The idea of maintaining my status as The List Queen just wears me out some days and frankly, I feel that I have outgrown the need to be pressured into doing more than my body or brain feels inclined to do simply because some random ink scratchings on a piece of paper mean that the task is on THE LIST. (sigh!)

As I’ve been having a bit of a rethink about some potential life changes, I ordered one book online, received it last week, and have been reading it in approximately 10-12 page snippets for the last 5 days. The book is called The 4-Hour Work Week and the author encourages his readers to step AWAY from the 9 to 5 concept and take a series of mini-retirements OR to find a way to create the kind of career that can be done outside of an office altogether by just a few hours of online effort each week. I am only 60 pages into this book and I can already understand why it is a New York Times bestseller.

The author,Timothy Ferriss, emphasises that this manner of living is not simply for the gap-year 20-somethings out there in the world — it’s a way of life that could be embraced by anyone at any age who is willing to live unconventionally.

Goodness — that rings a lot of bells in my head!

I’m been thinning out the household items, donating to charities, and getting better organised. The idea of living with less possessions registers more strongly with each passing month — less to insure, less to fret about, less to keep clean.

Ferriss goes a step further in The 4-Hour Work Week when he introduces the idea of severing ties with your former job and living in or travelling to exotic locales just because you CAN as a result of being released from the prison of the 40-80 hour work week that is considered the norm in most societies. And if you either create your own job or follow some of his suggestions, you are able to have an ‘office’ anywhere in the world and outsource most of the physical labour to Virtual Assistants who keep things running smoothly.

I’ll continue to suggest more of these types of books in coming columns because I believe that there are rather a LOT of us who have ‘gypsy feet’ and yet still need to earn an income while we travel.

Lots to think about!