When a friend of mine ran out of better ideas, he invented the shoebox bill payment system.
Every Sunday he would pull out a shoebox stuffed with unpaid bills, draw one at random, pay it, and keep going until the money ran out. Whatever was left in the box waited for next week’s draw. Or the week after. Or the week after that.
He once received a demand letter from a creditor who had grown tired of waiting. His response was to write back and inform them that if they weren’t going to be nicer about it, they would simply miss out on next week’s draw.
I don’t know if he actually sent that letter. But I do know that this is not a good way to live.
The shoebox method is funny until it isn’t. And the reason it fails isn’t really about money. It’s about the absence of a system. Without rules you’ve agreed to follow in advance, every decision becomes a fresh argument with yourself. You put things off because there’s no clear trigger telling you what to do next. The bills pile up not because you can’t pay them, but because there’s no structure telling you when and how.
A bill payment system doesn’t have to be complicated. It just needs to be a set of agreed rules. Pay this one first because it has the highest penalty. Pay this one on the fifteenth because that’s when the account clears. Keep this much in reserve because unexpected things happen. Simple rules, applied consistently, produce results that random effort never will.
But here’s what most people don’t realise about systems. The same logic that makes a bill payment system work is the logic that makes an online business work. Without agreed rules guiding what you create, what you name it, how you price it, and when you retire it, you end up doing what my mate did with his shoebox. You make it up each time and hope for the best.
I was reminded of this recently when I came across a set of 8 rules for making money online. One of them explains something I found genuinely interesting: why a product called Inner Sanctum Secrets disappears from the market, while one called Dangerous Ideas keeps selling. The name, the positioning, the rules around it all determine the outcome. Not luck. Not timing. Rules.
If you’ve been building your online income without a clear system behind it, this is worth a look.
Check out the 8 rules for making money online here:
