The Principles of Lifestyle Design

Sharing the truth about the 4-hour workweek and my actual implementation in this broadcast. We also cover the following topics:
– How saving for ‘retirement’ is doing you harm
– Why a single holiday each year is bad for business owners
– When you should optimise for income vs. time (vs. others)

We are running an 8-week webinar series for members delivering our Remote Work Playbook for small businesses running remote teams covering everything from hiring and supporting your team to technology tools and leadership during the current economic landscape. 

Our exclusive series will cover these topics:

Transcription:

Hey guys, Pete Moriarty here, and I am covering my favorite lifestyle design, hacks, tips, lessons, and learnings from everything that I’ve learnt in designing my life. And of course, this is inspired by a book called, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Really, really brilliant book paved the way for a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, digital nomads, and those who wanted a more flexible lifestyle. This is really behind a lot of the thinking behind remote teams and remote work. This was, I guess, one of the stepping stones to that revolution happening. So I’m really glad to share a little bit about the kind of principles that I learned from that book. Also, some of my experience having, I like to think I have practiced, pretty much most of it and sharing that good stuff with you guys. So what is lifestyle design? Lifestyle design is all about having happiness now rather than later.

So what that means is doing things you love now, rather than the idea of kind of waiting for retirement to do things that you love, right? Pretty simple idea, but not many people get that right. For many business owners, they get into business with the idea that I’m going to start a business and that’s going to give me freedom. Whereas quite often the opposite actually happens. You get very consumed in the business and especially in the startup phase, let’s think about the first one, two, three years in growing a business, it can be pretty darn tough and requires a lot of your time. So this vehicle that was supposed to create freedom, and if you’re an entrepreneur who is one of those wants to stick it to the man kind of people, you got a chip on your shoulder that you want to prove to the world.

I know that’s not everyone, but for some people certainly. Then you’ve gone from this act of independence of starting your own business to, “Oh my God. Now I’m like chained to this thing.” So that’s a very interesting concept to delve into. So not only being in business or running a business, can it actually have the opposite effect on your freedom, then you may expect but it can perpetuate this idea of I’m going to hustle now, so I can enjoy life later. I mean, let that sink in. Because there’s a lot of people promoting hustle, right? I’m going to hustle now so that I can enjoy life later. Isn’t that a dangerous thought? So the idea of lifestyle design is designing a life that you enjoy now other than waiting or pushing it off to sometime in the future.

Because I’ve got a pretty cynical opinion of hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle for life. Because I think that it’s really quite an addictive tendency and I think it’s a way of us pushing down emotions, pushing down the enjoyment of life and staying in that state of survival mode for long, long periods of time. I’ve seen this in many friends that are entrepreneurs in the sense of the business owners that I’ve observed, where business is like a drug and they even have trouble getting off that drug. And even a close friend of mine and I won’t name him who was exiting a business and had all this free time on his hands. And then rather than having a few months off and taking some R&R time, immediately jumped straight into another business for a number of years. I just kind of observed that and I went, “Wow, that’s crazy.”

This is like a drug. It’s like a drug for people to be on that merry-go-round. So lifestyle design is basically getting off that merry-go-round and if that’s something that you like the idea of, and then give us a thumbs up and if you haven’t already shared this video with anyone you think might be interested, then please go ahead and do that. Okay. Let’s come back to the idea of freedom. I define freedom in a few different ways, right? You can have location freedom, that’s pretty obvious. Time freedom is another important freedom. And then your freedom on let’s say your money or your income or how you generate your ability to live. So those different ideas of freedom, when we work with the business, we do technology consulting, right? But I’m always trying to create more freedom for customers, which means can we save someone money? Can we save someone time? Or can we give them more flexibility?

So whether it’s putting stuff in Google drive or switching them over to a cloud based CRM system and getting them off a legacy Microsoft server or something like that, whatever we’re doing, I’m trying to create more freedom for that person. So that’s kind of the idea behind why I really love this idea and the concept of lifestyle design is it’s about getting away from being chained to your business. We happen to help people with technology. That’s how we hope that happened. Giving someone freedom gives you options and that’s what I really like about this concept. Freedom gives you options and there’s this great movie it’s called The Gambler and it’s a Mark Wahlberg film. It’s pretty good, go and watch it. It’s basically a gambling addict, right?

He’s borrowing money from loan sharks and the loan shark played by John Candy is giving him a schooling and basically giving him a bit of coaching. And he says, “You know what? You need, you need fuck off money and fuck off money is basically enough.” Sorry. If anyone’s got kids watching, just turn the volume down, fuck off money is basically when you’ve got enough money in the bank that you can still go to work. You can still enjoy life. You can still do whatever activities you want to do, but you don’t have to answer that anyone. The quote goes, if your boss tells you to do something you don’t want to do. Tell him to fuck off. If a customer doesn’t want to work with you, tell them to fuck off. Everyone says you can’t park there, tell him to fuck because you basically got fuck off money sitting in the bank, right?

What I like about that is the idea that you don’t need to be controlled by anyone else. I think that really hits home with entrepreneurs. If business owners aren’t having to be controlled by the business, but not having to be controlled by us. I know for myself personally, like why I started a business was as I was growing up in my childhood, I didn’t have a really safe family environment in the home that I was growing up with. My parents went through a nasty divorce. I was eight years old. So I was quite young and running a business and earning income for myself becoming self-sufficient was my way of having that, safety of, okay, I can tell anyone to fuck off and I’m going to be okay. We’ve got this idea of building up our freedom right through our income in the business, but it’s not just money, freedom. It’s also time freedom and it’s also flexibility as well.

But the key thing with lifestyle design is I don’t want you to wait to enjoy it. The idea of a retirement waiting to a 50 or 60-years-old, which to me as a gen Y seems extremely foreign. For gen Xs and the baby boomers that are on the call as well. Idea of saving up for retirement and work, work, work, work work just seems pretty nuts, right? Because the chances are that you’re going to have some kind of ailments. That’s just literally the chances you’re going to have some kind of body ailments. That means that you’re not going to actually be able to enjoy life by the time you get to 60 or 70-years-old. That’s number one. Number two if coronavirus hasn’t got you, then how much of your life can you enjoy once your golden years have already gone?

So lifestyle design is really about designing your business, your life, your income, and the things that you do around a life that is really, really fulfilling now. And getting off the addiction train of I’ll do it later or I’ll enjoy myself later. I have many people who say to me many times, Pete, you have a really great life or you do all these fun things all the time, or it looks like you really enjoying yourself. I say, “Yeah, I’ve designed it this way.” Exactly, that’s exactly what I want. I want a life that’s awesome. So if you want a life, that’s awesome this is something for you to dig into. Okay. First thing I want you to do, we’re going to do an exercise together and I want you to value your time because understanding the value of your time is the most important thing for you to understand what things you should be doing and what things you shouldn’t be doing.

I think you’ve got a bit of an inkling of where we’re going to get to here. We’re going to get to some delegation, right? So I want you to take your yearly, not your income, but your yearly top line sales revenue. Okay. So you yearly revenue. If you’ve got a budget or if you’ve got like a goal revenue for the year, and I’m not talking about your like blue sky goal, I’m talking about what is your realistic goal of the next 12 months of revenue, right? I want you to write down that number. So just grab a calculator, grab out your phone. I want you to write down that number. So it’s 12 months of top line sales, top line revenue. This is all of your income, all of the business income. I want you to take that and I want you to divide it.

I’m going to put the number in here. I want you to divide it by 8,020. Okay. So you’re going to take your full year income and you’re going to divide it by 8,020 and you’re going to get a new number. Now, when you put your number in there, so I’m going to take mine. So our revenue this year is probably going to be around the three million mark. So I’m going to take that and I’m going to go divide it. I’m going to give you a second to go and divide that as well. If I can find my calculator. Taking your year’s revenue and we’re going to divide it by 8,020. There we go. Cool. All right. So I got 374, right? So that’s mine. It doesn’t matter what number you get. I don’t care. Whenever you get, we’re talking about revenue here, not profit. So it doesn’t matter anyway, right?

Okay. Now that number 8020 is a very important number. 8,020 is 40 times, 52, 40 hours, times 52 weeks. Now I know not everyone works 40 hours. Not everyone works 52 weeks. This is a guideline only. But what that equates to is the number of hours that you have per year. And what you did was you just divided your revenue by the number of hours that you have available in your inventory. And what you then have is what is your hourly rate? So if you’re a business owner, if you’re a CEO, if you’re a manager that is the hourly rate that you are responsible for. That is the amount of revenue that you need to generate in the organization that you run for every hour that you work. Now, are you actually billing that much? No, not necessarily, but your responsibility as the CEO is for that organization to generate a commercial results equal to that much money every single hour that you’re working in the business.

That is the new value of your time. And what I want you to do is take this number and apply it everywhere in your life. So in your business and also in your home life as well, if you are doing anything that is worth less than that amount per hour, you shouldn’t be doing it. That’s up to someone else. So doing this is going to help you buy back a whole bunch of your time, right? This is going to be really, really good. Now, you’re probably getting some ideas pop up into your head right now. So I want you to start taking some notes, right? Start writing down some notes about what kind of things that might be happening in your life right now that you shouldn’t be doing and post those in the comments right down below, post them in the comments.

What are you doing right now that you shouldn’t be doing? There’s three things that we’re going to do with each one of those. We’re either going to delegate, we’re going to delete, which means stop doing, or we’re going to automate. Delegate, delete, or automate if you ever think about those. Now it doesn’t matter what stage of business you’re at. You can do this exercise every year. I guarantee every single time I did this exercise, I think of one extra thing that I’m not doing. It might be the cleaning. It might be the cooking. It might be the bookkeeping. It might be replying to YouTube comments, which I worked out this week, because it’s probably not a good use of my time. You’re always going to have things come up that are not a good use of your time. And you want to outsource or delegate to someone else.

All right. So drop it in the comments. Let me know, what are you going to delete, delegate, or outsource? What are you doing to pass on to someone else. Now, you know the value of your time. There’s another way of looking at this and that is that one of the principles in the book, this is in the 4-Hour Workweek, which is the Bible, right? That is to look at well, if you were to compare a high flying CEO of a publicly listed organization, who’s earning a couple of million dollars a year as a salary, right? But is working 80 hours a week. Compare that to an eCommerce entrepreneur who’s earning $100,000 a year, but it’s only working one hour a week or two hours a week. Well, who’s actually getting more value for their money and for their time invested.

So that’s the other way of looking at this equation, but I’m really interested in what you guys are doing right now, that is below your new pay grade. We’ve now valued our time and we’ve realized some of the things that we can delegate or we can automate. Now I want to talk about more of the lifestyle side of things. This is really where me being a young person, interested in travel do have flexibility. I don’t have kids at the moment, right? So I’ve got a little bit less responsibility and I’ve been able to really take the lifestyle design to the extreme. So I’ve had a couple of years where I’ve digital nomaded. I’ve been completely a nomad working from wherever I wanted to, traveling literally with a backpack, doing the vegabonding thing. Had times where being in a particular location, but I’ve traveled overseas early every month sometimes.

I’ve had times where I’ve strapped a backpack on and just started buying one way tickets, which is one of the things that was on my bucket list. I’ve enjoyed the freedom and flexibility of location, independence away from my business. And this is what we’re going to be going a little bit deeper into. It doesn’t necessarily mean that dropping on a backpack and buying one way tickets is for everyone. Absolutely understand that it isn’t. But the principle is still really important when you remove the title as to location independence. When you remove the ties to a particular dependence on a certain customer, certain way of doing business, certain business model, certain ways of thinking you really open yourself to more success and you open yourself to more rewards that come your way. As an example, May we’ve had customers that we’ve helped that over the years, cloudifying their business, right?

Taking them from legacy IT systems into the Google world. One of those customers who came along to us was actually driving to the office every day, just to check his emails because he wasn’t able to access his emails from home. The remote desktop connection was too slow and it was like a shit situation, right? So it was driving to the office every day to get his emails done. We’ve got everything on the cloud. And what he ended up doing was I remember he emailed me a couple of weeks after we had his project implemented. And he said, “Hey, Pete, I’m literally sitting here watching my son play cricket while I’m catching up on some emails and doing a little bit of work, sitting on the sidelines.” He literally said like, “You’ve changed my life. This has literally been life changing.”

So what I really love about that is that something as simple as freeing yourself up, location-wise means that you can really, really affect the quality of your life. If that means more time with your kids. If that means more time with family and friends, if that hopefully for you as a business owner means more time taking holidays, then that’s going to be really good thing. So I want to talk about holidays. No, it’s part of Australian culture to get… What is it? Three or four weeks of holiday leave per year, right? And most people take like one big holiday per year. However, the idea is that Tim Ferriss put forward in the book, the 4-Hour Workweek are to take lots of mini holidays and many retreats, so many holidays and many retreats are about getting away and getting a refresh without saving up for a big holiday.

What happens when you save up for a big holiday, right? You kind of prepare for it. You get ready to put your phone on silent or you prepare your team, and then you do the kind of like the big going away thing. And when you then come back into the real world, you can tend to have a bit of a hangover where you kind of have to reintegrate back into normal life. And for some of us that can even be a bit of anxiety that comes up, “Oh God, I have to go back to that way of operating,” right? I certainly suffered this. And what actually ended up happening is rather than me having a quality holiday, because I spent most of my holiday worrying about what was going on in the business. What I found was I wasn’t actually having quality time away.

So I had less of those holidays. So the idea of a mini holiday is to have these three months or every four months, and basically have multiple holidays per year. Obviously, with being able to work from different devices, being able to work in different locations with structuring your business, better delegating tasks to your team. So you’re not a bottleneck. That’s going to give you the opportunity to have more of that family time and do more of those holidays right now. How do you find the balance between having lots of holidays and actually still being connected to your phone? Because that can be a real problem, right? I found in the last five years, most of my holidays, I would say are probably work holidays with a little bit of leisure time thrown in, right. And I’d say that’s probably 70 or 80% of my holidays.

That’s something that I’ve had to recognize and go, “Oh wow, shit.” Most of my travel has actually only been for work. Now I’ve done that heaps, right? It’s been nearly every month, that also gets a bit fatiguing. I think the balance and the recharge time is really important. That’s the most important thing amongst everything else, your recharge time is the most important. So what these many holidays are about is about getting the recharge time. If right now you are someone who is chained to your mobile phone. You’re thinking, “Well, Pete, if I went away once every three months and I don’t have to switch my phone off and I’d be worried about whether or not the calls went through to my team.” It may be an issue of you not having a good routing system of actually getting work from your customers to your team.

So that may be using shared collaborative mailboxes in your email system. So that customers have somewhere to email. That’s not you all the time. We have that set up, help at itgenius.com. Anyone can email it and about 35 people can see into that inbox and action things so that customers don’t have to email me. Even if a customer has a problem, they can click a little feedback button and then the team will be notified and they will be able to take care of that again, without it having to be escalated to me. And then number two, we use our app called Dialpad and that is a cloud based voice online phone system integrates fully with G suite. And what that means is that when a customer calls our main line, it’s automatically going to go through to the team. But if I need to take a call, it doesn’t matter where I am.

I have my mobile and I can actually take calls from the app that is on my phone as well, which is very cool. So it’s about extending the amount of leisure time that you have and making sure that you, your family are getting decent recharge time. I did a really good video on this last week where I covered how to actually make sure that you are healthy and make sure that you are having good balance. So go ahead and check that out. If you’re a customer of ours inside our concierge members area, I have a deep dive with some tools from one of our customers, Andrew Mae, who is a high performance specialist. And there is a self-diagnostic tool in there on how you can actually check in on how you’re doing with your recovery. How are you doing with your exercise, with your movement, with your environment, with your sleep, with how you approach your work and how you recover and making sure that you’re healthy. But mini holidays are a very important part of that.

Okay. So last one. I want to talk about your different leavers of optimizations. Now you have different ways of optimizing different areas of your life. And for most of us, for the most part, we optimize our income, right? I’ve done a lot of study on wealth creation and managing my income and building wealth over the last two years specifically, I’ve been diving right into it because for the last 10 years of growing and scaling my business, most of what I focused on was building my income. But like many business owners, I didn’t really take all that much off the table and begin to build wealth. So I’ve been on that journey of building wealth, alongside building my income now. I’ve noticed a bit of a shift in some of the ways that I’ve been working. So let’s talk about optimizing for different areas of your life.

For many of us, the first thing we want to optimize is our income. That makes absolute sense, right? Because until you have your income that exceeds your living expenses, you’re never going to get ahead. If you’ve got a little bit of debt hanging around, whether it’s in the business or consumer debt, you literally have to have the income exceeding your expenses if you’re ever going to take care of that, right? We all know about lifestyle creep and what happens is sometimes we earn more income and then we start spending more. We moved to a bigger house. So we leverage ourselves more and the market goes up and goes down and starts to squeeze us. We all know the traps there. I’m not going to hammer on about that. But the important thing is that as you would know, once you get to a certain level of income, and I think it’s around 80 or $100,000 Australian, that was certainly the case for me.

That once you go above that level of income, your happiness doesn’t actually increase the more income that you earn. There’ve been plenty of studies done on this, but once you hit a certain level of income, your happiness will not increase. I know that for a fact, because once I hit that particular threshold, I was like, “Oh, okay, cool. Well with more income, I can buy a nicer vacuum cleaner when I shop for a vacuum cleaner or I can buy like the organic stuff at Woolies, rather than the nonorganic stuff.” I don’t wake up any happier because oh my God, I bought that amazing organic broccoli. So what were looking to do here is first you want to get to that milestone, right? So if right now you’re not yet at that milestone of I’m comfortable and I have more than I need for my living expenses. That’s what you want to optimize. Focus on optimizing your income.

Now after you optimize that, after you’ve reached that threshold, this is where most people get it wrong, they just keep going. They keep going, going, going, going, because I’m going to link that back to the addictive nature of being in business. And if you’re in business to avoid something or because you’re an entrepreneurship addict, or just because you can’t stop. Or if you’re dealing with some kind of trauma by being in business, then you’re never going to get off that train. However, to grow and to shift to the next level for yourself, what you then need to do is actually start optimizing for other areas of your life. The next one that you want to optimize for is time. So optimizing for time is now, okay, I’ve got my basics taken care of, business has enough income to support me and to support itself and to grow and to be profitable and continue to invest in the business.

Great. Now let’s start optimizing for time. That’s where that second equation comes in. How many dollars of income I’m I getting in net return from the ventures that I’m a part of and how many hours did I invest in there? And that’s when you can start looking at things like, okay, well I have let’s say you’ve got some property investment or maybe you like to trade some shares on the share market and start looking at for each of the activities that I do that is generating the income. How much time am I investing in that? And then what is the return per hour spent on that time that is actually invested each one of those. And then we optimize for time, we optimize for time, we optimize for time, we optimize for time. You can use the exercise that I shared earlier on what your time is worth for you to get a bit of a sense on what kind of things you can start delegating or outsourcing.

Now, some of the things that I delegate and outsource are things like doing the washing, doing the cleaning at home, it’s someone to drive to Ikea for me and pick some stuff up. If I need someone to put together the Ikea stuff, I get them to take care of that. [Inaudible 00:21:38] is great, but I do actually enjoy the process of cooking. So I do tend to cook from time to time. That’s all the home stuff. Anything in the business that you are doing as an entrepreneur, that is a repeating process. You guys know this. If you’ve listened to me for a long time, it needs to be created in a system and then passed onto someone else. You should only be doing your highest and best use tasks. Just the tasks that you can bring the magic on and really passing on everything else to everyone else.

Okay. Other customers actually said to us that when he rolled out Dialpad and he had his business phone system on his mobile over the Christmas break, he was able to take a longer holiday. This is Aaron, his name is. He was able to take a longer holiday and they made like an extra 10 grand over the Christmas holidays because he was actually able to answer the phone, funny that, hey. He had a longer holiday and he made an extra 10 grand. That’s pretty awesome. So we’ve talked about optimization, one of the last points that I want to make to you guys, to design your business and design your reality around the life that you want. The first thing you need to do in deciding what life you want is to literally do that, decide, create your dream board, create your goals and really reflect on, what is the life that I want?

What do I want it to look like? What do I want to do every day? If you’ve not heard of the perfect day exercise, that is an exercise where you write down your perfect day. I wake up in the morning. I’ve slept in a little bit. I wake up to the sunrise, I smell the roses. I don’t know whatever you do in the morning shower, shave and shit, probably. But for me, when I wrote my perfect day was like, “All right. Well, I want to live near the beach. I want to have a good view. I want to have a partner with me. I want to be engaged in creative projects. I want to be working probably like three days a week. I want to have a business which pays all the bills on autopilot. So I don’t have to think about it.

And then I have extra money to invest and work on bigger goals and put into other businesses and other opportunities, but also spend time giving back and mentoring and having more of an impact as well. So once I had optimized for income, that was step one, step two, and step three was optimizing for a time. We already talked about that, but then the third step is optimizing for lifestyle. And when you optimize for lifestyle, you start moving the pieces of the puzzle, so they suit your lifestyle. Oe of my mentors, his name is James Schramko. He was teaching me about lifestyle design himself, and he actually sold one of his businesses because the upkeep on that business was just something that kept interrupting him and kept interrupting his work. Now, I also used to own a hosting company as well, and that was something that I’d get calls at 2:00 in the morning because the server was down and that the team hadn’t taken care of something and there was an escalation.

I was notified as the final, final emergency contact in a series of emergency contacts. I just kind of went, “No, no, no, this doesn’t suit my lifestyle goal.” So we ended up selling that business. We had another business that was keeping us in Sydney by providing onsite technical services to our customers. And that was literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in recurring revenue, which I said no to and shut down. I called every one of our customers. And I said, “Hey, you know how we charge you a 1,000 bucks a month for support? Yeah. Well, I’m going to charge you $150 a month now, how do you like that? Okay, good. I’m not coming on site anymore.” So we did that, right? We basically switched off hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

But what that opened us up to was me being location independent, which was important to me. But number two, it actually opened us up to modify our business model. So we could serve as customers all over Australia and then eventually all over the world as well, which was a really, really big shift for our business. So just this idea that well, you either run a performance business or you run a lifestyle business, right? And to an extent, I agree with that. You need to choose whether your business is going to have a future, being able to be sold. Whether your business is going to build enterprise value above just an income for yourself. Those are important concepts. And it is important to be intentional about the business that you’re creating. However, I do think that you can have a high performing business, which also fits in with your lifestyle.

I think you should, because you’re the business owner, you fucking deserve it. You should have a business that actually works for you and is going to work with your goals. And sometimes that requires having tough decisions made, tough decisions around products and services I’m I going to provide, how I’m I going to support my customers? How’s my business model going to fit my lifestyle. Now, one of the things that I know is that we don’t really work well with large enterprise customers. We’ve got a few of our customers who are like a thousand employees and above, right? So technically there’d be enterprise, but I’m talking about five or 10,000 type employee enterprises, the Woolworths and those guys, right? There on G suite where Australia’s top partner for Google. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be talking to them and doing business with them.

But the first thing they say is, “Hey, can you come to our office and do a presentation in the boardroom,” right? Most of these guys do, I’m not painting everyone with the same brush. And Woolworths are pretty Googley to be honest, but many of these businesses want that from us. We can’t deliver that. Or they want a technician to come on site when something goes wrong, we can’t deliver that. And so there are certain things that we just have to say no to because of the decisions that I’ve made around the lifestyle that I want. So I employ you to consider in your business, what decisions do you need to make in the business? So the business fits your lifestyle because that’s what it’s about. What about optimizing our lifestyle and remember designing our lifestyle for it to be exactly how we want it to be.

All right. Final takeaway. The final action item for you is if you do a dream board and you do a perfect day exercise, so you draw up that dream board of exactly what you want your life to look like in the next five to 10 years. You do your perfect day exercise, then they will subconsciously manifest in your life. I promise you, they are the kinds of things that just happen when you set the intention out there and you do them. I wrote a perfect day exercise literally one year later it happened. Totally crazy, super powerful. I feel right now, I feel so blessed that I’m able to live my perfect day so much now that I’ve actually built that and created that.

Paul has said, “I argue with my wife about working holidays, your thoughts, if you have time.” That’s a really, really good one Paul. Look, I think your wife will be okay if you’re having more holidays. Even if there’s a little bit of work happening now, I don’t like the idea of going to a holiday destination and sitting in the hotel with your laptop all day long. I love the idea of punching out one hour of work and then that’s it. I understand if you’re in the growth phase of your business, that you may not be able to disappear for a week or four weeks at a time. I probably would never disappear completely offline for weeks at a time. I have done it before. I tend to time it around Christmas holidays or something like that. If I really want to, I could, I enjoy even just jumping on to chat and just checking in with the team.

If I’m always on holidays and never on holidays, then it’s kind of all right and that kind of works for me. I will say though, having intentional time with family is really important and I’m really big on quality time. So reducing access to devices, things like I don’t have any devices in the bedroom. I have really strict no device time on the weekends and on weeknights as well at certain times. And that’s really my time to completely disconnect. It’s really, really easy to keep these little phones with us, every single place that we go and always be attached to them. I switch off all the notifications on it. So I choose when to access my phone. I don’t allow it to interrupt me. So there were a few little things there, but if you dig around on our other videos, you’ll see I’ve got some tricks on getting productive in that way.

Final thought is that after everything kind of… I’ve built the income that I’ve wanted to have. I tick the box of financial independence that I wanted to take when I was 15-years-old. Now I built a business that is resilient and mostly runs without me. What I found was that I actually lost a little bit of motivation for that business. I lost a little bit of motivation to continue to grow it because I had everything that I need, right? What I found was, and this was a shift from a friend of mine, his name is Carl Taylor, that as I grow the business and as my team grow the business, I can actually have more impact for our customers. I can have more impact in the staff that we employ and we can help more staff become employed by growing the business and therefore that’s overall going to do well for the world.

So that’s where I’ve shifted from first optimizing for income, then optimizing for time, thirdly, optimizing for lifestyle. Now my lifestyle is optimized. Number four is optimizing for impact. So hopefully you can go along that journey yourself. Hopefully, I’ve inspired you to take the steps, but so I’m going to say goodnight now. If you haven’t already connected with our group for G suite users and for remote workers, jump on those two group links right down there below. And if you’re interested in implementing any of the technology tools that we implement for small business customers, to help them get time freedom, location freedom, and flexibility on where, and when you work, allowing you to build a better team and a better business. Well then jump onto the chat button down below our team will be very happy to have a chat to you. See how we might be able to help inject some awesome technology into your business to help you and your team boost your productivity. Till next time. Take care. Cheers.