#11 how to redesign your life in 1 day

“How to build your ideal life in 1 day”

The internet is saturated by wildly overexaggerated claims like this.
I’m not going to add to them. Marketers ruin everything 😅
But there is a grain of truth in this:

What you do every day = your life.

Designers spend all day designing things,
You can apply your skills to create a new vision of your life,
And reverse engineer a lifestyle business around your lifestyle.
It all starts with simple actions every day.

If you’d like a deeper dive on each of these steps,
I’m launching a masterclass for lifestyle design,
to help creatives to design your life and grow a 6 figure lifestyle business that fits around it without the burnout.
Join me for more training here:

What you do every day = your life.

The act of building your ideal life happens one single day at a time.
and Solopreneuring is all about the lifestyle.

Most people start a business for freedom,
get overwhelmed & fit life around whatever time remains.

In the next 5 mins I’ll run through a mini masterclass for lifestyle design for solopreneurs.

But first, the truth you don’t want to hear:

Most people don’t CHOOSE their life.
Everyone wants the magic pill, the cheat sheet, the shortcut.
Instead they react to whatever comes along.
Where they live is where they were born.
Their career is based on the subjects they took at school.
Their job is a result of a few options that were on Indeed at the exact time they happened to be moving jobs….
So instead of acting with intention and moving towards the life they want.
If you want to create your ideal life,
you need to stop thinking in days and weeks. Start thinking in years and acting with intention.

It takes time and work to build the ideal life you want.
Redesigning your life doesn’t take huge effort.
What it takes is small steps.

intention, consistency + time  = big change

In the next 5 mins I’m going to share with you the exact steps I used to redesign my lifestyle,
build a 6 figure business around it,
that I run on a 3 day workweek.

6 things you’ll need to redesign your life:

1. 🔑 Awareness
   You need a kick up the bum & and decide what you want your life to look like.
2. 🔑 Strategy
   You need to design the trajectory for your life, and break goals down into tangible actions.
3. 🔑 Action
   You need a system to make sure you repeat those actions every day.
4. 🔑 Consistency
   You need a way to keep yourself on course for your actions to compound over time.
5. 🔑 Effectiveness
   You need to make sure you’re working on the right things.
6. 🔑 Leverage
   You need systems to scale your actions without adding time or getting burned out

Get your snorkels on solopreneurs, let’s dive in! 🤿

1️⃣ “Waking up” – You need to set a direction for your life

Whenever I ask people to describe their ideal lifestyle, they almost always start by telling me the amount of money they want to make.

Money is the wrong goal.
Your revenue means nothing to me.
Tell me, what profit are you taking from your business?
Great, well done!
But I don’t care, your profit means little when you’re working too hard for it.

How many hours did you work for your money?
In a lifestyle business, ‘Profit ÷ time’ is the only metric that counts.
Now, tell me what you do with the spare time you have.
Finally you have a more accurate portrayal of your success in life.

Everyone online wants to teach you how to earn 6 figures.
I want to teach you how to build a 6 figure lifestyle business that fits around your life, without the burnout.
Because nobody tells you this: once you have enough money, you’re going to get kicked right in the nuts with a painful existential crisis. 🤣

If you’re still at the stage where all you care about is money, then you basically want to grow a startup.
This system will certainly help you with that, and my startup design agency can help you more.
But if you want something even more interesting…
if you want something better than just a job…
if want enough money, more spare time, and ultimate freedom,
then what you actually want is a lifestyle business.

But you can’t just change your whole life in one sweep.
big action and grand gestures aren’t sustainable.
It’s why your new years resolutions all eventually fail.
It’s why people burn out.

If you want to make big changes to your life, you don’t take big actions.
You take small actions, every day to change the trajectory.
Time will do the job easier than massive effort.

The first step is simply being aware that you are dissatisfied,
and setting aside time to think about your life.
It’s amazing how many people don’t set aside time to reflect on this.

Most people don’t choose their life, They react to whatever comes along.
That’s what I did for years.

Until I set aside time to think about my life.
I realised life is short, and then you die.
I realised I wasn’t satisfied sacrificing 80% of my life to make someone else money.
I realised it was time to make some changes.
I started to plan my life.
But your life is what you do every day.
How can you plan your day if you don’t know what you want?
So let’s take a more cohesive view of your life to plan our ideal lifestyle:

Now I’ll show you how to identify & design your ideal lifestyle based around real world constraints.

🔑 Awareness- Set aside time to think about your life

2️⃣ “Plan your ideal life” – You need to break grand goals down into repeatable actions

The first step is the hardest. it seems so big you can’t take action.
but the first step is usually a tiny action.

So you want to jump right in to designing your ideal lifestyle.
But how can you plan your day if you don’t know what you want?

Usually when I ask this question to my students in Life by Design,
I get responses about things.
Your life is not the money you earn,
Your life is not where you went on holiday,
Your life is not the car you own.

Your life is how you spend your time every day.

How we spend our days,
is how we spend our lives
Annie Dillard

So we need to write down what we want our life to look like,
then break that down into daily actions.
I start by listing aspects of my life:

• Health
• Personal
• Relationships
• Business
• Financial
• Spiritual

Then I break down your goals into steps, and break that down into daily actions. eg.

🎯 Be even fitter by my 40s than I am in my 30s.

• ♻️ Habit – rowing machine and do 1k every day (5 mins)
• ♻️ Habit – jog with doggo every day (10 mins)
• ♻️ Habit – lift weights every day (10 mins before lunch)

🎯 £6k/m from retainers

• ♻️ Habit – x1 sales call a day
• ♻️ Habit – quarterly outreach campaign for SEO retainers
• ♻️ Habit – Check-in with existing clients every 10 weeks ( I built a fully automated referral system, you can steal it).

🔑 Strategy – Plan your life. What will it look like. what will you do every day. where will you do it.

3️⃣ “Take action every day” – You need small actions to compound over time.

So now you know how to turn yearly goals into daily steps.
but knowledge without action is just potential.

Remember we’re building a lifestyle business here….
Don’t put off having a great lifestyle until after you’ve “made it”.
You need to become someone who takes imperfect action.

Action doesn’t mean changing your whole life overnight, or committing to grand gestures.
Life isn’t a sprint or a marathon. It should be a stroll in the park.
Few can get up and run a marathon. But anyone can take a few small steps every day.

I’ll show you how to plan in years, but take small actions daily.

It starts with planning your day.
What you do every day becomes your life.
what do you WANT every day to look like for the next 5 years?
what do you NEED to do every day to get to where you want to be?

Now put that into a daily schedule.
BOOM, you’ve got your ideal lifestyle and you’re working towards it one day at a time.

It isn’t always easy.
We live in the real world.
There is always more to fit in.
But you don’t need a way to get through more tasks.
There will always be more tasks.
You need a way to keep yourself working on the right things,
and get out at the right time .

If you stick to the schedule, for the most part, you’ll be moving in the right direction, whilst still having a life,
and living the life you want…

life isn’t a sprint or a marathon. it’s a stroll. anyone can take a few small steps every day.
It’s much easier to build a business one day at a time, than all at once.

Why is it important to plan down to a daily and hourly level?
So the reason I make you watch the lifestyle design training first,
is to understand that time is your most important resource.

The great irony of success in a lifestyle business:

As you become more successful in your niche,
there’s going to be more demands on your time.
Remember our goal is a business which gives us freedom!

Many people don’t plan their day, and then wonder why they spend their day fighting fire.

Most people default to organizing their day out of their inbox.
Your inbox is a list of other people’s priorities.
If you’re working on other people’s priorities
You’ll never make time to work on yourself.

Now time is different for everyone.
I consult for 6 and 7 figure business owners and single parents who are working full time.
You can only control the areas you have agency over.
So don’t stress. if may just take you a little longer.
Don’t listen to the gurus, slower is totally fine.
They all quote their overnight success.
How would you define your timeline anyway?
when I started sidehustling?
when I went full time at Design Hero?
when I had my first 10k/m?

Everyone has a different amount of freedom and time.
This will be faster or slower for some depending on your situation.
There is no correct pace.
Don’t let anyone tell you what success looks like.
This is your life.

The point of this exercise is to help you spend the time you do have intentionally.

Copy my weekly schedule template, download it and customize it.
You can grab it here

🔑 Action – Plan your week, plan your days. Take your daily actions, and work them into a weekly schedule. be realistic.

4️⃣ “Stay the course” – You need to stay on track when life gets messy

What the gurus won’t tell you:
Big lifestyle changes don’t happen in weeks.
You must keep yourself walking on the right path for a long time.
Consistency and resilience are the key skills most people lack in modern times our focus has been eroded by convenience, distractions and addictions.
We live in a distracting world.
Most successful people are just the ones who were willing to do things for a long time, even when it seemed like they weren’t working.

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.”
– Bill Gates

Even if you have the staying power…it’s easy to stray as you lose sight of the shore.
Imagine a ship at sea.
If you steer off by 1 deg it can make dramatic changes to your destination.
You need a compass to stay on track.
Here’s your compass:

Accountability reviews

Writing things and saying things help you work things out in a way that thinking alone sometimes fails at.
Reviewing regularly helps you get clarity, adjust your behaviour and stay on track for long term plans.
I perform micro reviews and macro reviews.

Micro

• Daily 5mins
  • tasks
  • habits
  • moods
  • plan tomorrow
• Weekly 5 mins
  • weekly theme
  • Most important thing
  • next week

Macro

• Monthly 60mins
  • Answer reflection questions
  • Business admin
  • Review marketing strategy
  • Review financials
  • Review team training
• Quarterly 60mins
  • Review big picture plan
  • Make sure daily actions align
  • Reassess priorities
  • Assign Quarterly sprint goals
• Annual (more abstract) 15mins
  • look back
  • analyse
  • reassess
  • clarity

This post has my accountability review templates you can steal to keep yourself on track so you can plan in years, act daily.

🔑 Consistency – perform daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual reviews to make sure your actions tie up with the direction you’ve set for yourself.

5️⃣ “Make the right moves” – You need to work on the right things everyday

With a lifestyle business, you ARE the business.
Personal growth = business growth
You will need to constantly learn new skills in order to grow the business.

Many freelancers and business owners fall into the trap of always working IN the business instead of ON the business.
Then they wonder why they are always firefighting, or buried in admin,
instead of building systems that reduce or remove admin from the business.

Set aside time every day, every week, or whatever you can afford to work on the big picture tasks that grow your business.

It’s tempting to just start and work more and waste months running 100mph in the wrong direction.

The most common mistake I see?

People do the right things in the wrong order.
You need to work on the right things, every day, and in the correct order.

There’s a lot to learn and a lot to do.
So how do you know what’s important.

Read it, learn it, try it.
Revise your daily schedule, with time set aside to work on the things you learn.
Work on these for just an hour every day for 6 monthsm
and you won’t even recognise yourself. 💪🏻

I have built a roadmap of the RIGHT things to work on in the RIGHT order.
Sometimes you have to mix it up, but generally this is the right order to do things.
You can steal my 6 figure roadmap here.

🔑 Effectiveness – Work on yourself. Grow your skills and knowledge by working on the things from the roadmap a little bit each day.

6️⃣ “Build Leverage” – You need systems to multiply your outputs, and scale your actions without burnout

Now you know what to do. You need more time to do it.
How the feck do you do that, when you’re already running a business?

You’ll need to build systems that automate the fundamentals,
So you can scale and make more money, without adding more time.
So you can scale without burnout and maintain your freedom.

Freedom is why we’re doing this.
Remember that when you forget yourself and chase the money dragon. 🐲

So allow me to introduce you to what I’m calling the “lean, leveraged lifestyle business”

I systemized my design agency and automated all the admin and drudgery.
This leaves more time for thinking, planning, and working ON my business.

Remember how I said the most common mistake is working on the right things in the wrong order?
Everyone wants to start scaling before they have the foundations..
Scaling the wrong things will multiply bad results.
Get the foundations right before you systemize.

My process for building systems….

1. Document
   Write down every step of your processes for every part of your business. Start with the broad phases and break them down into microsteps. you can’t optimize your process unless you know what your process is. This is know as “SOPs”
2. Optimize
   Now t hat you have a map of the actions you take for each part of your business you can analyse, reduce and optimize your process.
3. Systemize
   This will create a repeatable system which will drastically cut the hours you need to spend on admin on your business. half your input = double your profit. Now you don’t need to work as much. Lets take it further.
4. Automate
   If you have steps that are repeated, create templates for them. if you have actions that are repeated, create automations to remove yourself.
5. Delegate
   If you can’t automate it then you can consider delegating or outsourcing it to someone who’s time is cheaper than your hourly rate.

🔑 Leverage – Document your processes, optimize them and systemize them to get back your free time.

7️⃣ Do this for a year, review, re-assess repeat.

That’s it
Simple doesn’t mean easy.

The course I’ve charted here for you is months and years.When I started this, I thought I wanted to run a design agency.
I didn’t know I actually wanted a lifestyle business.
Sometimes you have to figure it out as you go.
The skills and insights you learn by doing these x6 steps will give you the freedom to pursue any lifestyle you choose.
If you’ve got skills and can sell them online the world is your oyster.
Sometimes you just need a kick up the bum and some clarity to set a new direction for your life.
Don’t get too set on the “right” lifestyle.

life is a continuum not a destination.
Things change.
The important bit is to set a direction and live intentionally.

If you’d like a deeper dive on each of these steps,
I’m launching a masterclass for lifestyle design,
to help freelancers redesign their life and grow a 6 figure lifestyle business that fits around their life without the burnout.
Join me for more training here: