The only way to build something on the side without ruining everything else
4 min read · 858 words ·
It was a Sunday evening in January. I'd been at my laptop since about half two, telling myself I'd be done by four. By six I was still there, half-watching the clock, half-writing something that probably needed another pass anyway. My partner was in the other room. I could hear the television. I missed dinner.
That's not a dramatic story. Nobody was harmed. But it was a small, clear signal that I was doing this wrong.
The hustle-harder crowd will tell you something different
There's a version of the side-project story that goes like this: get up at five, work until seven, do your day job, work again from ten until midnight, repeat until you've built something worth having. The people who promote that model aren't lying about what they did. But they're often missing context — they were younger, or they didn't have kids, or they could afford to be mentally absent for two years because nobody was depending on their presence. Or, frankly, they burned out and didn't include that chapter.
I'm a Client Director at Computacenter. It's a proper job — a demanding, genuinely good one — and it takes most of my energy on most days. That's not a complaint. I like the work, I'm good at it, and it funds the life I have now while I build the one I want later. But it means the bandwidth available for anything else is real and finite: roughly four to seven hours a week. That's it. That's the budget.
If I tried to hustle around that, I'd be exhausted and absent and probably not building anything very good anyway, because tired people make mediocre decisions. The maths don't work.
What I built instead
A year or so ago I started designing something different. The idea was simple enough: if I only have a few hours a week, those hours can't go on repetitive tasks. They have to go on thinking, deciding, and directing. Everything else — content generation, review, scheduling, publishing, analytics — has to run without me.
The result is an automation system I call Zo.E. Ten workflows, built in n8n, connected to Telegram so I can approve or redirect things from my phone without sitting at a desk. It drafts content, checks it against the brand, queues it, publishes it, tracks what's working, and sends me a weekly summary. When it's running properly, it runs whether I'm at it or not.
That's not lazy. That's the point.
The system exists specifically so that I don't have to choose between building Nunlimited and being present in the rest of my life. The goal — a £250k-a-year portfolio profit — is a future-freedom target, not a justification for present-day grind. If the grind is the price of admission, the thing you're building isn't freedom. It's just a different kind of cage.
Protecting the off-hours isn't optional
There are times when I will not work on this. Dinner. The kids' stuff. Evenings when I just want to sit down and not think about workflows. Weekend mornings, mostly. Those are not negotiable, and they don't move because an automation has broken or because I've had a good content idea.
If something breaks during a protected window, it stays broken. Nothing in a content business is so urgent it can't wait until Tuesday. The main risk of convincing yourself otherwise is that you train yourself to be always on — which means you're never fully anywhere.
The other thing that matters is being straight with the people around you about what you're doing and why. Not in a big pitch — just plainly. "I'm working on this because I want us to have more options in five years. It needs about two hours on a Tuesday night. That's the ask." When people understand the purpose, and can see it's actually bounded, they tend to be on board. What wears people down isn't the time — it's the uncertainty. Not knowing when it ends, or whether it's ever going to amount to anything.
The honest version of success here
I want to be direct about something, because I think it often gets glossed over in content like this: the goal isn't just a number. A healthy revenue target means nothing if the cost of reaching it is two years of being half-present in your own life. The point of building systems that run without you isn't to make you feel clever. It's so you can actually be somewhere else — at dinner, on the weekend, on a walk — without the guilt of knowing there's a backlog of tasks waiting.
That's the actual goal. Not passive income as a concept. Not the feeling of being an entrepreneur. A life where the work is contained, the systems carry the weight, and you're present when you're meant to be present.
It's achievable. But only if you design it that way from the start — not as an afterthought once you've already burned through the goodwill of everyone around you.
Ta,
James
Founder | Nunlimited
