Internet Business Blog

One of the most common complaints from people today is not having enough time. We all have just 24-hours in a day and yet there are those who always seem to be able to get so much more done than the rest.

What’s their secret? After all, you work the same hours and so you should have the same amount of free time. It’s not as if you waste your time. Okay, you watch a bit of TV, but who doesn’t? Everyone needs to relax somehow…

In today’s modern world, there are more ways than ever to waste away time; the very thing most of us claim to not have enough of and yet we carelessly spend it like there’s always going to be a tomorrow.

Whether you’ve come to accept it or not, you only have a finite bucket of time in which you are going to be able to live your life. You may not realise it, but you’re probably leaking time. It may not be gushing out so you’d notice it, but like a bucket with dozens of tiny holes, it all adds up or rather it all leaks out.

It can be difficult to prevent time leaks. The world we live in is more competitive and more demanding than it ever was before. We’re asked to work longer hours and it’s easy to become overloaded with information whether it’s information you want or not.

We’re very rarely alone any more, with mobile phones and the Internet to deliver instant communication from around the globe 24-hours a day. There are many opportunities to be distracted too, whether it’s from advertising or messages from our social networks.

All of these distractions will drain away your bucket of time, but you don’t have to let them.

You only have 24-hours in a day. That’s 168 in a 7-day week and you probably already spend one-third of that unconscious leaving you with 112-hours. Let’s say you work 9-5, 5-days a week. There goes another 40-hours that aren’t yours. You’re left with 72-hours to spread across the week and that’s not including the time it takes to shower, cook, etc. Let’s take off another 3-hours a day for essential activities. You’ve got 51-hours left. 26 of those are Saturday and Sunday. The remaining 25 means you have 5-hours per week night. What do you do with those?

How many of the following distractions eat into your remaining hours?

1. Watching ‘Reality’ TV – Watching other people live their lives. It’s a strange concept or are we all just a bit more voyeuristic than we’d like to admit? And it’s not just this particular genre, but also includes many other ‘nutrient-free’ shows.
2. Surfing Web 2.0 – Digg, YouTube, flickr… If you’re not gaining anything from these websites besides the entertainment factor then what are you doing?
3. Checking emails – Just like your post, your emails are delivered to your inbox. How often do you check for new post coming through your door and how often do you check for new emails?
4. Checking stats – We love to know how popular our websites and blogs are so we’ll keep checking our stats to see how many hits we’ve had or how many AdSense clicks we’ve racked up in the last 20 minutes.
5. Commuting – Travelling to and from your place of work is usually unproductive time, but does it have to be? Learn a new language, plan your next holiday, read and reply to your emails. The same can be applied to other situations where you don’t need to give the activity 100% focus e.g. listen to an audio book whilst you’re taking a shower.
6. Trashy mags – What does it matter who’s going out with who or who’s gained/lost 20lbs? You may be on your lunch break or sat in the doctor’s waiting room, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be doing something more worthwhile.
7. Playing video games – Everyone loves a bit of fun, but why not play a real game with real people and combine fun with exercise? Not only would you be multi-tasking, but you’d probably be adding some water back into that bucket of yours.

Be honest with yourself. How much time are you wasting away on distractions rather than using that time to work on achieving what you want from your life or spending it with the real people in our lives?

The distractions will always be there. The opportunities and people we care about won’t.

What have you done with your life today?

Over the summer, I listened to the audio book version of Robert T. Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad and I experienced what could be described as a financial awakening. Apart from being a very enjoyable listen, the book offered some valuable lessons about how the rich get rich(er) and why the poor stay poor.

The key concept taught by the book is that of financial aptitude; knowing how to make your money work for you. It explained how the rich invest their money in income generating assets instead of the liabilities that poor people spend their money on. When asset buying is done well, it leads to more income without having to invest more time. That extra income can then be reinvested and the money making cycle not only continues, but grows.

For most people, their only source of significant income is through their jobs working for somebody else. Whilst there are those in jobs that pay well, the way in which they make extra money is to invest more of their time into their jobs. On the surface, this seems like a fair deal, but it’s hardly scalable and the extra income generated stops as soon as the overtime stops.

If you could get paid continuously for the time you invest, why would you instead choose to only get paid once for it?

I already appreciated that getting paid once for my time is unlikely to make me rich and that the smarter way to do things was to have automated income streams that aren’t directly proportional to the amount of time I spent on them. This was crucial because my time was one factor that will always be limited so I had to make use of someone or something else’s time in order to be where I wanted to be financially.

This is why, I’ve been working on reducing the amount of time I spend on single-pay work and instead reinvesting that time on developing assets that will generate income continuously. Gary of OSWorld has a large spread of 250 products that generate his income. In my opinion, he’s a good example of someone who has lots of individual income generating assets and has been able to escape the rat race because of them.

Back in September, the Northern Rock bank hit the headlines for the wrong reasons and their stock value plunged. I watched with interest as their share value bounced from the roller coaster ride it was on and I remembered that investing in the stock market was one of the ways of making money work for you suggested by Rich Dad. It was then I decided to take a closer at investing on the stock markets as a means of making my money work for me.

After speaking with a friend about my new found interest in the stock markets, he explained how his dad had tens of thousands of pounds invested in a variety of assets and was living a very enjoyable life in retirement. I always wondered how his parents were able to afford what seemed to be dozens of holidays throughout the year only to discover that my friend had a “rich dad”!

Within the space of the following few weeks, I researched and invested in a variety of different financial vehicles, moving as much money I could from bank accounts that offered a relatively low return.

Here’s a summary of my investments so far:

• Mini cash ISA offering a safe 6.3% return over the short term.
• FTSE 100 index tracking fund which could return a higher percentage over a longer term, but with greater risk. In order to minimise the tax I’ll have to pay on any income generated, I’ve wrapped it in a mini stock ISA.
• Shares in a number of FTSE 100 companies. Although these are large blue chip businesses, they’re still a risky investment as has been demonstrated recently with the likes of Northern Rock.
• Shares in a FTSE SmallCap company I consider to have great growth potential. Another risky investment, but with the potential to offer massive gains.

All of the above was set-up online and now only require minimal input from me as all I need to do is monitor their progress.

It’s still very early days for my stock portfolio, but in my mind, the financial switch has been well and truly flicked. Now, every significant purchase I make is categorised as being either an income generating asset or a liability. Doing this has already helped to reduce my outgoings significantly.

Interestingly, Rich Dad, Poor Dad categorises a house as a liability whereas everyone I’ve asked considered their homes to be assets. What do you think?

It seems like it’s the season for website theme changes as not only have a few of my regular reads (e.g. Sarah, Jon, Stu, Jason) changed their blog themes, but The Register and Amazon.co.uk have rounded some of their corners out (Amazon.co.uk now seems to have reverted to their previous look since I last checked earlier today) and now my blog!

The theme I’m currently using is a pre-release version that was XHTML compliant on a test installation, but that soon changed after I added my content into the mix together with a variety of third party gadgetry. It’s a CSS-based design with no tables used for layout.

I thought it was a good time to upgrade to WordPress v2.3 (with post preview), housekeep a few redundant plugins and move away from the JavaScript heavy K2 theme I was previously using. I’ve also installed Sarah’s BlogRush alternative, but having a few issues getting it to work with FeedBurner feeds [edit: later found the issues were caused by not RTFM].

If you spot any gremlins at work, please let me know!

Recently, I mentioned a significant life event that was taking much of my focus. Well, that event was my wedding!

My wife and I (!) got married at Rowton Castle and we’re just back from our honeymoon in the Maldives. The past few weeks have been an absolutely amazing experience. The kind of experience that makes all of the hard work worthwhile.

If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to or why posts have been a little sparse recently now you know! I did have good intentions to either line-up some scheduled posts using the built-in WordPress functionality and/or use the email blogging functionality to provide updates whilst on honeymoon. However, my good intentions were overridden by even better intentions to take a break from computers.

Our water villa had free Internet access via a LAN, but I’d promised not to take a laptop even though it would have also been useful for storing photos and video. The most I got around to doing with a computer was to send some emails.

I did spend a little time thinking about putting together a website that contains the information about the resort we stayed at, more specifically, the type of information that we would have liked to have seen before going. I don’t imagine it would be too difficult to get such a site ranking well since there’s not much detailed, first-hand information available already. I even took some generic video clips that can be used to help promote an informational website.

I was pleased to see that during the time when I was eating fabulous food, enjoying beautiful surroundings and swimming with a giant turtle amongst the coral I’d still managed to sell some TLA ads, refer some sales as an affiliate and sell an ebook.

Technorati Tags: AIS, TLA

Another reason why this blog might suck at the moment is the infrequent posting. I would like to spend more time on developing interesting content to share, but I’m currently preoccupied by a few things so I’ll just give anyone who’s interested a quick run down:

• The biggest thing that’s taking up much of my time and effort is that I’ve a major life event coming up very soon. It’s not something that I’ve discussed here at all, but I will spill more beans about it after the event. For now, I’m either preparing for it or tying up loose ends before it happens. More to follow…
• My web design business is attracting a lot more enquiries nowadays and even those that don’t turn into a paying project eat up time. I prefer to handle the client side of things so it’s not a task that can be outsourced and there’s nobody I can trust to delegate it to. Keeping control in this area also lets me choose which projects I want to take on so it’s not all bad.
• With things being a bit hectic right now, when I do get some free time I’m more likely to consume content rather than generate it. It’s easier on my brain which I need for other tasks!

Fortunately, whilst a lot of my attention is focused on the above, the automated income streams I’ve got in place are still doing their thing even whilst I’m not. That, there dear reader, is the beauty of online passive income streams. You do the work once and you reap the rewards on a continual basis. You can take a break whilst your systems keep on working for you!

Technorati Tags: Residual Income, Passive Income, AIS, Affiliate Marketing, Text Link Ads