Allow me to make one thing perfectly clear.

I. HATE. WAKING. UP.

I had originally written “I hate mornings”, but then I realised actually, I don’t. What I hate about mornings is the waking up part: the screeching of the alarm; what it normally signifies (going to work); getting stuck in traffic; being cold and dark, and so on.

When that happened this morning, just as I was climbing into my car I had the flicker of a premise for a post about how you can organise your day to maximise productivity in different areas of your life at different times. The fact the idea occurred at 5.30 in the morning served to reinforce my thinking.

You might be thinking quite what this has to do with personal finance. A productive day will maximise your earning potential. It will please your bosses; it’ll get you ahead; it’ll get more done with the same amount of time; and it’ll make you feel more positive.

A Bad Productivity Day

So, what exactly am I getting at here? So far there have been 132 words and not much substance to show for it. For a moment imagine you are Paul or Paula, and a somewhat typical day for you looks something like this:

• 6.45 am – Wake Up & Shower
• 7.30 am – Arrive at Work
• 7.34 am – Attempt to Deal With E-Mails
• 7.55 am – Give Up, Find Coffee
• 8.00 am – Continue Dealing With E-Mails
• 8.30 am – Suffer Morning Meeting & Presentation
• 10.00 am – Rush Breakfast
• 10.30 am – Finish Report
• Midday – Working Lunch (Still Finishing Report)
• 2.00 pm – Afternoon Meeting
• 3.00 pm – Afternoon Slump
• 5.00 pm – Give Up & Go Home
• 6.00 pm – Cook A Ready Meal
• 8.00 pm – Collapse In Front of TV
• 11.00 pm – Go to Bed

Identify & Exploit Your Day Phases

Everyone has what I call ‘phases’ that occur throughout the day at given points. Some people are “morning people”, where they roll out of bed at 5am bright as a daisy, eat a pastry, paint a masterpiece before lunch and then get down to mind-numbing report writing after a good hearty lunch and a siesta, and then retire to evening home life by cooking a sumptuous meal and finishing a novel.

Such a person is extremely creative and productive because they know what their phases are.

• Creative, passionate and driven in the mornings.
• Hungry and sleepy with no interest in work at lunchtime.
• Tenacious, meticulous and detailed in the afternoon.
• Relaxed, sensual and creative again in the evening.

A Real World Example

Although I secretly hate mornings, if I have suffered through the ‘waking up’ part and have actually got out of bed, I know that fuelled by a cup of tea or two but before eating anything, I can be quite creative. I’m writing this blog post in just such a phase.

Once I eat something my mind focus changes from creativity to practicality so I may do something physical rather than mental. After lunch I feel sleepy, and if I give in to that sleepy slump I can power through the rest of the day being detailed and meticulous. For me, that is a good time to proof-read.

Towards the end of the day my drive for creativity returns and I end up expressing it in the kitchen making a delicious meal, or batch cooking a selection of delicious meals for lunch times, or for when time in general is pinched.

A Good Productivity Day

• 6.30 am – Wake Up, Shower, Breakfast
• 7.30 am – Arrive at Work
• 7.31 am – Find Coffee
• 7.34 am – Create Presentation For Morning Meeting
• 8.15 am – Network With Colleagues
• 8.30 am – Morning Meeting (All impressed with presentation)
• 10.00 am – Coffee Break
• 10.15 am – Write and Finish Report
• Midday – Head Out For Lunch In the Sun
• 1.00 pm – Check, Sort, Reply to E-Mails
• 1.55 pm – Grab a Coffee
• 2.00 pm – Afternoon Meeting
• 3.00 pm – Coffee & Review Meeting Notes
• 3.45 pm – Write Tomorrow’s Todo’s
• 4.30 pm – Go Home
• 5.30 pm – Get Creative in the Kitchen
• 6.30 pm – Enjoy a Film
• 10.00 pm – Go to Bed

10 Tips to Maximise Your Productivity

The above are just examples. Whatever you do in your day you can apply the principles below to make the most of your day. In this example we have done more work in less working day, and then continued with that energy at home.

Here’s how:

1. Get up a few minutes earlier

It doesn’t seem like much, but getting up 15 minutes earlier allowed us to have breakfast and a cup of tea to get our brain firing before we even got to work. In that time we came up with the idea of creating a quick PowerPoint to help get the main features of the meeting across in a graphical and not just verbal way.

2. Grab a coffee / tea first thing to power the mind

I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a bit of a caffeine junkie, and I embrace it when it works the most for me. In the morning’s a cup of joe will turn my 1.4 litre mental engine into a 6 litre V8. If you’re not one for tea or coffee, grab your drink of choice to power your mind. Staying hydrated is as important for the mind as it is for the body.

3. Ignore emails until you are good and ready

E-Mail is a very impersonal method of communication, and saps your creativity by diverting your attention. Once you’ve read an email that is screaming for a reply, you feel compelled to reply to it there and then. If you don’t and try to do something else, it’ll be nagging away at you anyway serving as a constant distraction.

4. Use your creativity phase

Instead of getting bogged down in other people’s demands first thing in the morning, use your creativity phase productively. In our case we seized it to take advantage of the images our mind put together to allow us to augment our morning meeting with a stunning presentation.

5. Use your productivity phase

Spurred on by how well the meeting went, and re-fuelled with a fresh cup of the bean, we powered through the post-meeting report before lunch time appeared and managed to finish it on time. This allowed us to eat a proper lunch, and spend some time re-charging our vitamin D in the sunshine and fresh air.

6. Acknowledge the afternoon productivity slump

It is part of human physiology that after lunch time we have a slump in mental and physical energy. Take advantage of this by dealing with matters that don’t really require a vast amount of mental processing power of physical stamina: attack those emails.

7. Leave todo’s for yourself tomorrow

If you need a particular phase to do something brilliantly rather than just sufficiently, remind yourself to do it during that phase on another day. Proper workload planning will allow you to take advantage of yourself without falling behind.

8. Come home and get creative yourself

Everyone can cook, and it is a great way to de-stress (with some practice if you’re not brilliant at it – and anyone can follow a recipe). You will benefit from the additional nutrition of cooking fresh rather than your body just suffering another TV dinner.

9. Switch off and relax

In my example we watched a movie. You could equally go for a walk, relax in the bath or curl up on the sofa and read a book. All of them involve disassociating from the race of life for a period and re-charging our souls.

10. Get sufficient sleep

A tired body and mind is an unproductive one. Your creativity, productivity and all other elements will suffer if you fail to get enough sleep. So go to bed an hour earlier than normal and reap those benefits.

What do you do to maximise your day? Come share in the comments!

I was talking with some colleagues at work last week, and discussion swung around to topics along the lines of “are you going to do this forever?”. Most were answered in the same vain:

Colleague 1: “I’ll have to. I can’t afford to take a pay cut.”

Colleague 2: “I’ll have to. I’m £2k overdrawn as it is.”

Colleague 3: “I’ll have to. I have kids at college.”

When it came my turn to answer the question, they all scoffed, laughed and told me I was a dreamer. I said “I intend to work for another 10 years, and retire from the mainstream rat-race when I am 38.”

There were a variety of replies. Some profane. Some full of mock-encouragement. All disbelieving in some way. I was so shot down that I didn’t even really get a chance to explain how I hope to do it, and their cutting remarks actually made me wonder if it is just a pipe dream to be able to give up mainstream work and live a dream instead.

What is Passive Income?

Before I delve further into my dream perhaps it is worth spending a moment explaining just what a passive income is, as not everyone will quite understand.

In short, a passive income is something of which you have applied resources to, and which continue to provide resources in return now and later. (Thanks to Trent @TheSimpleDollar for the premise).

If that sounds a bit vague, it is. An actual example would be buying dividend-producing investments (using a current resource – cash) which will provide a resource now and later (dividends). Another example would be to write a book (resource – time) providing a royalty revenue stream long after the time ceases being spent on it.

My Passive Income Plan

It was probably a good thing they didn’t ask what my plan was, because I’m not sure I could have explained it there and then and kept their attention at the same time. But I got thinking – what IS my plan? It needs to be a half decent one for this to work.

Amongst my own plans in general, I’ve taken a hint of inspiration from @FinancialSamurai’s Plan, which he discusses in quite some depth.

Time Rich, Not Cash Rich

It’s important to note that I don’t intend to become ‘cash rich’ from my dreams. What I want to be is ‘time rich’. I’d like to step off the hamster wheel of normal work, and instead focus on things I find rewarding such as charity and volunteering. If my standard living costs can be all but covered by passive streams of income then the time I’d ordinarily spend labouring away for an employer can instead be redirected towards giving.

Continue Blogging

I’d like to drive my passion in blogging further and become a ‘professional’ at it. Quite where the line between an ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ blogger is drawn I’m not sure, but to be able to count your blog as a significant passive income source would be a good start on crossing that line.

Stocks & Dividends

I subscribe to the ‘Oblivious Investor‘ mode of thinking when it comes to investing in stocks and shares. My current holdings pay pittance in dividends, and my banking sector is particularly dismal at this moment in time. But, because I’m playing the stock market for a longer-term goal, I’m not actually bothered that I’m losing (on paper) 5% a month. At some point things will rebound as they always do, and we will go from bust to boom once more and I can cash in on that.

The principle of Pound Cost Averaging is also in my favour, as I mostly started buying when the market was on its way down.

One thing I do need to do is begin a dividend pool. At the moment while some of my holdings will provide an income of sorts either through sale or unintended dividends I need to start actively thinking about options that will provide a sustained, regular high dividend stream.

Shout out and thanks to @Monevator for the Lazy Portfolio write-up as well. There are some great ideas within.

Write Books

One of my many passions is writing. I like to think that I can get across complex concepts and ideas without actually giving people brain ache. It also pains me to still see that despite attempts last year, there is still no compulsory school-level education on managing personal finance and money.

I’d like to combine the two and write a book aimed at the 16-21 year old market about doing just that.

Is It Just A Dream?

Not necessarily.

Assuming I need £800 to ‘live’ per month, then a passive income stream could bring me most of the way there, with careful planning. A part-time job of say, 16 hours a week could provide money to ‘live’ with. As with all dreams, anything is possible; you get out of it what you put in.

If it stays a dream then yes, it is just a dream. But if you work to make that dream a reality, then who is to say you cannot succeed?

What’s your plan?

If you have a plan for jumping off the hamster wheel too, come share it in the comments.

Everyone loves getting money off something they were planning to buy anyway. If you’d arranged with some friends to meet up of an evening and have a meal out somewhere, what better way of saving money all round than to find for example, a 20% off voucher.

Vouchers of Old

In the days before the recent internet, this usually involved clipping coupons out of newspapers and magazines, or waiting for a retailer to mail their regular customers with offers. Neither of these methods supported the pleasure of spontaneity and worst case scenario you either paid full price or, -determined to be frugal come hell or high water – went somewhere you didn’t really want to.

Your 20% off might also have contributed to the general deforestation of the planet. Not a good feeling!

Vouchers in the Digital Age

Thankfully those scenarios are no longer the case and you can be as spontaneous as you like, and still eat under a tree. If you’re significant other says they feel like a romantic dinner out for a change, the technically connected amongst us can fire up an App on our smartphones and find just the place near us to fit the bill, and also be safe in the knowledge that the evening isn’t going to cost the earth.

I love eating out. It’s one of the simpler pleasures in life that also keeps our economy ticking over in all sorts of ways. Voucher’s are not limited to food however. You can make savings on just about anything from your food shopping, to clothing, to gifts, gadgets, mobile phones, home improvements and sports gear.

If you can think of a retailer – someone can probably find you a code or a voucher to go with it.

Caveat Emptor

Not all online voucher sites are created equal. Most require some exchange of your personal information – at a minimum in the form of an email address – before releasing codes to you. I have tried most over the last few years and have, for the most part, regretted the experiences.

There is also no guarantee that the codes some sites give you will even work. By then, it is too late and they have your email address as well. I had mostly resigned myself to never finding a voucher code site on the internet that was honest, that worked, and that didn’t require personal information in return for a voucher.

The last straw was when ordering a Dominos Pizza for myself and 5 friends about 6 months ago. Horrified when the check-out price came to just shy of £100 I frantically began searching for vouchers I could use. After parting with my email address on 3 different sites and getting 3 different codes – not one of them actually worked.

I pretty much gave up at that point.

New Player – NetVoucherCodes.co.uk

An email from a friend and fellow blogger Gamer In Debt pointed me in the direction of someone new. I was mildly skeptical because of past experiences, but given it was from a fellow personal finance blogger that I’ve come to know and exchange comments with I figured I had nothing to lose trying it out.

I’ve been exclusively using Net Voucher Codes for the past 2 weeks and I think I’ve found ‘my one’. The App works on both android and iPhone, and crucially for me, their website doesn’t demand your email address (or any other personal information) before giving up codes that actually work.

Give them a try if you’ve had similar prior experiences to me. With no demands for your contact details and inside leg measurements, you’ve nothing to lose other than some money off your bill!