Good morning, I am sitting in a café in Chiang Mai looking out of a window getting peppered with rain.

It provokes a thoughtful mood, as I reflect over my last few weeks.

I recently completed a four-week fitness camp in Phuket. It is an environment I was not used to being in.

It is a place dedicated to exercise, health, nutrition and of course Muay Thai. There was a different sort of status going on, in Fitness Street as it is known.

Now I am in Nimman, Chiang Mai, the digital nomad paradise, and again the values switch up where lifestyle, freedom and solo-preneurship are eagerly sought.

It is a refreshing experience seeing these perspectives after the hard work, striving in adversity and mission driven environment I have been in.

All these environments I identify with, and it was refreshing to see that there is life outside the hard-working hustle environment I have skewed towards.

Having time in different situations are allowing me to draw out which specific values I identify with, hard work, flexibility, few close relationships, and fitness.

It is time to design a life around these values

My ideal life would consist of starting my day doing 1-2 hours exercise, eating a healthy breakfast and then working 3-4 hours on my own business before lunch.

In the afternoon I would work for a couple more hours either on my business or another personal interest before exercising again.

This would leave the evening to eat and enjoy time with family, friends and personal interests.

However, I am not at that stage because, I don’t have my own business or in a relationship.

I need to work to attain my ideal life

Planning out my ideal day has given focus on the areas I need to work on.

It also helps to frame the type of business that I would like to create.

It is not one that involves selling my time but developing a product or service that can scale without me being at the center of it.

Therefore, I need to work to select a business model that suits this lifestyle and develop it around this framing.

But what does developing the idea look like?

Well, it is about empathizing, defining, ideation, prototyping and testing.

I have been generating a list of business ideas, but I now need to start selecting the most promising ideas and understand the problem from the user perspective.

In addition, I need to evaluate the competitive landscape to see whether my idea has a unique selling point and there is a market for it.

My target is to down select three to five ideas and go through the above empathizing loop to help define my ideas further.

There will be attrition in this process, and I expect to down select to one or two ideas which I can bring into the prototype stage to have a minimal viable product to test.

Using this process, I feel for the first time that I have a structure to develop my ideas.

So what will be my life for the next 12 months?

To achieve developing a working business, I need to be disciplined about how I spend my time.

It will involve getting up early to do one hour exercise, then having breakfast and working my new job, followed by a further hour of exercise in the evening.

In the evening and weekends, I will have to schedule around 10 hours a week on developing my business idea.

Just like a financial budget, I will need to track how I spend my time so that I can ensure that I make progress on my exercise and business development goals.

I have made steps, by taking on a less intense role but I know it is easy to veer to much in one direction.

Let’s see how I progress, but for now, my focus is putting this time budget into action!