For me, the best thing about this whole earning a living online thing is that it really doesn’t take much time to maintain existing sites and to retain a consistent level of income. If I put in a few hours a week, it’s likely that I’ll keep earning the same amount. True, the more work I put in, the more I’m likely to earn, but to stay the same doesn’t require a lot of time.

So… I see this as a huge opportunity to attempt to accomplish a few things I’ve always been meaning to do. I’ll still put in as much work on my sites as possible, but will have lots of free time to get other things done as well.

Here are a few of my goals:

• Learn Mandarin - I’ve always wanted to learn a language that nobody would ever expect me to be able to speak and I think Mandarin is it. I’m under no illusions that in six months I’ll be anywhere close to good at it, but I want to put in a good effort. I’ve been in touch with a language school so will head out to chat with them tomorrow. It’ll be nice to get my brain cells working again.
• Take guitar lessons - I’ve always wanted to learn an instrument. I’m not sure I have a musical bone in my body but if I don’t have a crack at it, I’ll never know. I guess the main issue will be finding a willing, English speaking teacher here.
• Learn PHP - I’m constantly frustrated at not knowing how all those PHP related things work and think if I could learn a bit I’d be able to do some pretty cool things on my sites. I’m hoping I can learn a bit of PHP with some reading, online tutorials and a lot of trial and error.
• Get fit - I love going to the gym but I hate going after a long day at work and a hellish commute. Without these two things forcing me home to laziness, I’m hoping to join a gym and actually go. I want to cycle across a country at some point and am thinking Myanmar or Laos at the end of the year could both be good options. To do that without killing myself I’ll have to ge tmy arse in gear.

I think it would be a waste to have so much free time and not fill it with lessons or things that are productive. If the internet implodes one day and I find myself back in the office you can bet I’ll be kicking myself for not taking advantage of such a great opportunity.

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I have to admit that I think this self employment thing is for me. I think my boss might be a bit soft though. She lets me sleep in until 11am, take long lunch breaks surf the internet far to often, and knock off early. I’m making up for it though by working on the weekend so maybe she’s not a total pushover.

I quit my regular job last Wednesday and on Thursday morning, my first day of freedom, I was woken up at 6am by the sounds of a yapping Chihuahua running down the street and my stressed out housemate chasing it, Benny Hill style, trying to get the thing back inside. The first thing I did was laugh, the second thing I did was glance over at my clock to see how much longer I could sleep for before getting up for work. It took a few minutes for it to register that I didn’t have to get up for work at all and it was a damn fine feeling, let me tell ya!

I’m just over a week into working for myself and, while I haven’t really managed to get much done, I am making a bit of progress here and there. I don’t feel so bad about having those wasted days where I spend all my time working on something complicated, accomplish nothing but learn a few new things in the process. In the past, I didn’t have time to mess about with this sort of stuff but now I can see the benefits behind the learning and if I have to waste a day or two then it’s not the big deal it used to be because I’ll have plenty of time the next day to get things done.

I’ve got until January 7th before heading off on my travels and I’m going to set a few goals here so I know what I need to get done before I go.

• Build Wanderstruck.com - This will be my regular travel blog as well as a travel magazine type site and I want to have it up and running by the time I leave so I can update it on the road without any hassles. So far Ive been tweaking a theme and have learned a lot of CSS but there are some things I want to do that are a bit tricky and that has me worried.
• Sort out my revenue an expenses and get an accountant - I’m avoiding this but it needs to be done. Sorting out my revenue will be easy but I’m not sure what I can count towards my expenses, especially once I hit the road, and that’s where the accountant comes in. I’m hoping it’ll just involve a day or two of research and a couple emails or phone calls. Once I get this figure out it’ll be a big weight off.
• Finish my working holidays site - I have a lot of books here at home that will help me with research for this site. I won’t be carting them around with me so that means Id better get cracking and finish this thing finally.
• Transfer hosts for one of my sites - I need to move a site from Powweb to Dreamhost to save myself $100 when my hosting needs to be renewed in February. This isn’t the sort of thing I’ll want to do when I’m travelling so I need to set aside a few hours to do this. I also need to add Server Side Includes into this site to make updating easier. I’ll probably kll the forum as well because it’s a pain in my arse so I’ll need to use the info in the posts to write up some more articles.

I asked my boss and she says I can have the week around Xmas off so I’ll have a lot to cram in after the holidays. If I can’t manage a post between now and then, have a good Santa day!

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When I think about my motivation for wanting to earn a living online it’s a pretty simple answer for me - freedom. I want to be able to do what I want, when I want. At the moment, travelling is what I want to do. Two years from now it could be a different story. I might want to settle somewhere and pursue other interests. Such as…

• Art - I used to draw and paint portraits when I was younger. Mainly sports art but I also did portraits of friends and family and stuff as gifts. I’d love to get back into this and spend more time being all artsy fartsy.
• Music - I’d also love to learn how to play guitar. I’m pretty sure I’m tone deaf (except when I’m singing in the shower) so this might be totally impossible but I won’t know until I try. Or I could just take the guitar with me into the shower where I will no doubt become a rock god.
• Photography - I was always convinced that the only way to take a really great photo was to have a really great camera. Now that I’ve got one of those fancy pants SLR things I have realised that I am, in fact, just a crap photographer. I really should read the instruction manual.
• Languages - I’ve been threatening for years to learn a language. I guess this sort of goes hand in hand with travel since it’s better to be surrounded by the language than to be sitting in a classroom 3 hours a week. I’d really love to head off to some random place like Yemen and learn Arabic. Yemen… yeah man!
• Study - I’d also love to spend some time honing my web skills in a real, live school. So far I’ve pretty much stumbled and bumbled my way through everything by trial and error. I don’t think I’ve even read a single book the whole time. I’d be really interested in taking an actual web design course and maybe, if I’m feeling brave and brainy, some PHP or programming stuff.

So I’m definitely not after money for money’s sake. I want to buy back my time and be able to pursue pretty much anything that happens to capture my imagination at the time. If I decide one day that I want to join the circus then, damnit, I’m going to join!

What sorts of passions other than travel would you pursue if you found yourself with loads of time on your hands?

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I’ll be heading off to Asia one way sometime in mid January with a laptop (that I have yet to buy… there’s one for the list), a backpack full of the usual backpacker stuff, a bit of money and no intention to return to the rat race anytime soon.

I look forward to working on the road but I’d rather keep it to about 2 hours a day of content updates rather than spending a lot longer building sites from scratch, debugging current sites and sorting out all the things I’ve avoided for too long. I don’t mind doing these things on a rainy day in London but when I’m at some beachy location with the sun shining and the beer flowing the chances of my getting more than a few hours a day of work done are pretty minimal. Actually I can guarantee it’s not going to happen.

That means I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’m working full time at the moment and attempting to maintain a social life so things will be busy but I’ve really got to get cracking if I’m going to have the level of freedom I want once I hit the road.

So in an effort to motivate myself and sort my thoughts out I’ve come up with a list of all the things I’d like to get done before I leave for Asia in the mid January 2008:

• Add more content and photos to my London site - I’ll be moving away soon so it’s silly not to take advantage of living here while I can. I’ll probably lose interest in the site once I move away in mid December so adding to it as much as possible is a priority.
• Overhaul my Working Holiday site - I’m working on overhauling this site because it’s not performing nearly as well as I think it can. I’ve got big things in mind that will take a lot of research and I’m putting a lot of care into the design so this one’s a biggie.
• Move my final site to Dreamhost - I’m currently shelling out around $100/year to host one of my niche sites with Powweb which is pointless since I can whack it onto Dreamhost for free. The problem is that I have a forum and need to sort out moving the database over. Might sound simple to some but I’m a bit tech challenged. I need to work this out at some point to save myself $100. Once I do this all of my sites will be with Dreamhost which is cost effective and will make managing my sites a bit easier.
• Revive Travoholic.com - This is my oldest site, Google loves it and it performs well but, lets be honest, it’s crap. I’ve neglected it for way too long because with nearly 1000 pages it’s pretty unruly and undergoing an overhaul is a bit intimidating. There’s a lot of good information hidden in there and I think the site has a lot of potential, I just need to devise some way to tap into it. This is a huge project that I might not get to. I’m think I’m afraid of my website.
• Set up a travel blog - I think the internet needs another travel blog. Ok that’s a lie but I’m going to put mine out there anyways because it will be great. Ok that’s a lie too. I want one just because.
• Join more affiliate programs - While I’ve acknowledged that affiliate programs are the way forward, I have yet to get off of my arse to do anything about it. I need to spend some quality time scouring the internet for programs that are good matches for my sites.

I haven’t put increasing traffic or finding new income streams or stuff like that as goals because those are the sorts of things that I expect to be doing on the road. I guess I’m focusing on behind the scenes things, the infrastructure, and once I’ve got things how I want them I’ll focus my efforts on the other stuff.

I still expect to build the occasional new site after I leave if I come up with a good idea but I don’t want site construction to be the bulk of my work abroad so here’s hoping I can manage to achieve my goals!

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