Lifestyle design does not always feature heavily in people’s minds when they decide to start a business.  It is however, an area that I believe needs ample attention prior to starting your internet business.  By designing your ideal lifestyle before building your latest internet project, you can ensure that your new venture can be built to bring your lifestyle dreams into reality and support the life that you really want to live, rather than accepting the lifestyle that is presented to you by default, and without too much thought, as a result of the business model that has been built.

The Benefits of Designing Your Ideal Lifestyle

By paying attention to the type of lifestyle that you want to lead prior to building up your internet business, not only do you get to run your own successful business, you also get to live the life that you have always dreamed of living.

We have been conditioned in life to accept working from 9 to 5 each day in order to get paid the money that we need to live on.  The problem that I have always had with this Time for Money scenario is that we end up living to work, rather than working to live and our dreams stay where they are, firmly rooted in dreamland.  This is where lifestyle design comes in.

I address this topic in more depth in my free eBook “Internet Business & A Life of Freedom”, which you can receive immediately by subscribing to our newsletter.  In summary, we end up wasting the prime of our lives going to work in order to earn the money that we need to live on.  As a result, we receive just a couple of hours each day to do what we really want to do and end up living for the weekends.

When we retire, we have the time to do those things that we’ve always wanted to do, but by then it is likely that we no longer have the physical ability that we once had and our pensions probably wouldn’t cover it anyway.

Taking all this into account, here are some of the Key Benefits that lifestyle design can give you:

1. Reduce the amount of time you work each day by increasing efficiency and automating procedures so that the main bulk of the work is done for you.  You can reduce this time to a few hours a week, rather than 40.
2. Give you the freedom to travel the world, if that’s what you want to do, before you retire.  Why wait until you retire when you no longer have the agility that you need?  You can do it now and run your business in the process.
3. Allow you to spend more quality time with those close to you, when you want.
4. Time to enjoy your life immediately and do the things that you’ve always dreamed of doing, rather than having to wait and hope that you still have both the ambition and fitness that you need.
5. Time for Yourself.

Each and every person will have their own priorities and things that they want to achieve in their lives.  If you were to think about the things that you would do in your life, if you had the time and the money to do them, you could easily expand this list.

Goals – The Way To Design Your Ideal Lifestyle

I think that the whole idea of goal setting is looked down upon by a lot of people and when I mention the process of goal-setting to others, the response I commonly get is along the lines of, “That doesn’t work, I’ve tried it before!”.

However, when applied correctly and consistently, putting the process of goal-setting into lifestyle design can bring into your reality the life that you dream of.  Lifestyle design need not be complicated.  In simple terms, it is the process of deciding how you would want your life to look, deciding what steps you need to take to get there and then building your internet business around that lifestyle.

Business teaches us that in order to achieve certain things, we need to set goals in our work and manage our time.  NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) teaches us similar techniques in goal-setting to achieve our goals.  However, NLP gives us additional resources that can be used in order to ensure that we reach our outcomes.

Defining your goals and applying the actions that you need to obtain them works, period.  You just need to know how to effectively define and consistently apply them, to give you the edge that you need to make life happen the way that you imagine.

Lifestyle Design and Internet Business

I know that this has been a very basic explanation of lifestyle design and it is a very necessary overview, as it’s important to keep focused on why you are looking to start your own internet business in the first place.

For me initially, I would have been quite happy just working the same hours as I was at work, but for myself and at home, in order to bring in enough money to match what I was earning in my 9 to 5 job.  I soon found though, that I was able to concentrate better at home on individual tasks and I could finish an entire days work in less than 5 hours, that’s already a saving of 15 hours each week, without introducing any efficiency or automation!

Some of you may be looking to work every hour of the day in order to build up your business empire and have thousands of people at your beck and call.  Others may only want to work and hour or so each week.  We are all different and our dreams are different and whatever dream you have currently, lifestyle design concepts can certainly help you to achieve them.

We shall be covering more on lifestyle design as we progress with building our internet businesses.  At this stage, it may be worthwhile just thinking about the life that you really want, rather than the life you have come to, or think that you should, accept.  Explore those dreams once again as you start to consider the type of lifestyle that your internet business could give you.