I talk about a typical week and how semi-retirement is treating me.

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00:00 Introduction and Outdoor Recording Challenges
00:52 When to Quit Blogging and Projects
01:50 Doug’s Current Work and Lifestyle
03:52 Daily Routine and Productivity
07:09 Interview Preferences and Podcasting
14:34 Fitness, Health, and Cooking
18:59 Hobbies and Personal Interests
22:51 Financial Independence and Early Retirement
31:55 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. I’m Doug Cunnington, and today I’m trying to record outside. There’s, uh, dogs barking.

There’s crickets making noise. The sun could give me a hard time. The audio might not even be recording, but we’re gonna do our best I was about to make notes and then I thought, uh, fuck it. We’ll just go for it, you know? So we’re gonna go for it today.

The topic will be something that, uh, Lauren Hunter put a seed into my head, and we were talking a couple weeks ago about when to. Quit blogging or stop projects and that sort of thing, which is a hard thing to figure out. There’s sunk costs. There’s the fact that sometimes if you wanna work on something, it takes a long time before you get traction.

There’s plenty of examples out there, but there’s other times where maybe you should quit and you are actually wasting your time and you should move on to something else. Really hard to tell. It’s extremely hard to tell. So one thing in the conversation, Lauren mentioned a, actually it was before we started recording, and she maybe was like, ah, you know, how much time do you spend working?

And like, what do you do? And I’m like, I’m in a really weird spot. I don’t work that much right now.

And the thing is with the Doug Show and the Niche Site project and all that kind of, uh, sort of content. Hm. You know, we were talking about side hustles. We’re talking about like how to earn money online and that sort of thing.

And I’m not really testing that stuff out anymore. There’s some dog around here, uh, that. The people must have locked the dog outside and it just wants to be with his family or something like that. So I apologize for that. Georgie’s hanging out right behind me. She’s just chilling. She may come up closer in a few minutes.

The people that are just listening, you won’t obviously see this, but Georgie’s in the, in the frame here and, uh, she likes to play, but she just. She’s taking a little rest right now. She has, she’s like, uh, laying down, but she has a Frisbee, like laying across her, uh, arms or legs, I guess their legs, but it’s her front leg, so I consider them arms.

All right, so Lauren was like, Hey, how much time do you spend working? And I was like, I don’t spend that much time working. Um, I’ve whittled things down and my other podcast is Mile Hi-Fi, and it’s about early retirement. My wife retired about 18 months ago, and I have been working for myself for. About a decade.

I didn’t even celebrate my, like, layoff day. I kind of forgot about it. I, it’s so far from, it’s removed from my, like, daily thinking. I don’t even think about the corporate job anymore. I don’t do that much work, and it’s really refined down to the work that I want to do most of the time.

Now, you can’t get away from admin all the time, but I have stopped replying to so many emails. If I don’t wanna write an email newsletter that week, I don’t do it. If I want to, then I’ll go for it. I’ll write a few that week.

So I’ll describe. Kind of what I’m working on, kind of how like a week looks for me.

And I’ll also talk about, um, the fact that some people were probably nervous, like, well, if I, if I wasn’t working on something, then what do I do with my time? And I’ve chatted with at least dozens of retired people that are young, say in their thirties or forties or early fifties. Very few people are bored, so I’ll give you a little info on that.

But more importantly, I mean a lot of people wanna get to a spot where like work is optional, and that is where I have arrived. So the work that I’m doing is optional. I don’t have to do it, and it’s. You know, it’s good to work on things and to be productive and creative, and I get that part of it, but it’s far less than whatever I expected.

And again, I talk to people and I’m like, ah, yeah, my wife retired. And they’re like, I just don’t know what, uh, that’s crazy. I would be so bored. Like, I like to be productive. And I think I would’ve thought that back in the day. But I don’t think it anymore. And I don’t, I don’t do that much work, and I can tell you it’s fucking awesome.

I love it. It’s not for everybody, but it works for me. So the bigger piece that I’ll cover today is just like what I did while I was working on my side hustles when I had a full, full-time gig, and it enabled us to have a work optional. Um, lifestyle. Some people would want to travel. Some people wanna work on their pet projects and, um, maybe like start the business that they actually wanna work on that doesn’t have to earn as much money.

That said, I’m just gonna tell you stories. This is not financial or legal advice in any capacity. I’m just gonna tell you what I did and I’m not prescribing this to anyone. And it’s not financial advice to be explicit. It’s not financial advice in any way. And a lot of it’s simple. I’m not gonna even mention anything super specific.

But anyway, typical week, I’m probably working a, I don’t know, three or four days. And on those days I’m probably working 45 minutes to say four hours or so. And the biggest chunks are when I’m actually like doing an interview and I’ll pause here ’cause there’s a plane flying overhead.

It’s often nice outside, but if it’s not windy, there’s like other, other noise, but it’s peaceful out here, at least with the headphones on and I can’t hear the dog yiping back there. the days where I work longer, it’s usually like an hour or an hour and a half of like an interview. So that’s like the biggest chunk, and that actually goes by very quickly because it uh, it’s fun.

And that’s the thing, I enjoy doing the interviews. It’s a conversation I get to learn about someone. Half the time I’m talking to a friend of mine, and we’re able to go into like a, a deeper conversation that you wouldn’t normally have. Let’s say I’m hiking with a group of people or it’s at a happy hour and there’s a lot of people around, maybe I don’t ask.

As many questions and we don’t have the same kind of conversation. It’s different of course, when it’s for a podcast, but essentially I’m chatting with people that I wanna chat with and there was a time, and I’ve uh, complained about this in the past, where I would actually like interview people that had books coming out or I was interviewing people where it looked like it could be an interesting opportunity for me to make the connection.

I’ve since learned that. I don’t enjoy that and it’s not good for me to make the connection, and it’s better for me to not do those interviews. And a lot of times these will come in. And it, it doesn’t have to be someone promoting a book. They could be just trying to get out there on podcast. So they have a promotion company working for ’em and they send an email and they’re like, um, Joe Blow is a CEO.

He pulled himself up by. Bootstraps and he’s been able to become a multimillionaire and he’s a CEO and it would be great for your audience to chat with him ’cause he has all these great fucking stories and he has a big email newsletter and social following and all this stuff. And he’s gonna promote it to his audience of.

193,000 people, and I did a few of those and then realized, oh, these motherfuckers don’t bring any of their audience. They just want to get either links or in front of my audience, and I don’t care about their story. And they’re a dime a fucking dozen. I, I don’t give a shit. I don’t wanna talk to ’em. I now mark those as spam and I probably have a bunch of, um.

Domains and emails where I just don’t get emails from ’em anymore. ’cause they kept sending me all this shit. I’m like, remove me from your list. And if it’s someone really good, they’re probably going to come in through like a channel that I’ll accept, which is typically like a warm introduction or if I meet someone in person.

So I recently did an interview. Uh, for my other podcast, but I met him at a live event. I talked to him, hung out with him for, uh, a couple hours or whatever, and they were passing through town and I was like, great, come to the studio. We’ll do an interview. You guys have a cool story, so we’ll talk about it.

And that worked out great. But typically if I get an email, cold email, I’m not, uh, I’m not even replying back these days. I used to say, ah, it’s not a good fit, whatever. But now. I tell, I, I just mark it as spam and move on with my I do interviews. There’s a little overhead, and if you’ve been following this podcast for a while, you know that I have somewhat struggled with what I was gonna cover in the last, say, six months or so, because I’m not trying to start new side hustles. I’m not. Doing this stuff that people might be interested in, in the same way.

I’m still interviewing some people here and there, but I’m mostly just, I’m just talking about stuff. Right?