Wow. Ok. So, I launched this website and concurrently my passive income project about 150 days ago. The intention was to report regularly on my progress towards creating low-input income streams. Having a look around here it seems that so far I’ve pretty much sucked on both updates and generating income.

So what’s been going on? Well, the truth is that I have sucked on updates to the site, and I haven’t really been able to spend much time putting plans in place to generate new income streams. As it stands, the project has earned a whopping £1.60 from Adsense adverts on the How To pages found on the site and nothing else.

I’m certainly not complaining though. The last few months have been great fun as my girlfriend and I have been deep in the midst of planning our wedding. My regular work has also been very busy as we lost some members of our team and workloads have increased. Both of these things have meant that I haven’t been able to dedicate much time to passive income trials, however I’m going to re-focus and double efforts in the coming months.

My focus in the coming weeks

I haven’t lost my enthusiasm for the passive income project and the aspects of lifestyle design that it entails, so over the next few months I am going to be trying out, and posting results on, the following:

• Zopa, a UK based peer-to-peer lending venture has recently caught my eye, so I’m going to have a nose around and experiment
• iphone apps: I’ve had some good experiences using Elance in the past, so I’m going to look into getting some apps made up by some coding professionals found on Elance
• Going paperless:

Looking forward to getting these mini-projects up-and-running and reporting back to you all

As Pandora found when she was messing around with her box, sometimes you start things, they gain momentum and then woosh, they are beyond your control!

My Pandora’s box moment came after reading The Four Hour Work Week (affiliate link).

Now, many people better qualified than me can tell you about the ins-and-outs of the book, talk you through the more subtle points. Instead, what has stayed with me from the book, what I was amazed by, was how ready it was to take on the assumptions that underlie how we approach work today, and how easily it was able to show many of them to be outdated and irrelevant.

It is this challenging and questioning approach that has infected my thinking. This is the ‘Pandora-process’ that I can’t seen to control or stop. And I’m pleased about it.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

What’s wrong with earning a living?

Earning a living. Simple enough phrase really. 99.9% of the world’s working population go to work everyday and ‘earn a living’. But take a second to think about what the words really mean: Earn. A. Living.

What does the phrase say? More importantly, what is the underlying assumption it makes about work and life? If you think about it, you can see that the phrase implies that you have ‘do’ one thing (earn), in order to ‘have’ another (living). It implies that you have to work, before you are allowed to thrive; that you have to ‘earn’ before you can ‘live’.

Even if it is just a figure a speech (and even if it is, we mustn’t forget that the way we talk about things dramatically impacts our approach to them) I don’t like this assumption that we have to ‘earn a living’, for a number of reasons. Most of my reasons are focused on what it seems to imply about the deferring of one’s life to a later date in lieu of earning now. Life is NOW, not in the future, at some unspecified date. But I won’t go into that now. For the moment I’ll just ask:

What about earning WHILE living instead?

What about you?

Have you experienced a change to your thinking or approach to life?
What spurred that change?
What examples do you have of flawed thinking and bogus assumptions in our everyday approach to work and life?

Today I’ve had to draw a line.

I’ve drawn a line under a highly productive behaviour that’s been helping me get some useful things done. Why would I do this? The answer is because I have fallen into a nasty behaviour-trap I’m going to call ‘productive’ procrastination.

Getting loads done whilst getting nothing done

It is 15 days since I launched this blog. In that time I have added just two posts to the site (1,2). Now, I recognise that, in general, my output is going to be low. I am writing in my spare time around work, so time is limited. But I still feel that just two posts is really poor. To rub salt into the wound, I have been spending every spare-time minute ‘working’ on the blog. So, given I’ve been putting the effort in, what has been preventing me from writing more content? Well, to be honest, I have.

Thinking back over it now I can see that each time I’ve sat down to work on the blog, I’ve put up little ‘to-do-list’ barriers that have prevented me from actually concentrating on producing good content. I would convince myself there were lots of ‘things’ that needed to ‘get done’ before I could happily concentrate on articles and posts. Whether it was changing the column layout, tweaking my header design or adding a contact page I’ve found all sorts of ways to place little jobs in my way that I felt I just had to complete before I could begin writing.

The interesting question here is why I have carried on like this if writing content is actually what I have wanted to be doing? The answer lies in the ‘productive’ nature of this particular procrastination – productive procrastination. This is where you cannot see that you are procrastinating on a certain task because it is masked by the fact that you are being productive in other directions.

For me, the procrastinating I was doing on writing content was hidden by the productive nature of the other blog-related tasks I was ticking off the list. This is why productive procrastination is particularly insidious. We’re taught from an early age that being productive is a good thing, but in this case it is actually blocking the real aim.

‘Productive procrastination’- you are getting stuff done, just not the stuff that you should be doing.

Re-focus on the necessary

So it occurred to me: what’s important when you are trying to build out a decent blog, with a solid community of readers? What’s gonna drive people to my site? Killer content, that’s what. Not the color of my header, not the layout of my columns. You cannot search based on the ‘dope-ness’ of a site’s layout. Content is king, and that is precisely the thing my productive procrastination has been preventing me from producing. No more! Now I recognise the issue, I’m going to take the great advice I read here, live with the imperfect and, well, just get things out there. Here we go!

What about you?

Have you noticed yourself being really ‘busy’ but not getting important things done?
Do you have tips for breaking through periods of procrastination?
What other damaging habits have you had to overcome to be more productive?

Please feel free to leave a comment, I’d love to hear form you.

And with a press of my mouse button…….we are launched on our passive income journey! It will be a long, long road, but I hope you will pop by every now and then to check on my progress, and maybe leave the odd comment (of encouragement!).

Let’s clear up an important point early on

On the front page of this website I make a lot of noise about something called “passive income” and how the concept can be used to generate money whilst at the same time freeing you up to have more leisure time. But what exactly do I mean by passive income? A tight economic definition might be something like this

Passive income is a rent received on a regular basis, with little effort required to maintain it.

My personal definition (which, I guess, reflects my current limited understanding of the topic) would be something more like this

Continuing residual income earned from endeavors which, although they may take large amounts of effort to set-up, require minimal ongoing maintenance.

It’s a bit wordy but I prefer this one for two reasons. First, it captures the notion that nothing worthwhile comes for free, and second, it alludes to the idea that correct construction of a passive income stream will allow for minimal maintenance.

Why am I pursuing passive income and writing this blog?

Short-term: curiosity. Generating income is a challenge, and challenges are fun, right? I’m curious to see if this is possible, if creating passive income from nothing is feasible in practice. Building the blog, and learning some new technical skills have also been engaging, fun, processes.

Medium-term: income diversification. Being reliant on a single source of income (i.e. a regular job) can leave you exposed if things take a turn for the worse. Constructing a series of income streams would alleviate this over-reliance through diversification.

Long-term: who knows?!? Blissful retirement and bountiful free time?

I hope that by posting candidly about all the results and the problems I encounter along the way I can create some discussion around the topics by readers of the blog who are also interested in the topic.

How am I goign to go about this?

My initial approach is going to have two strands. First-up I’m going to write a series of ‘how-tos’ on topics I know well and publish them on this site. The hope is that they will generate enough trafiic to try and monetise them with adverts. This is a mirror to the ehow phenomenon in the US, which monetises contributor content and passes them a percentage of the ad revenue. Why host on my own site as opposed to using ehow, I hear you ask? Because, at present, ehow does not revenue share with UK contributors.

The second strand of my current strategy is t-shirt design, as can be found here. Please don’t laugh. I figure if I can produce one or two designs a month, it cant hurt to pop them up on the site and see if anyone takes a fancy to them.

Now, I’m the first to admit that these aren’t the best or most original strategies, but they are a start. I think part of the fun of the overall project will be to look back across the months and see how the various sub-strategies develop and suceed (fail). To be able to do that I need to start somewhere; ‘how-tos’ and t-shirts are where I stick my flag in the ground!

What do you think?

I’d love to hear what you think of this project. Am I mad and dellusional? Should I be starting off with other ideas? What are your experiences in trying to generate passive income? What successes and failures have you encountered?

Please leave any comments or thoughts using the form below. Cheers, Tim.