Essentially lifestyle design boils down to how effectively you use your time, and the emotions you get from spending that time.

photo by nationalrural

I was sitting in on a mastermind call this week, and the moderator said something that truly clicked with me, and will hopefully click for the rest all of you,

I am about to spend life. Is my life worth spending on “this.”

Now look at what you are doing right now – you could be reading posts, or checking your Twitter account, writing a report, spending time with your family or friends, playing video games, traveling, checking email – you get my point. Now reread the sentence above. Is my life worth spending on this?
Let’s do a quick exercise. Count to 10.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

That is 10 seconds you can never get back. Ten seconds you could have spent getting on the treadmill, writing a post, meeting a new contact, sitting on the couch – you get it now right?

There are countless programs that teach time management and I bet in your 9-5 you were spoon fed a program that was to work with all the employees at the company. At your new freedom business, or internet lifestyle you have been tossed ideas of how to spend your time from outsourcing to inbox zero to GTD.

It Doesn’t Matter

I’ve read them all, taken online classes and attended countless seminars and they have all lead me back to the same place. That place is my Firefox open with tons of tabs, GMail open so I see my inbox numbers grow, Tweetdeck chirping every 30 seconds and a phone that likes to buzz every few minutes.

We all fall back on the systems that are familiar to us. We keep the email open to see new orders come in, or client requests. We hope that a cool Tweet pops up that takes us to a new blog or person. We open links in new tabs with the hopes of reading them in a few minutes and two days later discover that they are still there and if I close it I may never find it again. We bookmark, Stumble and Digg with tags that are great in intention, but when we need that one post for reference for something we are writing we are back in Google doing countless searches for keywords that make no sense to any human and gives webmasters that Tweet that says, “someone just found my site using the keyword ‘how to make love to twitter with a butter knife + mashable + orlando in 2009′.”

Damn that ADD

There’s only about 4.5 million people with ADHD in the U.S. (study from 2006). So what’s the problem with the rest of us?
Information overload is a start. How many blogs are in your RSS Reader? How many people’s Tweets do you look at? How many emails do you get everyday?

Processing this information is crucial to not only your growth, but also to get a hold of your life and come to peace. I don’t think minimalism is the answer. I think it lies in values and priorities. In order to be truly happy and live your ideal lifestyle, you need to do things that align with your values. If you value making money, you need to quit being a social media whore and start getting business. If you value family, what can you do to make every moment in your life more valuable for your family?

The Right Solution For You

As someone who has gone through many programs I have decided that there is no cut and paste system that is going to work for me, but I know a few things that can get people to notice when they are not spending their life to their fullest.

Write down when you catch yourself not doing something you care about. I make little check marks on a scrap piece of paper every time I catch myself web surfing, daydreaming or checking email excessively. This will get you to think of your actions more carefully.

Reward yourself. You need you time and that needs to be implemented into your day. Whether its an hour chunk or a few 15 minute breaks, be sure to give yourself time to relax and entertain your brain.

Get something important done before lunch. Tim Ferriss says to do it as the first thing in your day, but I say give it till lunch. When you eat you will feel more accomplished and will be excited to get back to whatever it is you spend your time doing.

Write important things down and post at your desk. This really changed the way I have done things. I have a personal statement and business vision printed at my desk and I glance at it constantly. What it does is look me in the mirror and ask if what I am doing aligns with these statements and wil progress me closer towards a goal or purpose. It works freakishly good.

Tell people your goals. When you tell people your goals, they are prone to ask you about them in conversation. When they ask about a project you told them about and 3 weeks go by, you should have made some progress right? If not, they are going to call you off and not take your idea seriously. That’s powerful. Show them you mean it and if you work hard you will have something to report.

How Do You Manage Your Time

Everyone has different ideas and views and I want to know what works for you. Do you have an application or a technique that can benefit people? Let us know in the comments. When building a business, learning from the wins and losses of others is one of the best things you can do, so please let’s share and help each other grow.

Greg is helping young people find their passion and grow their brand in the new Rock Star Business Series. Sign-up or say hey to Greg on Twitter.

We all make mistakes. Some bigger than others, but what constantly shines as more important than the mistake, is how you handle it.

I’m roughly 60ish days into lifestyle design and somewhere in the last two weeks I’ve gotten completely stuck. I see now why everyone isn’t breaking free from work, creating new products, living their dreams and generating income. I think it’s because we’re victim to our habits and we get lost in managing this thing called life. It’s also challenging, but that’s really not it. It’s time to get unstuck. The “Elimination” stage of lifestyle design testing is one that takes some serious mental re-training. Looking into our dreams as realities is fun (stage 1), understanding misconceptions about being productive is eye opening (stage 1), but transforming how you operate takes work (stage 2). Sure, I’d like to skip ahead and just focus on income streams (of quality), but it just wouldn’t be worth it if all I end up doing is working more like most business owners.

So somehow I’ve managed to fall back into the illusion of multitasking, doing small repetitive tasks myself, and checking my e-mail and phone constantly. I’ve wasted time on useless information and generally fallen back into drone behavior. I know better, I wrote how to conquer these things, but life management creep is a sneaky bastard. All the sudden I was moving at a snails pace, but because it was comfortable, because I kept thinking I’d catch up, I stayed there.

Have you ever been caught in a rut…thinking you’ll get out as soon as you catch up, as soon this project is done, or you’ve saved “this” much money. I don’t blame you, we’ve been conditioned to be cogs in the system, but there’s a way out, and it starts in your mind where you can’t be stopped. Start (or restart) now, here’s what’s working for me.

Getting Unstuck

Take a breather…

It’s obviously apparent and needs no scientific research to see that operating at 100% for 2 hours is better than operating at %30 for 6. if you’ve lost your focus, you’re not working at capacity. Go do something you love and really allow your mind some freedom. Come back and zero in.

Perspective re-loading

Keep your vision clear…I want to look back fully on this project when i’m making X a month in passive income, living out my dreams, helping others, and thinking differently about life…and say…this…this is a chronicle of how I did it. a clear vision of your goal helps you see the next steps. Use a tool like mindmeister.com to map out where you are or go back to a book or writing that allows you to step outside yourself and see what’s going on. Perspective is everything, and when you have it, your path becomes clear. I mapped out the impact life design has had on me in mindmeister and reviewed this blog to get me back on track. I’ve regained my dreamlines, re-read my wrong assumptions about the world, and look forward with singular focus to the next stages of testing, err I mean freedom! (automating, outsourcing, and the fabled income generation)

click to enlarge

Efficiency re-training

Re-enter the world of efficiency, limited information, batching tasks, singular focus and 80/20ing the crap out of life (past post on processes here). These practices remind me of Pavlov’s dog. I can train myself to see a more efficient path, just like I’ve lazily trained myself to waste hours organizing blogs, opening 12 things at once, going to the store 3 times because I didn’t think the first time, or watching TV I don’t even like, etc. etc. Approach tasks with the mindset to build yourself out of the process, it forces you to think differently, and more importantly I’m realizing, starts to train an automating / outsourcing thought process. More on that later. Besides, it’s now proven, multitaskers get less done! (Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows) Practice makes an impact, set reminders, close your e-mail, go on a media fast. Do less and you’ll do more.

Moving Past Mistakes

If you’ve realized your moving slowly lately, try some of the tactics here. They don’t have to be for “designing your life”, the principles apply to fitness, relationships, work…living in general. Have some methods of your own? Do share.

Further reading I found to help along the way…

22 Inspiration Quotes to get you moving (read time 3 minute)

How to Stop Procrastinating and Start Living the Life You Want – you need to learn to minimize procrastination so you can work toward things that matter, things that directly relate to your goals. (read time 7 minutes)

A Brief Guide to World Domination – Probably the single most effective thing you can read if you are unmotivated and unproductive. (read time 1 hour)

Abolishing the Someday Mindset – “if you don’t set goals the end result is simple: you fail.” (read time 4 minutes)

Riding on the words of my last post and interest from a few readers I thought I’d take the time and give a fairly detailed account of how I’ve actually used the previously mentioned lifestyle design tactics (found here) to free hours of time at my job and make myself extremely valuable. The response received from my co-workers and boss were not what I expected. It seems odd because the point of learning these tactics is to eventually build yourself out of a 9-5 all together, but the fact is, the singular focus and effective productivity methods will down right make you a better, more valuable, impactful employee (for yourself too). Consider it practice. It’s the complete opposite of what I thought would happen and a perfect stage setter for preparing yourself to create income on your own terms. (Note: Nowhere do I recommend ditching your work responsibilities, in fact the opposite are what so far seem to be required in positioning yourself to get out of the 9-5 scene.) 

What specifically have I been doing?

• Checking work e-mail twice a day, web service e-mail twice a day, personal e-mail once a day. Same with voicemail, even work voicemail. Unless it’s the company owner, or my boss, I deliberately let my phone go to voicemail.
• Using a notepad and calendar daily to schedule tasks as they come. This creates peace of mind when I honor my calendar.
• Interrupting interruptions. You CANNOT please everyone. If you are trying to be productive, stop people mid-sentence, let them know you’re busy and if this isn’t an emergency, to e-mail you. I’ve never pissed anyone off, and get a lot less requests doing this.
• Not checking e-mail first thing in the morning, instead I find and do the most important thing for the day immediately. This tactic alone increases productivity and employee value greatly.
• Answering all work related calls with “What’s up”, or “How can I help you” to prompt quick action.
• Asking for forgiveness instead of permission with boss and clients. I’ve ended up impressing most of the time and having to undo almost never.
• Constantly and literally asking myself, is what I’m doing important? Be conscious about singular focus, you cannot multitask no matter what you think. Use priorities instead of the multitasking concept. I have a huge piece of paper staring at me all day that states “IF YOU COULD ONLY DO 2 THINGS TODAY, WHAT WOULD THEY BE?
• Giving 80% of time to the top %20 of design and IT service clients. The remaining %80 percent get %20 of my time mostly because they are not generating income, or consume more time than necessary; they are not efficient clients. It may seem harsh, but you’re not trying to make friends in business, let that soak in. Use speech as a tool, deal with everyone politely, use the same evasion tactics and productivity tools when you’re the boss or employee to produce the best results.
• Batching cooking meals. I cook generally once on Sunday and once on Wed for all meals. Saves hours nightly and makes lunch cheap.
• Batching cleaning. I find this one the hardest. It sometimes actually pays to not clean something until more mess has accumulated. Weekly.
• Non-finishing. Information is useless if you can’t apply it right away, stop taking in nonsense, follow a short list, fill in on the go.
• Batching and scheduling when to absorb information. In general, a low information diet boosts singular focus, there’s too much media around us. I struggle with this, so I schedule times throughout the week to devote solely to reading blogs I stumble on that I like, books I want to take in, audio I want to listen to and so on. I use Evernote to pack it all away so I know where to start reading when I get to that point on the calendar. This week, I finish the Tao of Jeet Kune Do.

The actual processes I’ve used and continue to use are the same in concept if you’re self employed or working for the man, and they continue when you’ve broken free. You eventually want to build yourself out of “work” all together. The end game with lifestyle design (as I understand it and demonstrated by Tim Ferriss) is to create a lifestyle so effective that it’s nearly automating itself income while you live out dreams daily. I play both the self-employed and employee fields and have seen huge gains in both lately. I’ve noticed time gaps opening up in both areas by eliminating time wasters and increasing effective productivity givers. The “bonus” time provided by implementing elimination tactics have allowed me to do this project, find and consult with fellow life designers/entrepreneurs (post on who coming soon) and start developing the next stage of this project, the literal bread winner, creating a business solely for profit.

WHAT ABOUT FRIDAY OFF?!

Okay Okay. Yes, I have asked for Friday off, with pay, from my boss before. I did it in a very calculated way. Why? First because it was a challenge in a recent book I read, and secondly because I wanted to use the time to create other sources of income! I suggested it to my boss one day after implementing some of the above and aforementioned productivity improvements. I cited recently accomplished goals (actual e-mail) due to working when no one was in the office, or on Saturdays or when simply ignoring others for a short time (selective ignorance). I mentioned it would be a trial to see if I could continue to improve productivity, and I would of course be reachable by phone and able to come to work the second I was needed. I was absolutely set that my boss would laugh at this, but it couldn’t hurt to ask right?…to my utter surprise he looked at me and said, “I know what you mean, without everyone hounding you every second of the day, you could get a lot more done”. I staggered a bit trying not to act surprised. I mentioned trying it out in a few weeks. He nodded. I should have jumped on the idea right there, but I was satisfied with myself and backed away from the subject. It sounds completely absurd and I’m sure not all jobs could afford to trial out sending you home for the day, but is it possible? The answer is yes.

Who’s ready to start being more valuable at work, and in your own efforts to break free?

There’s something very elusive about actually getting work done. It really is baffling how good we are at not managing life. The key is realizing what’s holding you back. It’s a matter of waking up to how we waste our time and how we can combat it. It doesn’t take a class or a book to zero in on ways to instantly save hours of your day. The concepts apply to home life, but really shine when you realize your current 8 hour work day can be accomplished in two. Only a couple months into testing lifestyle design and I’ve seen what it looks like to cut out the fat and develop effective productivity in all areas of my life. I’ve gained hours in my day, stopped doing things that were simply unnecessary, and doubled on some work days what I’ve usually accomplished in one. If you’re looking to break free like we are, add some hours to your day, or want to be highly valued at work, here’s how…

Actions: Take at least three huge steps to cutting out time wasters and ineffective productivity at work. Replace the time with three practices that actually get work done.

Goals: Free at least one hour a day and then invest that time in reading about or acting on automating income or living your dreams.

What we waste our time on:

E-mail, ineffective work conversations, meetings, the web, managing bills/money, TV

When the workforce isn’t wasting 2 out of the 8 hours (salary.com) reported working, or watching the average 4 hours of TV (A.C. Nielsen Co) when they go home, they actually consider themselves to be working. The above categories are what inhibit producing reportable results while doing so. If you take a look at your workload honestly and imagined no red tape in the way, could you get everything done in 4 hours, in 2, in 1? I didn’t thinks so and I was wrong.

Before jumping on this life design road, I considered myself a very efficient person. Now I know I’m efficient, but mostly at wasting time. I bet you’re somewhat similar. The 8 hours a day we spend trying to produce results is amazingly cluttered with completely useless information and processes. We don’t know any better so we never switch channels.

Ready to change your life?

The concepts explained here will seem unreasonable. I assure you, they aren’t, I’m now living out each one. They take some practice getting used to, but save hours and hours, and take little more than a calendar to do.

Batch everything. Batching is the process of taking something you do more than once a day and performing it at planned specific intervals. Save hours a day example: Check your work e-mail twice a day, for a half an hour each time. That’s it. If you are in any type of corporate world this will seem impossible, it will also change your life. Immediately after attempting this, you start a cold sweat. After doing this for two weeks, I realized no one cared. I even told my boss who applauded me for the time management. His comment is below.

Rob:
Excellent strategy and definitely “Mission Control”.

You’re mileage might vary, you might need to set up an auto-response politely explaining how you are extremely busy right now and you’re currently check your e-mail twice a day, or to contact you through phone if its an emergency. You might need to start at 3 times a day. Advance tip, do the same thing with phone calls, explaining in your voicemail greeting that you check your voicemail twice a day, and if its an emergency to please call you on your cell phone. Currently, I almost never pick up the phone, I have my voicemails routed as audio files to my e-mail and check my e-mail twice a day, once at 11, and once at 4. This tactic alone saves me at least an hour and a half every day at work. I have not been confronted it about it, nor do I think I will be. I’m being more effective at work by doing so. Try batching your cooking, your cleaning, laundry, social time, you’ll be amazed at how much time you spend doing nothing.

Selective Ignorance, non-finishing and funneling. People inherently don’t want to get work done, so they will do anything they can to postpone it, including distract you. Lifestyle design takes some training, it reprograms your inherent want to do nothing and replaces it with habits for getting things done. Along the way you’ll need to develop a few tactics to help move through people’s inherent time wasting nonsense. Here are three easy examples to start practicing right now.

1. Selective Ignorance – Everything is not important. You can understand this first by defining your goals, and secondly by realizing you can’t make everyone happy. Hit delete, tune out un-needed information. A low information diet feeds thoughtful reflection, do not be a pack rat. You will not gain anything worth the effort in wading through the junk. Start ignoring now.
2. Practice Not Finishing – There is no better time waster than reading a book simply because you started it. If something sucks, stop doing it. If you’re half way through this article and realize it’s not going to be directly helpful to you, go away. There is something in us that says we have to unlock every mission and color in every box. The 80/20 rule shines clearly here. Only 20% of what you are doing produces 80% of the result…stop wasting 80% of your time getting 20% of the results, practice not finishing when its not directly useful to the task at hand. You can always come back to an article, video, project, etc.
3. Funneling useful information. Often times in communicating with people, there are several completely useless pieces of information. I have nothing against being personable, in fact its the best form of customer service, but if you’re focused on producing, you are not ready to shoot the breeze. We somehow have taken on a habit of thinking we can do both, or each half way. The art of funneling is to get at the point of what matters in a conversation quickly. The biggest time saver for me while in a work relationship is asking the simple question, “what can I do for you”. When someone is positioned with a questioned they innately want to answer. This process skips the how are you, oh I’m sorry your cat just died, what are you doing for the weekend conversation. Funnel through effectively selected word use. The action here is to take a minute to think about why you are speaking with someone to avoid the 5-10 you’ll end up wasting yammering on to them about nothing. Test these funneling methods below.

“I have a meeting in 5″ | ” i’m in the middle of something, whats up?”

Don’t make friends when productivity is involved

Avoid all meetings without clear actions

Use headphones, always be busy so you can focus on productivity

Multi-tasking. There is no such thing. There is only being present to several things for small amounts of time in succession. Stop having 12 windows open, stop chatting, surfing the web, using excel, word, powerpoint and the phone at the same time. You are not multi-tasking, you are moving an inch in every direction when you can be moving a mile in one. Study’s prove that after being distracted from a specific task it can take up to 40 minutes to “zone” back in. You are only slowing yourself to a crawl when you try and “multi-task”. I’ll use a technical example to demonstrate what I mean. When you use a computer, you generally understand that the more things you have open, the slower your computer goes. Eventually when you’ve opened the 23rd Internet Explorer window or Word document, the whole thing freezes and you start to flip out. Your brain is just like that, if you try to open more than one task at a time, all your doing is cutting productivity in half each time. Singular focus is the the second most important time saving concept I’ve learned behind batching. It’s easy and we don’t do it.

Ask yourself these questions:

• If you could only work two hours per day what would you do?

R – if i was really at work, i’d do only core projects on my calendar, ignore e-mail and voicemail, and people for that matter. if i was redesigning life, i would at this point, do nothing but research niche groups that i am a part of or could speak intelligently about

B -video tape myself 1st and 2nd and show it to the rest of the class

• If you could only work two hours per week what would you do?

R – geez. at work i would speed through tasks that i had to do, do tasks that effected everyone or the partners only. deny everything else. if i owned or were planning a company i would come up with a directive and outsource all the work?

B -I would locate instructional videos that were interesting. And create classwork assignments and powerpoints.  Have students teach more sections of the chapter and create assignments that my TA’s could grade

• If you had to stop 4/5 of time-consuming activities what would you remove?

R – at work, it would be almost all verbal communication, e-mails that weren’t defined with tasks. at home..i’d eliminate anything i don’t use every 2 days.

B – stop grading as much or in as much detail.  stop following the news. stop watching any tv or movies

• What are the top three things I fill time with to feel productive?

R – at work, time sensitive tasks or requests, zeroing my inbox, helping when someone calls with an issue. at home, research/reading, supporting friends and family with tech stuff, creating resources for people, working out.

B -working out, getting through a to do list, creating a new lesson plan

• How do you invent things to avoid the important

R – i schedule them instead of just doing them. i make up rules for myself that things need to be clean or organized before doing something completely unrelated.

B – at school I consistently avoid big tasks (putting them off makes them even less effective though i.e. grading, curriculum binder)

Finally, Get a calendar. We all have more than a few things to do in a day, here’s a thought, schedule them, write them down, and honor the occasions to do them. If something comes up in the middle of doing one task, capture it on paper or the computer and have time scheduled to take what’s on that paper and put it into a calendar. Repeat process as needed. I no longer use a “todo” list because of this concept. Capture it, schedule it, forget it.

All these principles can be molded to fit your specific situation, and these certainly aren’t the only ways to go about saving time, but they’re the most effective I’ve found so far. Please add your two cents in the comments.

A big part of lifestyle design is learning how to live minimally and effectively to directly impact both life and business. I’ve picked up on these key time savers and practices that have easily added up to a few days (yes around 60-70 hours) of time since trying them out a couple months ago. I do have one caveat though. I’ve noticed a trend in my research with some lifestyle designers is to move out of the country (USA) all together for its affordability and the general mobility of working through the web. I’m not doing this, nor will I post on it. Although I really applaud the efforts, I personally don’t see that as a fulfillment of my dreams. It’s a great way to give singular focus and cut back on permanent living costs and time wasters, but I view it as a workaround for allowing income generation to appear bigger than it is. The ultimate goal of designing my mobile life is to create the ability for me to work independent of location at leisure, not as a cost saver. (Like many reading, I’m committed to a job for now, and several people in the states, I’m not leaving for any longer than a celebratory escape from the 9-5 mini retirement!)

Go forth and be effective.

Did you know your clutter might be costing you $3000+ a year? Proposterous you say! Maybe, for some of us, but for a lot of disorganized people, the time spent tripping over accumulated junk and searching through papers is quite literally costing dollars.  “In a recent survey of 200 executives of 1,000 of the nation’s largest companies, respondents were asked: ‘What percent of time do executives waste because they or their assistants can’t find things?’ The median response was 4.3 hours a week, based on a 40-hour week.” (When Time’s Money, Organizing Pays Off) At a salary of $30,000, the cost of searching for important papers, measured in lost time, is about $3,376 per year. Ouch. What’s worse is that even if you’re an organized person, the act of being so when you own more than you need still wastes time and money.

Before I eliminated all the time wasting actions in my life, I eliminated all the time wasting products I owned. The old running sneakers in your closet and that cashback coupon you can’t seem to find is starting to take its toll. It’s a fact, living with less, means less to manage. Less to manage translates into a lifestyle that naturally saves you money. It also keeps you free to change your lifestyle and travel without the worry of included baggage, insurance against damage, the need replace things when their lost, etc. It’s stunning how much “stuff” we own that we don’t use. I’ve had a practice over the last 6 months to “minimize” what I no longer need. It fits in perfectly with phase 2 of lifestyle design testing, elimination.

Actions: Evaluate how being disorganized and owning that which you don’t use is costing you. Sell or trash junk you haven’t used in months.

Goals: Live better, cheaper, and more organized with less to manage.

I understand why a lot of lifestyle designers promote living with less. Several of them are some sort of digital nomad, traveling from place to place working through the internets, but some are like Leo Babauta with 5 kids, and realize that it just makes sense. I won’t kill this idea, because its been done, but here’s my practice, one that will start you on the road to living with less. It will increase your productivity and save you money, upping your abilities to live differently.

The idea is straight forward. Evaluate what you own, if it’s not something you’ve used in the last 3 months or is completely seasonal, sell it, craigslist it, or trash it. Here’s what it looked like for me just last month…

• Craigslist sold 4 pairs of pants, 3 shirts, an old cell phone, an old router, a keyboard, and some computer memory. I trashed 6 pairs of sneakers I somehow thought I would use again, or needed as “backups” which have traveled with me across the country and through three different apartments, completely useless in all of them. I realized I have about 35 t-shirts and only wear about 11 of them, I threw out 8 of them. In the end, I freed up space in my closet, made roughly $55 and save a few pieces of furniture could fit everything I own in a medium sized truck.

What’s it look like for you?

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