On Monk Mode

2025.08.31

CXV

[Changing Seasons, One Year of Sacrifice, Monk Mode, Temporal Cruft, Flowing to the Basin, An Idyllic Location]

Thesis: Monk Mode works in doses but must be balanced out by living a full life.

[Changing Seasons]

For the last 13 months, I've been living with my parents.

Now, I am moving to a hacker house in Boston.

A lot of people are asking me why now & why Boston.

The answer to both questions is actually rooted in a third--why did I go home in the first place?

In short, my priority has been & is succeeding with BirdDog (yes, I have a concrete definition of what this means). While that is still my priority, we’ve crossed a few significant hurdles; now, being around people who are in the arena will be worth more than being alone.

[One Year of Sacrifice]

You can do a lot in one year.

When you start something, it feels like one year of sacrifice will be a lot. It fly by quickly, though, and the more you start winning, the less it feels like sacrifice.

Me & Jack & BirdDog came in one end of a year with:

• No product

• No customers

• No audience

• No money

• No credibility boosting investors

We’ve come out the other end of that year with:

• A very strong product

• Quite a few customers

• A phenomenal audience

• Money from revenue

• Credibility boosting clients

None of this is to say that we are done sacrificing; far from it! We're just getting started. But, a very very important thing has happened: we now have a crude money generating function.

HoursIn * SomeConstant - burn = $$$$$$

When you're starting a business, it is not at all clear that putting time and resources into one end will produce money out the other end.

Over countless iterations and effort, a function starts to emerge: if you do more of x, then you will get more money. This function is by no means fully stable or independent of Jack & I’s inputs yet, but it is definitely there.

Now, the game shifts away from discovering the function towards operating & improving the function.

Beyond the emergence of the function, you become the kind of person who can operate the function -

I'm very far from the man who was sitting in an apartment in Como trying to get an overcomplicated scraper to work, wondering if it was even possible for someone with no formal technical training to stand up a scalable software product. I'm also far from the man who was nervous asking somebody for a $100/mo subscription…

[Monk Mode]

There's a popular trope among 20 something year old men called "Monk Mode." It's this idea that you dissappear for some period of time and work on one core thing.

By most definitions, I just spent a year in monk mode. This is my honest review.

The most important thing to understand: it's unrealistic to think you can only code & take sales calls for 14 hours a day, everyday, for one year straight while levitating an inch above the ground the entire time. Maybe the outlier of the outliers can do this, but in a lot of regards, I am an outlier, and I certainly didn't do it.

What I did do was:

• Prioritize one thing (BirdDog's success)

• Remove a lot that would get in the way of this priority

On some rare Saturdays, I was able to get out more than 500 minutes of focused work. When I say focused work, I mean notifications off, me and the keyboard, just coding.

My average "strong" day would be between 330-400 minutes of such work, and my actual average day probably comes out close to 220 minutes (I have an analog record, I need to average it). This does not count breaks, sales calls, meetings, follow ups, low importance emails, time on linkedin, work that I would do while listening to a podcast, etc etc.

To contrast, most knowledge workers do something like ‘2.8 hours of productive tasks’ a day (not sure if that implies focused work).

Here was my life outside of this work & the hundreds of customer discovery & sales calls I took:

• Jiu Jitsu: I went <10 times--even if I put it on my calendar, when the time came around and I was in the middle of something even moderately consequential for BirdDog, I would choose BirdDog.

• Fitness: I made time to maintain a nice level of fitness--it is really incredible what 100 pushups, 100 squats, and 10-20 minutes of stretching a day can do for you. As I discovered last weekend in Pennsylvania with some friends, by biking & some running & taking calls with a weighted vest, I've maintained a 'fair' level of cardio, but certainly not an impressive one.

• Outside: I walk outside briefly every morning and recently have been spending a couple of hours a day outside. I wish I would've spent more time doing this throughout the year.

• TV: I watched TV, but not a lot--it took me from March to the start of August to watch all 73 hours of Mad Men.

• Video Games: I didn't play them, except the one time that I spent two hours cranking out 50 diamonds, over a hundred bars of iron, a sugar cane & wheat farm, an enchanting room, sheep & cow pens for my little cousin in Minecraft (yes, I’m a 24 year old man bragging about my Minecraft abilities).

• Travel: I spent ~45 days away from home total, all domestic. Still worked during travel. Over one year, this is low for me, but high for others.

• Dating: I went on 3 or 4 dates, and had a dating profile active just under half the time.

• Reading: Happened in spurts. Averages to maybe 15 min / day.

• Vices: I had maybe 25 drinks total (30% of which were on one fateful night at Gyu-Kaku in Chicago), didn't do drugs, and completely abstained from a common young adult male vice, but the latter's not new.

• Food & Coffee: I had prodigious amounts of caffeine and had to have eaten close to or in excess of 2000 eggs (6 a day, most days).

• Friends: I didn't spend much time with friends, except when traveling. I did regularly call a few of my closest friends, and periodically caught up with others.

• Jack: I spent a ton of time on the phone with my co founder, Jack, some about business, some not (such things blend together).

• Family: I spent a decent amount of time helping my family with tasks and playing with Bobbi the Cat, all of who I will miss.

By some standards, you could call my year Austere. By other standards, it's probably just reasonable or average or even simply table stakes for what I’m trying to do.

[Temporal Cruft]

The most important part of my so called monk mode was not what I did or didn’t do in my free time, but how much I prioritized the mission and made sure I got out quality work nearly everyday (I think there were only 2 days in which I truly did 'nothing' for BirdDog).

This brings us to the issue with sustaining something like Monk Mode indefinitely: when you deprioritize everything outside of work, it becomes too easy to fill white space with cruft.

If you really are willing to give up everything for your business or project, you pay less attention to the value of your inputs and start doing busy work. Some tricky tradeoffs compound this:

• If you really want to respond to customers in 15 minutes or resolve the issue in an hour, you kind of have to check email / slack every 15 minutes

• It’s hard to “be active” on the social media you’re generating business from without developing an addiction (it is designed to hack your brain!)

All of this is without mentioning how since you're always online, it’s easy to open something like Instagram and look at memes or watch youtube shorts. After all, if you're going to be working all day, what's a 10 minute look here and there?

That's the crux of the issue--you're not ever REALLY going to work all the time, and if you think you will, it counterintuitively becomes easier to waste time. You can work a lot, but if you're not actively setting at least some boundaries, you'll be consumed and burnt out by the Sisyphean treadmill of being chronically online rather than doing needle moving, compounding task.

In some ways, having other meaningful things you care about can actually make you more productive. And, for my disposition and age, a hacker house in a city is a good place to find meaningful things to care about while actually accelerating BirdDog.

[Flowing to the Basin]

You understand why I did what I did, and you understand why the season is changing--but why am I going to a hacker house in particular?

A hacker house is a "sink" or “basin” for people like me: some of us flow there.

When starting a company, you are not necessarily around people who are doing what you are doing. This contrasts working as a skilled laborer for a real company (pharmacy, swe, sales, pipefitting, nursing, plumbing, law), where you are constantly interacting with peers & people who are ahead of you. This helps you learn faster.

I have Jack, who is a peer in some ways and ahead of me in others, but barring some advisors I meet with periodically, I don't have anyone I regularly interact with who is technically a peer or ahead of me. That’s not a ton of surface area for learning from others!

So, the question becomes, how do I go find a high density of people who are also facing similar challenges, both technically and in the business sense?

I could stay in Muskegon and seek them out, but since the density & absolute number are both low compared to many other places, this would take quite a bit of energy.

And, even then, if I did find these people, I would have to keep applying energy to see them regularly.

On the other hand, if I were to not only move to a place where the density and absolute number of such people was higher, but also put myself physically in a co living space with a good number of them, then the activation energy to learn from them drops to near zero. I will be cooking eggs with people who are building impressive technology and creating businesses around it, and I will see them evolve and learn everyday, too.

I will more easily be able to replace the temporal cruft above with time spent with people I can learn from and build meaningful relationships with.

On top of that, by virtue of being in a city, it will be easier to fill my life with adventures & romance, and I will make it a point to more regularly walk to a bjj gym.

[An Idyllic Location]

But why Boston?

For one, there really aren't many cities that have a hacker house and are at least as good as Boston in terms of talent density, absolute number of cracked people, and number of potential clients.

New York and SF are both at least as good or better in these regards. (I've never found what I'm looking for in Chicago hacker house wise).

Boston beats SF in that Boston is less homogenous, both career & intellectually wise, so I will have much less competition in Boston in a lot of ways (there will certainly be fewer founders trying to sell a b2b saas to sales teams!). The towering spires of NY are a bit claustrophobic for me; I've been told I'd love Brooklyn (the gentrified part) but have yet to make it out there.

And, at the end of the day, on a very human level I just like Boston, particularly Cambridge. So far, I've had good experiences there. I think part of my preference comes from the fact that it reminds me a bit of Ann Arbor, which I liked a lot. The walkability is nice.

If you liked this post, give it a subscribe… I’ve been here for the last 115 Sundays and plan on sticking around!

So, now you know what I did, why I did it, what I’m doing next, and why I’m doing it.

Should you do “Monk Mode”?

You know the answer to your question, not me.

Live Deeply,