Name: productive routine⏱️managing 9-5 tech job + YouTube⁉️ (ft.@JeffSu @ Google)
Uploaded: 2025-06-06T08:35:14.000Z
Duration: 11 min 46 s
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Adverbs of degree

If you really want to do something, you will find the time to do it.

The second conditional

I'm not sure if you did that on purpose, Lillian.

I call it the Core Workflow, C-O-R-E, Core.

Hi, welcome back to Coffee Chat with Lillian.

So the biggest question I always get is, Lillian, so you have your 9-5, how do you have the time to do your YouTube and everything else?

And I have learned so much throughout the journey and I want to share two key mindsets for me.

The first one is that, okay, you have your 9-5, but also you have your 5-9.

So the second mindset for me is to think before I do.

Basically, I use the scatter time, like during the commute, in the elevator, or even by taking a shower to brainstorm and think.

Then when it comes to me opening my laptop, I'm only focused on execution.

Thinking and brainstorming takes the most amount of time and effort versus execution is like, you just get really deep in the focus mode of executing it and finishing those tasks.

Second section is my 5-9 and how I produce all the content and everything else that I do.

I actually use the meeting time to brainstorm together with them.

And that way we do the thinking in the meeting versus like a status update.

When I am in meetings, I always have a Google Doc open and I'm like presenting my note and live typing the note.

That way it allows the other person to be really engaged in the conversation, to brainstorm, and we can like already have specific next steps for us to work on and to execute on.

After the meetings, we only have to reference all of our meeting notes and just execute, execute, execute.

The other secret tip I have is at your job, you have the luxury of leveraging resources and using existing resources that's around you.

For instance, if you were to write a code to run an analysis from scratch, that probably takes a lot of the heavy lifting.

So in the meeting, I will ask questions like, hey, like, have you seen similar analysis being done by other regions or other teams that we can, you know, take inspirations from?

And usually when we take inspiration, we will let the other teams know like, hey, like we love this analysis.

Is there anything we can build off of it?

I think the point is like leverage resources to make your job more efficient.

In terms of my five to nine, with YouTube, content creation, podcast and everything, I visualize all of my content creation like an open air.

An open air is where you have unlimited ideas, which is the hard part because when you don't have structure, that's when you can, because you can go so many ways, then who are you at the other day?

And the way I get closer to knowing who I am is through journaling and diary.

So you read my journals, it's a lot of like little things I've noticed about me.

For instance, like I'm someone who is very quiet in meetings, but I always make sure when I say something, I make it very impactful.

When I film, I try to put all the stuff I need to film in one or two days because even though you guys are looking at a perfect, looking million with like a perfect backdrop, but there's a lot of planning that goes behind it.

Which location, what day, what outfit, doing the makeup, doing my hair, make sure the lighting is right, borrowing the tripod.

If you look behind the scene, like you see right now, like behind the camera, there's a lot that goes on there.

So with that, I wanted to introduce someone who I really, really admire.

This person also works at 9to5 in tech, similar to me, but this person has also built a YouTube channel that is very successful.

He recently just crossed 1 million subscribers and I wanted to introduce you to you guys and learn from how he does it all.

Jeff is a product marketing manager at Google, but he also has a YouTube channel and has turned it into a content business, but you wanna quickly introduce yourself.

I'm currently a full-time product marketing manager at Google, but funny story, a lot of my colleagues, when they refer to me, introduce me, they're like, oh, this is a full-time YouTuber and part-time Googler.

But can you tell us a little bit about why and when you started your YouTube?

So I started YouTube back in 2020, but the context as to why I started goes back to when I was in college.

So when I was in college, you were probably in kindergarten.

Back in the day, there weren't that many good job search advice online.

The job search advice back then were very subjective.

I remember my first ever video was uploaded on June 3rd, 2020.

How long have you been doing YouTube now?

But you also like turned your YouTube and your content into a full-on business, right?

Do you feel like you're like a founder now or like an owner's mindset?

Since Googlers are watching this, of course not.

How could you even ask that question early on?

But no, I don't think it's a founder story.

It's more like I basically like to teach.

And number two, I wanted to make the job search process easier.

And I thought YouTube would just be the easiest way to do that.

Yeah, I think that's something that I find really similar between us.

And teaching not as in just like teaching for the sake of like sharing knowledge, but it's like, how can I teach something in the simplest way possible for the audience to get it in the shortest amount of time?

I'm curious, have you ever run workshops in Spotify for your colleagues?

I think as a business analyst, I do that on a daily basis of helping people think better, helping people think faster, helping people break down the ambiguous business questions.

So the reason I ask is at Google, there's this unofficial program, like G2G, Googler to Googler, where you can, anyone can raise their hand and be like, I have something to share.

I did that a couple of times and really enjoyed it.

So aside from that, cause I also get a lot of inspiration from my job.

How did you juggle between your nine to five job and then doing a full-time content?

When I started in 2020, and I'd love to hear your experience too.

I struggled quite a bit to balance both because when I first joined Google, I told myself, I really appreciate this opportunity.

But after I started uploading YouTube videos, I gave myself a target.

I would upload one video every week for two years.

And the reason for that is because like my then mentor and now friend Ali Abdaal, his basic pitch was, if you upload a video every week for two years, your life will change.

But it was really hard to balance both because basically I didn't have any free time outside of work or on the weekends.

That's, I can relate to that because when I launched my course, it was like a 24 seven thing.

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productive routine⏱️managing 9-5 tech job + YouTube⁉️ (ft.@JeffSu @ Google)

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