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By Little Mummy, May 5, 2010 12:09 am

So in my last post I introduced the concept of Lifestyle Design, a concept introduced to me by Tim Ferriss in The 4 Hour Workweek.

1. Decide what your priorities are.

What are your priorities? Family, money, time, work, freedom.

For me it’s family and freedom. I want my family to be happy and I want a certain amount of freedom. I have a chronic illness and some days I can be quite unwell, I don’t want to feel like I have to drag myself to a cube for eight hours when I feel like that. I also don’t want to rely on my husband for support which is why I’m retraining by getting a degree at uni and building my own income streams. A 9-5 job will always be there as a back up if things don’t work out.

Don’t let the ‘norm’ become your default if it doesn’t fit in with your plan.

2. Decide what you want to achieve in your life

Do you want to travel the world, become a stay at home mum, run a successful business, or build your own home?

I’ve been a stay at home mum but I want to continue to be able to pick Erin up from school and spend holidays with her. I’d also like to travel quite a bit. I enjoy the challenge of making money but I’m not bothered about being rich or owning stuff.

3. Make a Plan

Businesses make plans all the time so why not make a plan for the business of living. Get a pen and paper and roughly right down how you’d like your life to go, what you’d like to do, where you’d like to go, what you’d like to own.

For me it was all about time and freedom. I have two areas that I’ll need money for and they are travel and parenting. I have a fairly long list of places I’d like to travel and one major trip that will cost quite a bit. I’d like to be able to help Erin out here and there.

Figuring out how much you need to earn to achieve your goals was an important step for me and made me realise that neither myself nor my husband need to be shackled to a job we hate. We’re truly happy at the moment and we’re living off one average wage and a side income from myself. We both feel that we have a good work/life balance and spend lots of time together as a family. If I returned to work full time this definitely wouldn’t be the case.

4. Earn to live, or do something you’d do anyway regardless of money

Either earn the money you need (see your plan) in the least amount of time possible, or do something you love that you would do for nothing anyway.

I’m choosing the second option at the moment but if I fail to reach my financial goal then I’ll revert to the first option. I don’t see myself working 40 hours a week again, I’d rather take on temporary or contract work if I end up pursuing the first option.

Again, don’t revert to the default, look for the next best option for you. It’s not all or nothing, it’s about getting as close as you can to your ideal scenario.

5. Don’t wait for retirement, don’t wait for tomorrow

Tim Ferriss pushed the idea of ‘mini-retirements’, his thinking was why spend 40 years knocking your pan in to spend 15 years not doing much because you’re too old. His idea was to have short work bursts interspersed with mini-retirements. Basically sabbaticals but ramped up a bit

I resonate with this idea a lot. I don’t care much for retiring, I’d rather continue to earn money (in whatever way) and enjoy the whole of my life rather than wait for some magic age that I may never see.

So there’s my take on lifestyle design and how I’ve made it relate to my own life, and I definitely feel as though I’m beginning to reap the rewards.

Have you done something similar? Will you be giving lifestyle design a go?

Comments (2)

By Little Mummy, May 3, 2010 6:16 am

Do you ever feel overwhelmed?

Do you feel like you’re ‘doing it all’ rather than ‘having it all’?

Do you feel like you life is passing you by and you spend most of your time doing stuff you’d rather not be doing?

Lifestyle Design could be the answer.

The term ‘Lifestyle Design’ was coined by Timothy Ferriss in his book The 4-hour work week which became an online phenomena a couple of years back. I’ve read the book and although many of the ideas aren’t workable for parents (like becoming location free) there are many ideas that we could all gain from exploring. As with all ‘out there’ ideas you need to keep an open mind and take the bits you think you can apply to your own life that will be a benefit.

What is Lifestyle Design?

Lifestyle Design is the designing of one’s life to make it more authentic, that is more in keeping with your true goals and passions in life. For Timothy and his followers this relates to personal growth opportunities, adventure, leisure and the ability to be location free ie. their income is either passive or their work is based online enabling them to travel the world with their laptop. Not ideal or even a goal for many of us but I think we’d all like a bit more freedom, no?

All sounds a bit ‘buzzy’ and ‘blue sky thinking’? Well don’t write the idea of just yet because I think we can all take something from this idea of Lifestyle Design.

What can we take from Lifestyle Design

At it’s core the idea of Lifestyle Design is to design a life that prioritises the priorities. For many of us the main part of our existence is the pursuit of earning money, I would argue that many of us do so with no fixed idea of how much we need to earn or no specific end goals, we simply go to work earn money and try to get promoted to earn more money. Have many of us actually sat down and worked out a life plan and how much we actually need to acheive that plan? Probably not, I hadn’t until recently.

In his book Timothy says

People don’t want to be millionaires—they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy

Timothy goes on to show you that you can live the life you want on much less than you think.

In my next post I’ll discuss how lifestyle design has helped me move forward with my own goals, freed me of the need to earn and buy and generally made me much happier.

Until then here’s a link to Tim’s book – The 4 Hour Workweek – in case you’re interested, as I said it focuses predominantly on people who want to radically overhaul their lives, but it’s all relative and I think everyone can take a little something from the ideas he talks about.

Hope this post doesn’t sound too preachy, I just think there’s something in what Timothy teaches and it’s definitely encouraged me to take a different view that I think might be of benefit to some other people in the same boat as myself (stay at home mum at a crossroads wondering what the hell to do next!)