A Day in the Life of a Full-Time YouTuber

Hey guitar enthusiasts and other YouTubers. I'm just so used to saying, hey guitar enthusiasts when I start a video. I just wrapped up a day of, of content creation and I wanted to go live here to, to talk to you guys about kind of like the day in the life of a full time YouTuber, which is what I am. That's what I do full time now. I did have, you know, my music schools. I'm not a stranger to business and running businesses, but everyone always asks me, like Lauren, how do you avoid the content grind? Do you ever feel burned out? And yes, we all get to the point sometimes where we get burnt out and we don't want to make content, but we know we have to. We kind of get into that content rat race. And I just wanted to tell you guys what I did today. So my schedule today was I woke up, I actually slept in late. I slept until 8 o' clock today. I came out here into the kitchen, I made some coffee and I popped on to my community real quick. I have a private community of guitar students and I hopped on there and I did a live video. I think I went live for maybe about 15 minutes or so just talking about a topic, how to, how to practice better, better practice techniques, what to do when practicing a song. So that took about 15 minutes. And then I went into my content library because I knew I was going to be recording some song lessons today and some other stuff for guitar. So on Friday I recorded a bunch of stuff for this channel. So I have all my content for March was done on Friday. So I'm done for all my March content came out today. And you can see here, I got my notes. So this was one of the songs I did today. This was called Ticket to Ride by the Beatles. And I noticed that there were some other notes that I wanted to put on this. I also made a note that one of the chords was wrong. So I want to go in and correct that before I go live. So this was like six songs that I did today for this guitar channel and I do one song every week. So I recorded six weeks of content. I also did an additional lesson video. I tend to do one song lesson every week, every Saturday and then on what on Thursday sometimes I'll pop in a technique lesson or a, you know, some other. This was about how to humidify your guitar. So I'll do something that's not something song related on another day. So I used to consistently post twice a week. I've kind of been pretty much doing that for the last Couple years. And that's kind of my content posting strategy. I always post at least once a week and sometimes if I don't have a song ready, I will go live on my channel. There's been a few times where I didn't quite have a song ready. I could have just been busy and maybe I didn't do my batch recording the way I did. And I would tell people, hey, you know, I don't have a song for you today. But I decided I was going to go live instead so that I could talk to you guys. So I'm still delivering value. I'm still showing up on, on YouTube. But just goes to show you, it doesn't always have to be structured content. Like this is content. All right, I'm live here. This is content. I'm delivering something. And down the road I could go and chop this up later and turn it into different pieces of content as a creator. So you can do that. But you know, that was a lot of videos. So when did I start? You know, I had my breakfast, I showered at about maybe like 10 o'. Clock. And then 10:30 I started getting my studio ready. I went over there, I turned the heat on and I would say by 11:00am I push record. Okay, so push record. I recorded four. That's. What did I say, had six lessons. I recorded four lessons in one play along. So I did five lessons and then I stopped at 12:30 to, to take a lunch break. Okay, I like taking breaks. And I changed shirts. So I was wearing my, you know, my Wonder Woman shirt. That's the shirt I started with. And then after lunch I was like, oh, let me change shirts. So I have different shirt on and I put one of my Superman shirts on. But you can see I'm back in the Wonder Woman shirt. And then I recorded another two song lessons and then one technique lesson. So I did three more lessons after lunch. And now what I'm doing, you know, I've popped my, my memory cards out. So I use two cameras when I'm filming my, my camera two. Cam two is the close up. So that's how I get my close up videos. And then cam1 is my wide shot like this, the wide shot video. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to transfer all the content onto my laptop to make sure that I can now get it into Dropbox for my va. So that's, you know, so what is it now? It's 2:30. So you know, for, I worked technically, you know, like 10:30 to 2:30 and I'm kind of done with content, but now I've got the wrap up of the content. I got to get it up there with all the diagrams and everything for my va. So now I have to go in, make those corrections and make sure that my VA has everything that, that he needs to be successful on the editing side of things. So you can see that's pretty much my day. So probably that, you know, probably the next hour or so is going to be me transferring files, uploading files and correcting a few diagrams here and there. So for me it's kind of like, you know, maybe a five hour day. Plus I did, you know, some of the stuff in my community that I do in the mornings, but that's it now for the rest of the week. I don't really have to worry about recording content if I don't want to. And I think, you know, it can be very hard when you start getting into the realm of, of YouTube and you're getting successful. You know, I have 260 subscribers more on, on my other channel, this channel, you know, I've only got like 6 or 700. And you know, it's a smaller channel, but when you start getting bigger there, there it starts getting to be this pressure to perform. And I would say probably September, October, November, my, my channel was kind of like flatlining a bit. I wasn't seeing much growth. It was much smaller in terms of the number of views and subscribers I was getting the year prior or even a couple years prior. So I was like, man, that was a little bit disheartening because, you know, I felt like I was putting out a good amount of content still. I felt like I was showing up and giving it my best, but it doesn't show up in the numbers. And I think that's something. Um, I really got focused on numbers probably in 2021 and 2022. I think I really, really got focused on the number game and watching the analytics and being like, wow, that wasn't like a number one video or this one only got this many subscribers and you start getting bound by the numbers and you start doing things because the numbers are telling you to do things. Whereas when you first started on YouTube, you were doing things because you were really passionate about it. Okay, you were really passionate about the things you were doing. All my first videos, I just, you know, there's mistakes. I rarely edited videos. When I first put them up, I was just, I was literally doing it for fun. I was doing it for fun. And over time, you Know, this is what it's 2023. I uploaded my first video April, March of 2017. So this is what my five and a half is going to be my sixth year doing, doing YouTube. And, and you know, when you get to a certain level, you know, it takes some of the fun out of it. It takes some of the fun out of it. Like, man, I gotta got to do this content. I got to deliver, I got to be there for people. I have to show up or my subscribers are going to be pissed or they're, you know. If I take a week off, is my channel going to fall apart? It won't fall apart if you take a week off. Don't worry about that. I'll answer that question. It won't fall apart for a week. I actually did a lot less posting this past, past summer than I usually do. I still posted once a week, but I kind of pulled back from doing twice a week. And maybe that's why my channel was a little bit slower in the fall than it usually is. But it just happens, you know, sometimes you get videos, they take off. I have a video right now that's doing really well and my channel exploded again in January and then those videos start dying down and you have to make new videos to pick up the slack for those ones that dropped off. And what you do is you have to just keep making the content. And if you, you're feeling like you're getting number bound, you know, like, man, I don't know why this video is not doing good. Like I thought it was a great video and it didn't get as many views as my last video. I would just highly encourage you to, to stop looking at the tube buddies and the vidiqs and the analytics and just get back to making content. For making content. Get back into your groove of why you did this in the, in the first place. You know, like me, I know I got to get this content done. All right? And I told you today I woke up at 8 o', clock, I had my me time. I went into my community and I said hello, but I really didn't start working until like 10:30, 11:00 clock this morning. Which meant I had three hours of kind of like lull time to kind of get myself into the mood. It's not like I jump straight into my work. Usually during the week I do, but on the weekends I try to like ease my way into the work. And then I have my student, you know, I had all my stuff prepped. Okay, I do prep for, for Recording songs. I have to prep more. But, like, the. The lesson I did on humidity, I just had bullet points. I literally just went off the cuff on that video. I really did. But I had all my products lined up. I had like four products I went through on how to humidify a guitar. So, like, the outline was right in front of me because it was just like, I picked up a new product. They talked about this product, the pros and cons. Cool. Here's the next product. So I didn't really need a good outline because I know those products really well and what the whole point of the video was. So I didn't need a super duper outline on that one. I really could go off the cuff. That was just an idea I had this morning. I was like, oh, I keep forgetting to do this humidity video. I was like, I'm just going to film it today. So I threw it in on the end of. After I got everything else done. And, you know, I was feeling really good today about filming content, but tomorrow I might not be, or next week I might not be. And we all have those periods where we're not in the mood to film content. And when I'm in those moods, I will tend to film the bare minimum. I might just record a couple weeks of content. Like I said, this weekend, I was feeling great. I did all of March for this YouTube channel. I'm basically starting to get into April because I'm actually taking a month off and going to Scotland in April. So I want to have my content ready so I can just schedule it out and I can take a month off. I can take a month off. But my. My YouTube channel isn't going to fall apart because I'm still producing the content. And I have that in mind in my content schedule. I saw a post. I actually pulled it up over here. It was from Vanessa Lau, who's a very, very big YouTuber. She's got, I think, almost 700,000 subscribers. And. And she put a post up on February 22nd, and it says, as some of you may have already noticed, based on my lack of presence lately on social media, I've made the decision to go on an indefinite sabbatical, taking a long, extended break from work. So that was a really interesting one when I saw that post, because she is a big YouTuber. She's big on social media. I think she's got 280,000 followers here on Instagram. This is one of her Instagram announcements, and she just talks about how she felt like she was missing out on her relationships in life. She felt like, you know, this grind of, you know, getting up, making content, you know, she's starting to speak and she's like, you know, she, she's got all these courses and she, she goes, I stepped down from all my speaking engagements, including the ones that I had on my vision board since I started my business. And she said, you know, she felt like she was giving up. I, let's see, I just wanted to find the part where she talked about like family. But that was the reason why she was doing it because she felt like her life was like her YouTube life was taking off and it was running her in a way that she didn't want it to do that she had a different idea of what she wanted for her life and she's taking a step back. She stopped a lot of her programs. I mean she makes, she runs a multiple seven figure brands. A multiple seven figure brand. And here's this person, you know, we see these people and they're successful and they're supposed to have it all together, right? I'm sure she has a team she works with. You don't build a big brand like that and not have a team.

And maybe she doesn't. Maybe she has a small team and that's why she was feeling overwhelmed. I don't know the back end of her process. But you know, you see someone like that who's very successful and on social media and on YouTube, it looks one way, right? It looks like, oh, everything's great. It was like when Tom Brady got divorced. Everyone was like, see, not everything is, is, you know, rainbows and sunshines. You don't know what's going on behind the scenes when someone's successful. That's why I like going live a lot. I think I'm going to do that more on this channel because I want to share with you guys kind of the ups and downs of the journey. You know, we all have those points where like we're doing well, we want to share the good things, but I also want to share the bad things. And that's being a YouTube creator is, is tough. And you feel that grind because right now, you know, I'm making long form content. I'm trying to keep up and start starting to try and do shorts and reels and, and I may pull back on that. I might stop doing the shorts and reels one because it's just like I feel like I'm just making content to make content and, and that's not why I'm doing this. You know, I I don't want to go into the, the rat race thing of like, okay, well, I gotta make, you know, I gotta make two reels a week or two shorts a week. So now I gotta go and film 10 of those for the month of March. And when you start getting into that, it's when the job starts becoming a job again. It starts taking over your life. And I think a lot of people, they, they stop to do YouTube because they're trying to get away from that traditional life that's kind of pulling them and, and making them feel, you know, stressed and overwhelmed. And you know, a lot of us as entrepreneurs, you know, I left a job working for the pharmaceutical companies to work in pharmaceuticals. And I worked 40 hours a week. I would leave, you know, I'd have, I'd work like seven to three. So I'd get up early and I'd be home by 4 o' clock and guess what? 4 o' clock would hit and the rest of the day was mine to do whatever I wanted to. And as an entrepreneur, I filled that with, with work to start doing my own things. But we quit our jobs and then we work 80 hours a week. So then we quit our jobs just to have another job. And something I wanted to do with YouTube from the get go and why I wanted to share. You guys kind of like the day in the life today for me, it's like, yeah, I only worked four or five hours today, but I probably won't work at all tomorrow. Maybe I'll do a little bit of hopping on my community. But I really went and recorded a lot of content today knowing that I want to take some time off because I'm starting to feel a little bit of the wear down. I'm starting to feel a little bit of the overwhelm where I'm like, okay, I'm getting tired. And that's why we're going on vacation in April. So I'm trying to push myself through to the vacation, but I can feel you got to listen to your body. When you start feeling tired, it's okay to take a day off because as creative people, we get rejuvenated by taking time off. You know, I usually come up with some of my best ideas after I've taken a break or I've taken a vacation. So I, I think we need to. I'm going to turn the volume up on this microphone just a little bit here. I think as content creators, we need to schedule in those breaks. So something I started to do recently, you know, on days that Megan's not working. So today Megan's working in the hospital. I have the whole day to myself. It's nice and quiet here. But I've been trying to get myself to stop at about 5pm being like, okay, 5pm as entrepreneurs, we could work all day. We could work all day every day. And there's still a million things to do tomorrow. We all know that. And what I think we need to focus on is what do we want our workday to look like. Some of you have.

Other jobs that you're working. Okay. Some of you have other jobs that you're working and you're doing this YouTube thing on the side. All right. And it becomes a lot of work. And I think you need to schedule in the breaks of, you know, setting up those rules for yourself. When are you going to take a break to allow yourself to recharge, to get creative again? You know, I might not schedule breaks. That's why I might break. Yeah, that is, that's the truth. If you don't schedule breaks, at some point, you will break. You know, and I, you know, I'm a big fan of the Hustle. I'm a big fan of the grind, you know, rising grind. I mean, it's Sunday. I should be, you know, most people are relaxing on a Sunday. I'm, I'm working on a Sunday. But I also know, you know, my wife worked on Friday. My wife worked on Sunday at the hospital. She's probably going to be tired tomorrow, so maybe I want to spend some time with her tomorrow. Maybe we're going to go for a walk if it's going to be a nice day tomorrow. And there's nothing wrong with that. And I think as entrepreneurs, we feel really guilty about that downtime. I know I do. It's something I've been working on recently because I'm the type of entrepreneur. I literally am a workaholic. But I really enjoy work so much. But I feel it the more the mental exhaustion. Yeah. Claire is saying she was shocked to hear about Vanessa too. You know, it again, just goes to show you, we don't, you know, I don't know her business model. I know nothing. I'm glad she's taking some time to reflect. But, you know, she has a multi million dollar business and maybe she's cutting that down to a million. I don't know about you guys, but I'd be fine with a million dollars a year. Right. You know, if you're put a 1 in the chat if you'd love a million dollars a year. I'd be totally fine with a million dollars a year. And for her, you know, I don't know what her investments are. Maybe she has some other passive income streams that she's invested into so she can pull back, but, you know, maybe she can create a smaller team and have less work for herself and she's going to be much happier. So for her, she's weighing like, I can still make money. You know, let's just say, I don't know, let's throw a random number. Let's just say her business was $3 million a year. It's probably more knowing her. Let's, let's call it a $5 million a year business. And now she's cutting it down to a million dollars, but she's going to be happy as a, as a pig in shit, as they say. So, you know, those are tough things for people to walk away from. I worked with a coach, his name is Graham Cochran, and he had this recording revolution and he had this whole business and this whole thing, and he basically walked away from multiple six figures to do something else. And he's, he's done that multiple times and he's, he's recreating himself too. And you know, entrepreneurs, I think that's what we do, we recreat because we need to, we need to put our energy where we're passionate. Because if you're putting your energy where you're not passionate, it just, it becomes a grind. It really does become the literal sense of a grind. You feel like you're pushing up against this wall. And I think for a lot of us, we need to refocus and remember why we started doing what we're doing. You know, what was the goal? And for me, it's to be like, I can sleep in if I want to. Okay. Slept until 8 this morning. I usually get up slightly earlier. I know those of you who have kids, you're like, oh my God, I wish I could sleep till 8, you know, but for me, that's what I want for my life. If I'm tired and I'm feeling exhausted, if I want to sleep till 10 o' clock in the morning, I want to be able to allow myself to sleep until 10 o' clock in the morning and then have my breakfast. Okay. During, during the week when, when my wife's home, we'll get up, you know, we'll sit here at the coffee at the kitchen table and, and she'll read her little newspaper. Or sometimes we go into our reading room and we'll have Coffee and we'll read or we'll talk a little bit. And then usually around 10 o' clock, we both start getting to work. All right? So our day doesn't necessarily mean we're jumping right into work because that's what I did at my other job. You know, I would get up at 6:00 in the morning, I'd get ready, I'd get dressed and I get on the road because I had to be at work at 7. I'm not someone who has to put a lot of makeup on. I can, I can get ready for work in like 15 minutes. But, you know, I had to get up early. And if I didn't want to get up early, I still had to get up early. It didn't matter, you know, because it was my job and I had to do that. And I made a commitment that I was going to be there at 7 o', clock, I was going to work until 3 and then, and then I'd come home. Whereas here, you know, I tend to schedule a lot of my work kind of late morning and afternoon. This is my productivity. Time is late morning, kind of after 10 o' clock to around like 2, 3 o'. Clock. And then I start getting tired again. And that's when I'll do stuff like this. Because this is, this is not drain me. This actually, you know, being here and talking about business and, you know, talking to people about what it takes is stuff that actually energizes me. So this is a great time of day to do something like this. Even in the morning, when I went on my private community just for 15 minutes, I was like, well, what am I doing anyway? I'm just drinking coffee. And I sat there with my cup of coffee. I don't even know if I brushed my hair yet. I tease them all the time. Like, see, no other, you know, other guitar teacher is going to go live and show you guys, like, you know, what they look like when they just woke up. And I was just in a T shirt and, you know, I had a conversation with them and this, this is what I'm doing with you guys. We're just having a conversation. This is technically work. I'm working. I'm creating content, but I'm creating it in a way that has a relatively low stress level to it. When we get in front of the camera, you know, when I got my, my two memory cards, I got my two cameras and I gotta make sure, you know, the close up's perfect and I gotta make sure the wide angle's Perfect. And I gotta be. Did I have my hook? Did I have my outro? What video was the next call to action? Did I do this thing right? Like, when you're in that creative mode or you're trying to make, like, a real video for YouTube that is high quality versus doing something like this, where you're going live. And, I mean, I have an agenda. I wrote some notes here on an envelope. So many frizzy hair moments. Yeah, exactly. You know, you get to go live and you get to do different things. And I love doing stuff like this because it's low pressure. It's low pressure. If I screw up and I make a mistake, who cares? I have never been a proponent of wanting to be perfect. And I don't think your daily schedule has to be my daily schedule. You might be a morning person, especially if you have kids. I know a lot of people have kids. They'll get up even earlier than the kids get up so that they can have some quiet time to actually do work. When you are creating this YouTube lifestyle, it has to be your lifestyle. All right? Vanessa is going to create a lifestyle now that is perfect for her, and you need to create the lifestyle that's perfect for you. Okay? It's not mine. You know, you. I'll show you guys what I'm doing, and you might like it. You know, I get to go to Scotland for, you know, three weeks in April. Not a lot of people can do that. All right, Take three weeks off and go. Go around a country. You know, it takes time and it takes the right planning to do that. But if that's what you want, that's, you know, my. I sat down with my wife early in the year, and I said, hey, I want to take two big trips a year. Like, I want us to start enjoying life. I'm going to be 40 in April. That's our. So Scotland's my 40th birthday present. So we're gonna go to Scotland, and then for her birthday, we're gonna go to Iceland. So her birthday's in September, I'm in April, about six months apart. So it gives us a good time period to be like, great. We're going to do a trip here, and we're going to do a trip here. We're going to start experience. We don't have to be working all the time. We've worked really hard the last 15, 20 years. I mean, we've been together 13 years. 13 going on 14 years. And we've killed ourselves with the majority of that. So we're trying to pull back and say, okay, how can we make this meet our lifestyle? Just like her, she quit full time nursing. She quit full time nursing. She's working today, but that's her choice. She chose to work today. And there's a very big difference between choosing to do something and having to do something. So when I woke up this morning and I got to choose that I was going to make content, that I got to choose what I was going to do today and I could have done nothing today if I wanted to. I could be like, you know, I'm going to do nothing today, take it easy and I'll record tomorrow. But I knew she was working, so I chose today to work so that I can take tomorrow off, relax, refresh. I recorded a ton of content this weekend, so my brain's a little bit content fried and I really have don't have much more in me to record new content. But maybe next weekend I will, but I don't have to because I've batch recorded and now I have content for, you know, the next six to eight weeks for most stuff. So wanted to go live and share that with you guys. I hope you have a wonderful Sunday. I'll catch you guys soon. Have a good one, everyone. Bye. Bye.