wasn't actually recording,
so now I have to review that
video that now has been edited,
only without the screen recording at all,
and I have to recreate
the screen recording
while I'm watching it.
That's what I'm gonna do now.
(upbeat electronic music)
I have finished reviewing now
all three of those YouTube
videos and this last one,
it didn't actually need
any changes at all.
I had a couple ideas for things
I might like to see different,
so I let the editor know about that,
but it is good to go as it is.
I'm just going to take a
look at my to-do list here
that still has a lot
of things on it and see
what else is time sensitive at all
and at least take care of those things
and then we'll go from there.
(upbeat electronic music)
This is extremely frustrating
because there's just so many
things in my office that could
be straight or look crooked.
There's just a lot of lines.
As you probably know,
I don't normally film
my own YouTube videos.
I'm not really in the habit of setting up,
in practice with setting up
this particular set to film
and it's just taking me a
ridiculous amount of time.
I'm just filming this today
because it needs to get filmed
and it should be something quick and easy,
not something where I need someone
to hold a camera or anything,
and just seemed like the
easiest way to get it done,
but now I'm kind of regretting
it because I'm spending
so much time just getting set up.
(upbeat electronic music)
I see the world in front of you
and I can't wait to really
get into this with you.
I did it!
That only took like a long time.
It took an hour to film
that one short video.
That's why I normally
film like two or three
videos back-to-back and it's
also why I normally have help
because setting up is too much work.
I think I'm gonna put in
about one final hour of work,
try to knock out a few of these smaller,
but important things.
Right now, I'm going to
focus in on my email.
And that right there is inbox zero.
I was expecting there to
be an hour of emails here
that I wasn't gonna quite get through,
but I've only been working
on it for 22 minutes,
but that is the power of having
a team, having a few people.
My team is not big.
I have just a few people
who work for me part-time,
but they help me so much.
They deal with really serving
the customers really well
and making sure that we're helping them
with account issues and
helping them also to just
answering their business questions,
their YouTube questions, all of that,
and then they only pass me the
emails that they don't know
the answer to that I haven't
already told them an answer to
and so it really means
I don't have that many
emails to deal with.
Such a blessing.
Here's what's left on my to do list now.
All of this should take
me about 30 minutes
and then I'll be all done.
It turns out 10 minutes was
plenty of time to answer
everyone's questions in the
Startup Society Facebook group,
which is awesome,
so now I am going to get
into that design work,
hoping that Photoshop cooperates
me with it on this computer
that still is being a
little bit slow because
those big files are still uploading,
but that shouldn't take
me very long either.
Then I'll be done.
(upbeat electronic music)
I'm down to the last item on my to-do list
and that is to review some thumbnails
that another designer created,
so that's what I'm gonna do right now.
I am gonna record a little video for
my project manager, Courtney,
giving her my thoughts on these thumbnails
so that she can communicate
that to the designer
and get us some designs that
will work for the videos.
(upbeat electronic music)
That's done and that means
I'm done with everything.
It is 4:47,
definitely a little later
than I normally stop working.
A day in the life of an entrepreneur
really is very flexible and variable
from one day to the next
because we don't have
that externally dictated schedule.
We don't have a boss telling
us show up at this time
and leave at this time.
I try to work pretty steady hours,
starting every morning
at about eight and then
ending some time in the early afternoon.
It's just so my family has some structure
and also so I have structure 'cause it
helps me be more productive,
but that doesn't always happen
'cause it doesn't have to.
Anyway.
I'm all done and I hear children who have
arrived home right on time,
so I'm gonna go spend some time with them.
I'm also gonna take a shower
'cause my hair's clean,
but I feel like I stink,
so I'm gonna take a shower
and make something for dinner
and then I'm gonna take
the kids to Awana's,
which is like a kids' Bible
study program kind of,
and then come home and get
ready for bed and go to bed.
(upbeat electronic music)
- Hello, children.
- Say hi, mom.
- [Gillian] I see two children.
The other child.
- [Nanny] Do you see who's there?
- Who do you see there?
Who do you see?
(upbeat electronic music)
What would you like to eat?
Toys?
You can't eat toys.
Cheese?
We'll get you cheese.
Cheese.
Some food?
Look.
It's a new game.
It looks pretty good, huh?
New game.
How is that banana?
Do you like it?
(baby giggles)
(upbeat electronic music)
Well, I had every
intention of making salad
to go with this pasta, but
again, I blame vlogging.
Vlogging took the time of cooking today,
so we worked and we've
vlogged and we did not cook,
so we're having pasta for dinner and then
we need to run out the
door to get to Awana's.
(upbeat electronic music)
- Hi, I'm Walter.
- My name's Zack!
I Zack.
(upbeat electronic music)
- I just got back from
taking the kids to Awana's
and while I was there,
I met up with a friend of mine
and we had a good long talk.
Now, the kids are eating.
Zack, stop doing that.
The kids are eating dinner
number two because of course,
you have to eat before you go to bed,
and I'm going to clean
up this room because
tomorrow morning, a bunch of
my mom friends are all coming
for our weekly play group.
We get together with our kids and the moms
get a chance to talk and
to pray for each other
and the kids get a chance to play and
they're coming to my house tomorrow,
so I need to clean up my living room
so that they have a place to be.
(upbeat electronic music)
My day's pretty much done now,
so I'm gonna wrap this video up.
I really hope that you enjoyed seeing
the behind the scenes of a day in my life
as a digital entrepreneur and as the CEO
of a six-figure business.
If you did, make sure
you hit that like button
and if you wanna see more
videos in the future about
entrepreneurship, about success,
about working for yourself,
then make sure you subscribe
to my channel 'cause I make
new videos on those
topics every single week.
They're not normally like this.
They're normally a little
bit more practical,
a little bit more helpful maybe,
but I hope that you
enjoyed this one as well,
so I'd love to see you
back here again sometime.
The echo in here is really bad,
so I'm gonna stop talking in here,
but thanks so much for watching.
I hope that you're having an amazing day
and I'll see you again next week.
Bye guys.
(upbeat electronic music)
