Working from home is… Amazing. It really is. I highly recommend it. BUT, I'm learning some lessons about the dynamics of working from home with 3 kids that I wanted to share.
These are more geared towards parents, but I'm sure you can take these lessons and apply them with other relationships. BEFORE I dive into that, there’s a couple of other things I’ll cover today as well:
How to set up and automated task to scrape your emails and summarize what you want
Launching a local newsletter progress and why you should consider doing this as well
Why you have to be MUCH more clear than you think when talking with customers
Working from home— If you can, you should. ESPECIALLY if you have kids. The flexibility of being home and “available” is seriously one of the best things EVER.
I will say though that it is difficult at times. Yes, amazing, but also difficult. Because instead of being away at a location and separating work from home, everything is wrapped together in one spot. This is great because you can work early if you want to.
You can work late if you want to.
You can work random hours.
You can take a lunch break in your garage gym.
You can pause and pick your kids up from school early and go get an ice cream. You can do all of these things. But it is harder to get into a good flow state, especially if you have younger kids that are home for the summer or home with you in general because they’re not of school age yet. It makes those dynamics a little bit more interesting to navigate. What I'm learning and trying to figure out daily is the balance between all the work that I CAN do and the work that I SHOULD do.
I love what I do so much that it’s easy to just keep working… but more important than that, is a family that I have who I am doing all this work for.
And as much as it makes me happy to have all the dollars in the bank, not ONCE have my kids asked how much do we have in our bank account or “how many clients do you have?“… they don't care. They care about TIME WITH ME. So today, breaking from my norm, I didn’t get any work done in the morning. Instead I snuck in and woke up my middle child and brought her downstairs to snuggle on the couch and watch Disney. I wasn’t on my phone or computer, JUST with her. Present in the moment…
WAY harder than it seems because of course my mind is running wild with all the things I need to do, but those things had to wait today. The lesson here— break from the routine and remember WHO you are doing all this work for. I’ll keep working on it and I’d encourage you to do the same.
#1 — How to set up and automated task to scrape your emails and summarize what you want I built someone an email manager this week. I have a client (Michael). Sharp dude. Decades in supply chain. I’m currently helping him build out his own AI consulting business for that niche. In the process, he told me he was drowning in emails. So we built him something to clean it all up. With one prompt pretty much. it took about 30 minutes and zero code. For real! Every morning at 6am, before Michael is even up, an AI agent opens his inbox, reads every newsletter that came in overnight, throws out the junk, and writes him a one-page briefing. Top 3 things he needs to know, stats worth quoting on a sales call, even a “here’s who to reach out to today.” Then it drops the whole thing in a dated Google Doc. He wakes up, pours coffee, opens one doc, and knows everything. Here’s the whole thing in four steps:
Point an AI agent at your inbox and give it permission to read.
Tell it exactly what you care about and what’s junk. Be specific here. “Industry news, pricing stats, anything about my top 5 accounts” beats “the important stuff.”
Have it write you a one-page briefing in plain English. Top things to know, numbers worth quoting, one action to take today.
Set it to run on a schedule and drop the result somewhere you already look. For Michael, that’s a dated Google Doc at 6am.
That’s it. Let me know if you want the actual prompt I sent Michael and I can send it over to you as well. #2 — Launching a local newsletter (and why you should think about doing one too) Quick backstory. I’ve wanted to build a local newsletter for Orange County FOREVER. Everything good going on around here... events, new spots, where to take the kids... Crazy that we don't have a good on over here. This is an incredible business / asset to build if done right. This USED to take months, but no with the tech we have, it’s a few sittings, mostly with AI doing the heavy lifting, and it cost me basically nothing. Here’s the whole thing in plain English.
I had AI research the market first... who’s already doing this, where the gaps are. Named it The OC Buzz, grabbed a domain I already had sitting around, and set the whole thing up on a free platform that handles the sending, the website, AND the archive.
Then I had AI break down the two best local newsletters in the country section by section, and I built my own version on the same bones. Built the first issue, saved it as a template, and now every week is just pour the content in.
The only painful part was the tech plumbing, connecting the domain, and even THAT got walked through one step at a time. First issue already went out the door.
The point I'm making here. it doesn’t have to be a newsletter. It’s whatever YOU’VE been sitting on. The course. The little tool. The side thing you keep saying you’ll get to. Six months ago that’s a project you hire out or never finish (if im being honest). This week it was a Tuesday. If you’ve got a local angle, a niche you actually know, an audience you could serve... GENUINELY, just start. The cost of trying is next to nothing and most people haven’t noticed yet. I’ll keep building mine out in public so you can watch the whole thing, the wins and the faceplants both. (And if you’re in OC... subscribe. I am totally not above a shameless plug.)
#3 — Be FAR more clear than you think you need to be This is a lesson from building a 7-figure entrepreneur community, but it applies to basically every business on earth. The details matter. The problem is you don’t know WHICH details matter until you stress test the thing in the real world. Here’s our weird one. People were having trouble canceling. Now, we don’t WANT them to. But life happens, people come and go, and a business built for EVERYONE attracts NO ONE. So cancellations are part of it. Fine. The thing is, canceling isn’t complicated. You enter your email, you hit a button. So why were people getting stuck? Because they entered the WRONG email. They’d type in whatever address came to mind, leave the page thinking it was handled, get charged again, and send me a nasty message. To cancel, you have to use the same email you PAID with. People have five inboxes and pick one at random. The fix was one sentence we should’ve had from day one: “Enter the email address you used when you paid for your membership (this may be different from your Slack or Skool email).” Will that catch everyone? No. Some won’t read it. Some genuinely forget which email they used. But it’ll kill a chunk of the problem.
And the only reason we know to add it is because we lived it. You don’t know until you know, and the only way to know is by DOING.
Same lesson as my kids and the closed door. Clear feels obvious to you. It’s almost never obvious to the
BITES 🍩 BITE 1 — Mysterypreneur Link 🍩 BITE 2 — AI Juice 🧃 NOT SPONSORED, just cool— Zapier’s Copilot. You describe the automation you want in plain English (“every morning, read my new emails, summarize the important ones, drop them in a Google Doc”) and it builds the workflow for you. So sick! Take a look.
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