Lifestyle Planning: Design Your Perfect Life.
Plan Your Perfect Lifestyle
Start with Self-Care
Your own lifestyle is kind of a big deal in building your lifestyle business. The following post aims to help you design and plan your lifestyle, environment, habits, and schedule to achieve maximum productivity, health, and well-being.
The more you master these things and can take care of your mind and body, the faster and more robustly your business will grow.
So before you sacrifice your self-care routine and stop bonding with your loved ones in the name of getting more done, remind yourself that a happier you will work better and smarter.
Prioritizing self-care doesn’t mean meditating as soon as you wake up or working out before breakfast. It means sticking to these habits even when you don’t feel like it. My coach, Craig Ballantyne, calls these habits “non-negotiables.”
In his book The Perfect Week Formula, he lists a few of his non-negotiables. Then he proceeds to say, “For me, these cornerstones non-negotiables make the hardest parts of achieving my goals 10× easier and reduce my need for willpower or motivation. […] If I consume my five servings of greens every day and 1.5 liters of water, I feel better, think better, and move better all day long. If I do my 10 minutes of meditation daily, I’m less likely to slip back into anxiety, avoid envious thoughts, and more likely to stay focused at work. These non-negotiables ‘trickle down’ and create a virtuous cycle that makes it easy to stick to my other positive habits without requiring Herculean mental effort.”
We’ll cover a few simple self-care and fitness routines in the next posts, but for now, here’s my personal stack:
1. Brushing my teeth, trimming my beard, and moisturizing (10 minutes)
2. Drinking a cup of tea and reading 20 pages (60 minutes)
3. Listening to an audiobook, working out, and having a cold shower (20 minutes)
4. Meditating and stretching (20 minutes)
5. Drinking a big glass of water and taking my supplements (5 minutes)
Some of these habits help me maintain the right mindset, while others help me stay healthy and give me more energy.
Plan for Meaningful Work
And now that you’re taking care of yourself, let’s look at your work non-negotiables, remembering that not all work is created equal.
When I first started my agency, I worked around the clock, yet I was barely making enough money to pay my bills. That’s because I was only focusing on revolving tasks. I posted on social media, answered emails, and dealt with clients. But unfortunately, those were all upkeep tasks that were doing nothing to grow my business. I had created my own hamster wheel, and I was running on it.
Instead of doing that, think about your goals and identify your movers (those tasks that propel your business forward).
For example, when I was scaling my agency, my movers were: running sales calls, getting referrals, gathering testimonials, and hiring good talent. But now that I am running my group coaching program, I have a big team helping me. So my movers are writing this book, writing content for my blog, and coming up with good YouTube and Facebook ads.
Once you have a list of movers, it’s time to plug them into your schedule along with your other non-negotiables. But before shoving hours of work in your calendar, let’s be strategic about it. If your movers require you to interact with other people (prospects, clients, or partners), you must match your schedule to theirs. But if they are like mine (mainly deep, concentrated work), find the quietest time of the day and reserve it for that.
When you run a remote business, your schedule may vary. My U.S. clients, for instance, are between six and nine hours behind my time zone, so on the day I have my group coaching call, I’m off from lunch until late evening, and I run the call from 11 p.m. to midnight. Then the morning after, I still wake up at 5 a.m. to get my meaningful work done, and then I have a nap around 9 a.m.
The key to getting ahead every day is to save your most important work for the very first part of your day. That way, you never fall behind with your movers.
But what about the rest of your day? In his best-selling book Deep Work, Cal Newport explains that we can only sustain deep concentration for three slots of about 90 minutes each. So, if you use your first slot early in the morning, you still have three hours left to produce meaningful work throughout the day.
My goal is not to give you a strict timetable to follow. Instead, I want you to test a few schedules and stick to what works best for you.
Then once you take care of your movers, you can set aside time for your reactive work, like meetings, emails, and other interactive tasks.
Set Aside Time for Your Relationships
Now that your work is taken care of, it’s time to make room for your relationships.
Ray Dalio often talks about the importance of cultivating meaningful relationships at work and in your personal life. In a tweet from December 2020, he writes, “The most meaningful relationships are achieved when you and others can speak openly to each other about everything that’s important, learn together, and understand the need to hold each other accountable to be as excellent as you can be.”
That’s why you must schedule these meaningful interactions in your calendar, primarily when you work remotely. Otherwise, you may take the path of least resistance and use all your free time watching YouTube videos or scrolling through social media. And as an introvert, I know a thing or two about that! Before you can plug time for building meaningful relationships into your calendar, you need to figure out what the meaningful areas in your life are.
For example, in addition to being an entrepreneur, my client Lucas is also a fitness enthusiast. So, aside from his family and business associates, he has cultivated meaningful relationships with a couple of people at his gym. This way, he feels stimulated in all the key areas of his life.
And in my case, my wife and I recently had a baby daughter, so I mainly spend time outside work with them. But since I like to read and write, I have carved out two 30-minute slots a week in my calendar to speak with two friends who share the same passion.
Design Your Trips or Full Moves
So, you have accounted for all your activities, and it’s time to decide whether you will stay local or travel while working.
The beauty of running a remote business is that you don’t have to commit to either one of the two options.
In fact, for the first few years, my wife and I stayed in Toronto. Initially, I just worked from home.
Then I rented an office in a shared space. And only when my wife started working remotely did we decide to move to Europe. Whether you are single, married, or have kids or not, you can set up your travels in a way that fits your needs and lifestyle.
The main reasons we opted for Europe were better weather, proximity to many travel destinations, and family. When it’s your time to decide where (and if) you want to go, think about what you want from the experience, and don’t be afraid to test a few locations.
When deciding where to work, three essential factors to consider are time zones, internet connections, and tax systems (if you choose to relocate abroad).
Time zones
I am mentioning time zones first because it should be one of your main criteria for choosing your destination if you perform any client-facing activities. For example, I only run live coaching calls once a week, so the 11 p.m. start time doesn’t bother me. But if I had regular client calls at night, I wouldn’t be happy about it because that would interfere with my early-morning routines.
Internet connections:
One of my agency clients owns a successful lifestyle e-commerce business, and he had decided to relocate to a small island in Thailand to create video content. When he arrived at this paradise, he was in awe, but that lasted only a few minutes because he realized the island had a damaged broadband network and minimal cell service.
Tax systems
I can tell you from experience that you should always talk to your accountant if you plan to remain abroad for an extended time. But, if you decide to make a permanent (or semi-permanent) move, don’t let higher taxes prevent you from relocating, especially if we’re talking about a marginal difference. My accountant put it beautifully when he said, “Sure, you may spend 10 percent more in taxes, but if the cost of living is lower, and the quality of life is much better, you are more than breaking even. You own a lifestyle business, after all.”
Revisit Old Passions You Had Set Aside
And this takes me to the last question of this post: “What will you do with your free time?” After all, you worked so hard to free up your schedule. It would be such a waste if you just sat around all day.
In his best-selling book The 4-Hour Work Week, Timothy Ferriss talks about his activities before, during, and after he grew his business, from kickboxing in China to tango in Argentina and break dancing in Taiwan. But you don’t need to do all that. In fact, your best bet is to focus on one activity at a time.
For example, my client Andre focused on growing his e-commerce business for years, but he always had a passion for collectibles. So when he was able to free up his schedule, he resumed his interest and started trading memorabilia. And since this happened shortly before the 2021 non-fungible token craze, he could capitalize on that and turn his passion into his primary business model.
But whether you are looking to monetize your additional interests or want to live a more fulfilling life, I recommend you dedicate a few years to each one of them and explore them fully. True mastery of a craft takes time. In his best-selling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000-hour rule, and even though that’s a rough estimate, you won’t find true fulfillment in any activity unless you stick to it in the long run.
The image below shows a sample of how you could lay out a list of passion projects throughout a 25-year period.
Of course, that’s assuming that your lifestyle business is not in growth mode and only keeps you busy for 15 to 20 hours a week.
Focus on one project until you master it, then move on to something else and enjoy the fruits of your hard work.
During the growing phases of your business, though, you should use your free time to recharge and spend time with your friends and loved ones. Like the getting things done method, creator David Allen said, “You can do anything, but not everything.”
Keep in mind two things:
• Whether or not mastery indeed requires 10,000 hours, if you practice something daily for four hours, you’ll hit that milestone in less than seven years.
• When you undertake a new project, you can still use your downtime to do what you’ve already mastered.
In the image above, for example, we allocated the last five-year block to traveling while working, but you can still enjoy wine tasting and music in your free time.
In case you’re wondering, after spending eight years in music and 10 full-time years in business, I am now tackling my third stage: my passion for writing.
No matter what activities you choose to undertake, don’t forget that you are now perfectly equipped to master them.
You’ve scaled your business.
You know how to perform deliberate practice, you are resilient, and you are patient.
These are the only traits you need when learning a new skill, so keep expanding your horizons and have fun!