Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done (Book Highlights)

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If you are serious about dramatically improving your personal finances (like getting rid of credit card debt), the first step is to find out exactly where your money goes – track every dollar for a month using a spending log. I recall it being quite uncomfortable, but also eye-opening. In the same way, the book Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Vanderkam is based on the detailed hour-by-hour time diaries of thousands of people.

What characteristics make some people both feel less busy yet still spend time on the activities that are important to them? Some of the highlights below you may have seen elsewhere, but I did discover some new, actionable advice.

Know where your time goes. Track it. Reflect.

As a born skeptic, I had long been fascinated by what these logs showed about the blind spots people have about time. There can be great gaps between how we think we spend our time and reality as recorded. People claim to have no leisure time and then can recount in detail what happened on the most recent Big Bang Theory. Or—I was guilty of this one—we feel like we spend hours unloading the dishwasher, only to learn it takes five minutes each time, the four times per week we do it.

First, people who feel like they have enough time are exceedingly mindful of their time. They know where the time goes. They accept ownership of their lives and think through their days and weeks ahead of time. They also reflect on their lives, figuring out what worked and what didn’t.

It is not that people who have more free time have the time to reflect. After all, people with low time-perception scores actually spend more time on social media and TV than people with high time-perception scores. Instead, people allocate time to thinking and reflecting, and then they feel that they have more time.

Get rid of time-wasting activities. Check your e-mail less often. Check your phone less often. It wastes time, makes you more anxious, and it doesn’t create lasting memories. Be aware and perhaps limit your TV time.

They scrub their lives of anything that does not belong there. This includes self-imposed time burdens, such as constant connectivity, that clog time for no good reason. Indeed, one of the most striking findings of my survey was the gap in estimated phone checks per hour between people who felt relaxed about time and those who felt anxious.

Accept the “good enough” and even “better than nothing”. Aim for small, daily habits that move you steadily towards your goals. Five minutes towards your goal every day is so much better than nothing.

They let go of expectations of perfection and big results in the short run. Instead, they decide that good enough is good enough, knowing that steady progress over the long run is unstoppable.

What type of person do you want to be? What do you want to be known for spending your time on? Pick your worthwhile struggle. Spend time on the important people in your life.

There is freedom from things we don’t want to do, but there is also freedom to do the things we want to do, and figuring out the right balance requires understanding when commitments are burdens and when they are benefits.

These choices involve commitments, but they also stretch time, because as you choose to spend time on these things, you become in your mind the kind of person who has the time to spend on these things.

Happiness requires effort. It is not just bestowed; it is the earned interest on what you choose to pay in.

If my anticipating self wanted to do something, my remembering self will be glad to have done it. Indeed, my experiencing self may even enjoy parts of it. I am tired now, but I will always be tired, and we draw energy from meaningful things.

Outsource the other pain points if possible. Outsource the chores and errands that cause the most stress and/or block other productive pursuits.

In my life, learning to use childcare strategically has been a big breakthrough.

Fight for more flexible hours or less hours at work. The author shares stories about an engineer that had to find a new job first and threaten to quit, before the old employer would allow them to work at home for 4 days a week. (Sounds familiar!) Others have cut their work hours to 80% of full-time or 50% of full-time (if they can afford the accompanying loss in income). However, I found this quote to be useful work advice:

Of course, not all organizations or jobs are amenable to part-time work, and sometimes going off a full-time track can have far-reaching implications for a person’s career. I find that part-time options tend to work best in careers (such as medicine) where hours are more set and you are either in the office or not. The danger in other kinds of salaried work, as my time-diary studies have found, is that if no one knows how many hours anyone is working, “part-time” can often mean full-time hours for less pay. If that sounds like the reality of your industry, it might be a more satisfying option to hunt for (or craft) a job you love, and then negotiate for flexible hours in lieu of extra cash. If you do elect to take a pay cut to go part-time, work out a schedule where you get real days off—for example, you don’t go into the office Thursday or Friday—rather than accept vague promises of a reduced workload. This has the virtue of reducing work hours and commuting time too.

Ready to do your own time diary? The author provides free timesheets (including PDF, xls, and Google Sheets versions) for her 168 Hours Time Tracking Challenge at LauraVanderkam.com where you can track your own time for a week.

After tracking your time, look back over your schedule and ask yourself a few questions: What do I like about my schedule? What would I like to spend more time doing? What would I like to spend less time doing? How can I make that happen?

This book was published in 2018, but the author also has a new book Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters that just came out October 2022, although I have not read it and don’t know how it differs from this book.

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How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Published 100+ Years Ago, Still Practical Advice Today

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Either Jonathan Clements or Jason Zweig (both long-time, award-winning personal finance columnists) once wrote that personal finance writing was all about finding the 1,000th different way to discuss the same five basic concepts. Early in the book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1908, is the following mention of their professional ancestors:

Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence whose violence proves the interest they excite. Recently, in a daily organ, a battle raged round the question whether a woman can exist nicely in the country on £85 a year.

100 years later, we have the exact same debates. 100 years later, financial freedom is still whether you control how you spend your time. Work is still trading your life energy (time) for money, and financial freedom means creating a different source of money so you can stop trading your life energy (time) away. We are all given 24 hours a day.

You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions.

For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.

This may also sound familiar:

Which of us is not saying to himself—which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: “I shall alter that when I have a little more time”?

I assumed that this would be a philosophical book, but was pleasantly surprised at the amount of practical and actionable advice inside. Please read the book for the full and original message; I am crudely paraphrasing below.

Notice that you want more out of life. I call this the “itch”. The “itch” is what makes people seek out and devour information about financial freedom.

If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.

And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish something outside their formal programme is common to all men who in the course of evolution have risen past a certain level.

Realize that even with a full-time job, you DO have control over part of your day. Most of us will spend at least a couple decades working 8-9 hours a day, 5 days a week while building up those other income sources. However, even if you spend 10 hours a day working/commuting and 8 hours a day sleeping/eating/grooming, that still leaves 6 hours where you are free to do millions of different things. (Caregivers of young children and/or other family members: I know.) The point is, if you consciously spend even a fraction of that time on an invigorating activity, you can feel better about your entire life.

If my typical man wishes to live fully and completely he must, in his mind, arrange a day within a day. And this inner day, a Chinese box in a larger Chinese box, must begin at 6 p.m. and end at 10 a.m. It is a day of sixteen hours; and during all these sixteen hours he has nothing whatever to do but cultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men. During those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income.

If a man makes two-thirds of his existence subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can he hope to live fully and completely? He cannot.

Spend 30 minutes each weekday morning doing meditation and/or mindfulness training. Either wake up a bit earlier, or use your commute. Training your mind is a worthwhile activity and strengthens it like a muscle. You will be more patient and focused with your co-workers, your kids, and yourself.

People say: “One can’t help one’s thoughts.” But one can. The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurts us or gives us” pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent. Hence, it seems to me, the first business of the day should be to put the mind through its paces […]

When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no matter what, to begin with). You will not have gone ten yards before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking round the corner with another subject. Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the station you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not despair. Continue. Keep it up. You will succeed. […]

I do not care what you concentrate on, so long as you concentrate. It is the mere disciplining of the thinking machine that counts. But still, you may as well kill two birds with one stone, and concentrate on something useful. I suggest—it is only a suggestion—a little chapter of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.

Set aside 90 minutes per evening, three weeknights a week. During this time, you must find something that challenges your curiosity and makes you excited! If you pick the right activity, it will give you energy, not make you more tired. You might learn to rock climb, play tennis, rehearse for a community theater role, ballroom dance, read poetry, anything. You must consciously choose this activity and persevere with it for 3 months. It’s hard to break old habits, so that is why it is only for every other day.

But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty. They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a tennis match. Instead of saying, “Sorry I can’t see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club,” you must say, “…but I have to work.” This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul.

On your commute home, spend some time reflecting. What are the principles that you chose to live by? Are your actions aligned with those principles? If not, how can we fix that?

What leads to the permanent sorrowfulness of burglars is that their principles are contrary to burglary. If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for them; all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree.

We do not reflect. I mean that we do not reflect upon genuinely important things; upon the problem of our happiness, upon the main direction in which we are going, upon what life is giving to us, upon the share which reason has (or has not) in determining our actions, and upon the relation between our principles and our conduct.

Bottom line. Give it some modern edits, a snazzy book cover, and a powerful media blitz, and the 1908 short book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett could be a modern bestseller. Don’t wait until retirement to scratch those itches. By carefully changing how you spend specifically selected hours a week and consciously choosing activities that excite, strengthen, and invigorate you, you can improve your entire life today. (The book doesn’t touch your weekends.) As the copyright has expired, you can read it for free via Project Gutenberg (or search on Libby). A final spicy quote:

If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.

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Digital Minimalism Book Review: Parallels With Time and Money Management

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I initially stopped reading the NY Times bestseller Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport midway through because it seemed to target a problem that I did not have – I don’t spend much time on social media and deliberately avoid the front page news cycle. However, I’m glad that I went back as it contained many useful parallels with time management and financial independence.

Here is my favorite definition of digital minimalism:

A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Read that quote again but remove “of technology” and “online”, and isn’t that just a good philosophy for life in general?

This thought process also aligns with the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:

A truly practical approach to making the best use of time demands that we stop trying to deny the undeniable, acknowledging not merely that we might not get around to everything but that we definitely never will. That we’re guaranteed to have to abandon certain ambitions, disappoint certain people and drop certain balls in order to make time for doing a few things that count.

I also appreciated this description of the digital maximalist:

Notice, this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention. A maximalist is very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might miss out on something that’s the least bit interesting or valuable.

Put another way: minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

This comparison of minimalism vs. maximalism was the most useful part of the book for me. You can apply it to everything – your monthly spending, your collection of clothes/gadgets/stuff, the food you consume, how you spend your time every day. Minimalism is about where to draw the line, and how that line is probably closer to “less” than you think.

Happily missing out. I am working to identify my maximalist tendencies, and I like the phrase “happily missing out” as the opposite of FOMO. Instead of trying to moderate your use on something that isn’t clearly awesome, it’s easier to simply cut it out completely. Delete the app from your phone. Cancel the subscription. Don’t let the junk food enter you home. End the toxic relationship. Get rid of the widget that didn’t work out (even if it was expensive). Sell the regrettable investment (even at a loss). After the initial shock, I usually end up saying “Why didn’t I do that earlier?”

If you are interested in changing your tech habits, here’s the basic actionable strategy of the book:

  • Perform a 30-day “Digital Declutter” where you completely stop using social media and other optional digital apps.
  • During this reset, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful. Socialize in-person, spend time alone without your phone, build something with your hands.
  • After 30 days, reintroduce the apps carefully into your life one-by-one. They should only return if they are the best way to help you achieve something you deeply value.

Even this could have parallels to personal finance:

  • Perform a 30-day “Expense Fast” where you stop every optional expense.
  • Experiment by replacing your expenses with alternatives. Think of ways to eat everything edible that is already in your house. Realize that you have 10 different subscriptions and you don’t need them all. Walk outside instead of the gym. Ask someone to walk with you. Talk with an old friend on the phone. Don’t buy a single piece of new clothing.
  • After 30 days, reintroduce each expense life one-by-one. Some things you may realize should be a high priority. That’s good. Some things you may realize are low priority. Happily spend your money on the high priority items, and happily miss out on the rest.
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Practical Time Management: The Won’t Do List vs. Must Do List

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80 years times 50 weeks a year is 4,000 weeks. If we’re lucky, that means we’ll have about 4,000 Mondays, 4,000 Saturdays, and that’s it. I’ve started reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, which suggests that all those productivity hacks look at this number the wrong way. “If only you did X, you could fit in Y more stuff into your day and then you’ll be happy!” But the more likely result is that even if you do X, and fit in Y more stuff, you’ll remain just as stressed and unsatisfied.

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandkids would work just 15 hours a week due to increases in productivity. Well, the productivity per worker did increase, but we still work close to the same number of hours per week. We can have food delivered to our door with an few taps, but how many of us feel an abundance of free time? Even worse, we are “busy” but not because we are working on the things we want to be working on. We have an ever-growing “some day” list, so that we won’t have to face the truth that it is actually the “never” list.

So what’s the solution? This FT article Endless to-do list? Here’s how not to waste your life is an excerpt from the book. Here’s a good quote:

A truly practical approach to making the best use of time demands that we stop trying to deny the undeniable, acknowledging not merely that we might not get around to everything but that we definitely never will. That we’re guaranteed to have to abandon certain ambitions, disappoint certain people and drop certain balls in order to make time for doing a few things that count.

In the words of the creativity coach Jessica Abel, borrowing an insight from the world of personal finance, that means “paying yourself first” when it comes to time. What she means is doing at least a little of what you care about now, as opposed to banking on finding time for it in the future, once the decks are clear and life’s duties are out of the way. Life’s duties will never be out of the way. And so if you really mean it when you say you’d like to write a novel or spend more of your time with your ageing parents or fighting climate change, at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.

We need to remind ourselves to drop the relatively unimportant things in order to elevate the truly important ones.

Turning this into something little more concrete, here is my proposal:

  • Won’t Do List. Identify 2-3 lesser things that “would be nice” to do, but will simply end up a distraction from the really important things. Give them up. Leave them off your To Do list forever.
  • Must Do List. Identify one thing that you really want to do but have been putting off for too long. Do it for an hour early in the day, even if it pushes other things out of the way. You must work on it, even a little. It’ll probably be hard, which is why you put it off earlier. You may even discover that you really don’t want to do it after all, but at least now you know and can move on. (This is similar to the Charlie Munger “work for yourself an hour each day” advice.)

On a daily basis, I try to cut out the following things to add some time to my day. I haven’t solved my huge pile of e-mail, but I have given up on “Inbox Zero”, check it less often, and am more at peace that I will miss some things the first time around. This isn’t right for everyone, but I also limit myself to an average of 15 minutes a day on Twitter, 5 minutes on Instagram, and zero minutes on Facebook and TikTok. Social media just reminds me of junk food that tastes great in the moment but has little nutrition and I’m hungry again in 20 minutes. I believe Twitter has the most useful information, but filtering can be time-consuming. (I need Instagram to know where my favorite food trucks are at.) I finally decided cut cable TV and gave up following most live sports in 2020. I will miss watching it, but it does free up a lot of time.

Bottom line. You can’t have it all. Don’t fit more in. Cut things out, and lift a few key things up. The finance/time analogy is that you can afford nearly any one thing, but you can’t afford everything. Trying to do everything will keep you “busy” until you run out of weeks:

(image credit: Financial Times)

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Are You Unknowingly a Time Billionaire?

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The 2021 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting is streaming live on Yahoo Finance this weekend, and I am reminded of a lesser known quote from Warren Buffett about what is truly valuable. I believe he has said this elsewhere, but I found it repeated in a 2020 commencement speech (YouTube link) at the University of Nebraska:

There is nobody I would rather be than a young person graduating from the University of Nebraska today. […] I would say this to the current year’s class: ‘I would love to trade places with any of them.’ They feel they’re going out into an uncertain world and all of that, but there’s never been a better time.

During a Tim Ferriss podcast, investor Graham Duncan discussed the concept of a “time billionaire” and how it is hard to understand the magnitude difference between a billion and a million.

Graham Duncan: I was listening to a guy introduced a speaker a while ago. And he was saying people don’t really understand the difference between billionaires and millionaires. He said a million seconds is like 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.

This means a 20-year old is technically a time multi-billionaire. If you’re in your 40s or even early 50s, the odds are likely that you still have a billion seconds left as well. Have you considered how valuable that is? One of the richest people in the world would gladly trade places with you. I’m betting that nearly anyone with a billion dollars would trade it for a billion more seconds.

This Pomp Letter article and Wealest article both expand upon this idea of appreciating the value of time, including how young people should use this time to their advantage. Don’t take for granted the ability to throw yourself at something nonstop. I think short periods of crazy 100-hours-a-week focus is underrated. Take your shot. If you fail, so what?

If you fail, you have nothing, which is the same position you’re in right now.

You have no mortgage to pay, no family to support, and nothing to lose.

This makes you powerful. Your upside is many times greater than your downside.

Also mentioned is the Life in Weeks calendar from WaitButWhy.

Time is a limited resource, and just like with money, you have to spend it wisely and consciously. Don’t waste it without intention. Look at how many hours we spend on consuming media, via Visual Capitalist.

Bottom line. We can look up to certain wealthy people for knowledge and wisdom, but there are other important resources beyond money. Yes, it’s a cliché, but it is still so easily forgotten in this busy, competitive, stressful world. Many of us are extraordinarily wealthy in time, wealthy in love and relationships, and/or wealthy with a healthy mind and body. Someone out there would pay billions of dollars for what you have. I must remind myself to appreciate my wealth in all forms, and use it intentionally. I worry about running of out money, but also running out of time.

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Money Buys Happiness… If You Outsource Your Unwanted Chores

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happyfaceFirst, you were told that the best way to buy happiness was to buy experiences, not things. Other research then said happiness can come from buying the right things. Here’s another academic study making the rounds (WaPo, NYT): Buying time promotes happiness by Whilans et al, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Abstract:

Around the world, increases in wealth have produced an unintended consequence: a rising sense of time scarcity. We provide evidence that using money to buy time can provide a buffer against this time famine, thereby promoting happiness. Using large, diverse samples from the United States, Canada, Denmark, and The Netherlands (n = 6,271), we show that individuals who spend money on time-saving services report greater life satisfaction. A field experiment provides causal evidence that working adults report greater happiness after spending money on a time-saving purchase than on a material purchase. Together, these results suggest that using money to buy time can protect people from the detrimental effects of time pressure on life satisfaction.

The study found that spending money on time-saving activities was more efficient than material purchases in improving life satisfaction and decrease stress. This applied across different countries, careers, and income levels.

Here are some examples of time-saving activities:

  • House cleaner
  • Grocery delivery
  • Dry cleaning, laundry
  • Lawn care
  • Home repair
  • Cooking service
  • Shopping service
  • Shorter commute (taxi vs. bus)
  • Moving services
  • Junk removal services

For example, instead of spending $125 on clothes or gadgets, you’ll be happier if you spend $125 and the house is cleaned for you every two weeks. The more the activity is a chore that you dread doing yourself, the better.

This seems perfectly reasonable. I’m betting most of us have washing machines and dryers. Many also have dishwashers. That’s paying money to save time. I also paid more for a house with a shorter commute. This article about “extreme” commuting (4 hours+ total every weekday) sounded quite horrible. Amazon… enough said.

I must admit, I still have a hard time outsourcing many household tasks. I don’t love doing home repair, but I do like that after something breaks (and I spend a couple of hours on YouTube and trips to Home Depot), I have learned something new. I should think about what tasks I hate doing the most.

Bottom line: You can buy happiness by spending money to have more positive experiences. You can also buy happiness by avoiding negative experiences (i.e. having to spend your time on unpleasant tasks).

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

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My Hard Things + What I’m Willing to Give Up

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myhardthingsAs a follow-up to my post on choosing your hard things, I decided to share what I came up with. Keep in my these are MY hard things. You could have the two lists completely swapped, and that would get no judgment from me. The entire point is to do things aligned with your values and stop caring what anyone else thinks!

My hard things:

  • Save enough money and set things up to live off my investment income with minimal worry.
  • Spend lots of quality time with family, especially my three daughters. (I have 3 kids?!? How the $*%# did that happen?)
  • Spend some time alone reading and thinking about things I find interesting (ex. finance, cooking, off-grid living).
  • Exercise regularly, mostly by running around outdoors with my daughters. If I’m lucky, this will also include hiking or playing tennis with friends. If I’m really lucky, I’ll be skiing.

The things I am willing to give up:

  • A steady, prestigious job and high W-2 income.
  • “Better things” like a larger house, faster car, or nicer toys/clothes.
  • Watching television.
  • Regular ski trips, partying at bars and clubs, and Las Vegas runs with friends.
  • Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.

I’m not there yet, but it’s nice to have them written down. If I’m not spending my time working towards one of my hard things, then I’m not being productive even with the newest To-Do List app, ergonomic standing desk, and pristine e-mail inbox. I should also be careful to stop doing the things on my “Give Up” list.

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Choose Your Hard Things: You’ll Never Be Productive Enough for Everything

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stopwatch2

I was catching up on some longreads and enjoyed Why time management is ruining our lives by Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian. Here are some quick notes.

Inbox Zero. I’d heard of “Inbox Zero” where you keep your e-mail inbox completely empty, but didn’t know that the inventor Merlin Mann later gave up pushing the concept because he found himself “typing bullshit that I hoped would please my book editor” instead of spending time with his daughter. Meanwhile, we now have the (finished) book Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford that proposes that being messy can create better results.

My personal theory is that the organization level of your e-mail inbox simply doesn’t matter. If something is truly urgent they’ll get in touch somehow, likely by sending you another e-mail!

The productivity treadmill. Most of us have never had to walk a great distance to gather water. We no longer have to chop wood; we just turn on the heater. We have separate appliances to both wash and dry our clothes. There are countless ways to avoid cooking. Yet, we are all so busy. I found this paragraph quite observant (and sad):

The time-pressure problem was always supposed to get better as society advanced, not worse. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that within a century, economic growth would mean that we would be working no more than 15 hours per week – whereupon humanity would face its greatest challenge: that of figuring out how to use all those empty hours. Economists still argue about exactly why things turned out so differently, but the simplest answer is “capitalism”. Keynes seems to have assumed that we would naturally throttle down on work once our essential needs, plus a few extra desires, were satisfied. Instead, we just keep finding new things to need. Depending on your rung of the economic ladder, it’s either impossible, or at least usually feels impossible, to cut down on work in exchange for more time.

I would add that the average person spends hours of time watching TV to recuperate from the stress of each day.

Less is more. Don’t work harder to fit more stuff in. Sit quietly and figure out the really important stuff. Do that. Drop the rest.

But in the meantime, we might try to get more comfortable with not being as efficient as possible – with declining certain opportunities, disappointing certain people, and letting certain tasks go undone. Plenty of unpleasant chores are essential to survival. But others are not – we have just been conditioned to assume that they are. It isn’t compulsory to earn more money, achieve more goals, realise our potential on every dimension, or fit more in. In a quiet moment in Seattle, Robert Levine, a social psychologist from California, quoted the environmentalist Edward Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Being productive doesn’t help if you just add on more things. Don’t use being busy as a form of psychological avoidance:

The more you can convince yourself that you need never make difficult choices – because there will be enough time for everything – the less you will feel obliged to ask yourself whether the life you are choosing is the right one.

With so much noise, is it any wonder that “mindfulness” is in? When your mind is quiet, it is easier to realize the life that is true to yourself, as opposed to the life others expect of you. To loosely paraphrase Merlin Mann: Choose a select few hard things and stick with them. Because they’re your things.

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William James Told People to Automate Their Lives in 1892

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william james headshot

Inside the book that taught me the parallels of grit and financial freedom was a brief mention of another book called Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. While reading about the daily routines of notable individuals, I came across this quote from philosopher and psychologist William James (emphasis mine):

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

The quote is great, but I was surprised by the date – James wrote this in 1892!

Creating good habits means that it takes little effort to doing the right thing. If you’re forcing it, like going on a crash diet, every time you do so you’ll expend energy. Willpower is like a muscle. If your house is full of junk food, you’ll constantly spend energy trying to not eat it. If you spend hours online shopping, you’ll spend energy trying not to buy things you don’t need. Your willpower muscle will weaken, and eventually you’ll won’t have the energy to say no. If you have to consciously make the decision to save money every month, you’re likely to forget.

Make life easier for yourself. Automate everything you can. Remove all the junk food in the house. Unsubscribe from that daily “sale” newsletter from Groupon or Macy’s. Sign up for automatic paycheck withdrawals into your retirement account. Make the default choice – the one that happens with the least energy – the one that is best for you.

Of course, the book also pointed out that James in real life kept no regular schedule, was chronically indecisive, and a constant procrastinator. Reminds me of this XKCD comic:

time_management

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MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


FileThis App Review: Automatically Backup Your Online Statements

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Update 2023: FileThis is shutting down.

Old post:

filethis_applogo

A few months ago on my post about Paperless vs. Paper Statements, I received this helpful comment from reader Daveraham:

I like the services FileThis.com. It’s setup similar to MInt, where it stores account information, but instead of fetching dollar amounts and transactions, it grabs every statement available and stores them where you direct. Personally I store it an evernote account and then periodically pull it off to store on a removable HD that get’s stored in a fireproof box. Overkill?? Sure…. But its the point. You want to keep that snapshot of data for a long period of time.

I made a mental note to check the site out and… promptly forgot. I was again reminded in this Liz Weston article about apps to organize your financial life. In November 2015, FileThis announced their 2.0 version with new features. You can use the FileThis.com website, iOS app, or Android app (1.0 version only for now).

FileThis is now one of many “bill organizers” that ask for your account passwords in order to sift through your accounts and remind you of due dates. Personally, I don’t need or use due date reminders. I sit down at the end of every month, read through all my paper statements, track expenses, and pay my bills. I’m an old fart like that (although I do use free online billpay).

I previously shared that I maintain physical statements for critical financial accounts and have it mailed to a secure PO Box. But I also have several other financial accounts which are either dormant, temporarily opened for reviews or experiments, or have low balances which are set to paperless. Ideally, I would still log in and download those PDF statements every month and back them up. But I never do.

FileThis will log in and automatically download all your paperless statements and then save them to your cloud service of choice: Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Amazon Cloud, and more. You can even use their in-house storage (500 mb free). The cost options:

  • Free for up to six (6) connections. Checks weekly.
  • $2 a month ($20 a year upfront) for up to 12 connections. Checks weekly.
  • $5 a month ($50 a year upfront) for up to 30 connections. Checks daily.

Besides things like bank accounts, credit cards, and brokerage statements, FileThis will grab stuff from your mortgage provider, car loan servicer, cell phone bill, utility bills, insurance bills, and even online shopping accounts like Amazon. An added bonus is that they will even grab tax documents like 1099 forms.

I linked up a few accounts, the list is relatively extensive but it couldn’t find a local credit union. Here are some screenshots from my website and smartphone app.

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Remember that the actual files are on your cloud service. Here’s a screenshot from my Dropbox app. The files are stored in the folder Dropbox > Apps > FileThis.

filethis3

This is pretty cool. The initial download basically grabbed all the older documents that were available as well (up to last 3 years, supposedly). They’ll even grab PDF statements if you also get mailed paper statements (assuming they are available), giving you an additional backup copy.

By allowing backups directly to a third-party cloud service (Dropbox in my case), I will still have all of my online statements even if FileThis shuts down some day (remember Manilla?).

The trade-off here is that another FinTech startup has your account logins and passwords. Their security measures seem fair enough (encrypted SSL transmission, passwords are encrypted on server, the documents can be stored at your cloud service). I already track my paperless accounts in real-time with Mint, but I am willing to make this trade-off as I think it’s worth it to have my old statements backed up for me. (Why can’t Mint do this for me too?) The only other service I know that offers something similar is Finovera, but I think they store the statements on their own servers as opposed to your personal Dropbox.

As an existing user, if you sign up using my referral link, both you and I will receive an additional free connection (so you’d have a total of 7 free to start) and an additional 250 mb of free in-house cloud storage.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Everyone’s So Busy. Where Does All The Time Go?

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stopwatch2In the provocatively-titled article How Everything We Tell Ourselves About How Busy We Are Is A Lie, the writer interviews the director of the Americans’ Use of Time Project and takes data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey (ATUS). Here is my condensed version:

  • The average American works an average of 7.55 hours per day.
  • When comparing detailed time diaries with just asking people for a number, people tended to overestimate their work hours by 5% to 10%.
  • The average American sleeps an average of 8.75 hours per day.
  • On an average day, women spend 2 hours and 10 minutes doing housework, while men spend 1 hour and 17 minutes. That’s roughly a 60/40 ratio.
  • Most people have over 40 hours of free time per week.
  • Watching television takes up 50% of that free time.

Basically, we may feel more busy, but actually have more free time than folks from 40 years ago. Half that free time is used to watch TV.

I suppose the takeaway here is that our perceptions may differ from reality. If we tracked our activities in a time diary, we’d might discover some new things about our own schedules and habits. Perhaps we should all try to carve out an hour each day to work for ourselves.

Alternatively, I’d like to figure out how to really enjoy my free time without half my mind worrying about other stuff. So far, playing sports and swimming with my babies has been the most effective.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Manilla.com Review: The End of Paper Bills?

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone.

Most people still elect to receive paper bills, even though almost every vendor is pushing paperless. Why? Personally, my e-mail inbox is so much more cluttered with crap compared to my post office mailbox. It’s very easy for me to forget about a short e-mail saying “you have a bill waiting” with 86 other unread e-mails shouting at me. But then again, I do end up paying the bills online, so perhaps there is a better way? This is where Manilla.com comes in.

Making Paperless Billing Better

All your bills are organized in one central place. You give Manilla your login information*, and they handle the rest. If you need to look up an old bill, you don’t need to open the filing cabinet or reset your password (again) to that archaic water department website designed in 1995. You can just view or print out the .PDF from Manilla. They promise to store your bills for free, forever. I do wish there was a way to download all your stored bills at once, perhaps in a .zip file.

You may find that Manilla may not list some of your local vendors, although you can suggest future account providers for them to add. I couldn’t find my local water utility. You can also add magazine subscriptions, frequent flier mileage programs, and hotel rewards programs.

Easy-to-manage bill reminders. You can request e-mail or text message reminders to 7 days, 3 days, and/or 1 day before the due date. I need these repeated reminders, and it’s nice that they turn off automatically after they see that the bill has been paid.
[Read more…]

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.