Learn from my mistakes.
The other day a reader told me that my advice doesn’t work for people with responsibilities.
The guy had three kids, a job that paid the bills, and little free time.
And as is the case with many of the people who read me, I want to share three spiritual lessons that I have learned on my journey and have made me more spiritual and productive.
These lessons have saved me more than a thousand hours a year.
1. Be mindful
We have more time than we think.
I have responsibilities, too; I take care of a dependent 24/7. Therefore, although I don’t have children, I understand what it’s like to combine family life with work life.
Because of this, one of my obsessions has always been to save time.
To save time, the first thing I did was become aware of what I do daily.
I took paper and pencil and wrote down each daily task and the time it took me to do it.
In doing so, I discovered that a lot of my downtime was spent on transportation: 2 hours to get to work and 2 hours to get back.
Since I worked five days a week,
5 days x 4 hours of transportation per day x 52 weeks = 1040 hours per year lost in transportation.
That’s 43 days a year of total time sitting on transportation doing nothing.
And since I was working 160 a month (40 hours a week),
1040 hours of transportation / 160 hours per month = 6.5 months of work.
In other words, if the time I spent scrolling, sleeping, or looking out the window were spent working, that time would be the equivalent of working six and a half months a year at another job (my dream) full-time or a year part-time.
So I started riding public transportation using that time to fulfill my dreams by working on my projects while commuting to work.
Within a year and a half of doing this, I could quit my job and live my dream.
Lesson: take a pen and paper. Write down each daily task and, next to it, the time you spend on it. Find out where you can optimize your time and use it to fulfill your dreams.
2. Be f*cking kind
When I left my job at the multinational company and started working at home, I faced other kinds of problems, like the ones in the following list,
- My mother interrupted me all the time.
- Telephone arguments with clients.
- Angry neighbors play loud music.
All this made me work less than 75% of my capacity and exhausted my patience and energy.
It was like working with Windows Explorer and 25 tabs open: you get stuck constantly because you are consuming too many resources.
So I went back to the notebook method. And I started to write down how much time a day I was wasting more or less by ruminating on recurring negative thoughts, arguing, etc.
I discovered that I was spending an average of two hours a day. Therefore,
2 hours x 365 days (I now work every day of the year without exception, if you are my reader you know that) = 750 hours per year.
Or what is the same 31 days a year as the total time I spend angry?
So I started applying detachment, gratitude, and being kind. And now I estimate that I spend half of that time arguing. And my work is twice as good because I don’t have 25 windows explorer screens open at the same time in my mind 🙂
Lesson: you must practice emotional detachment, gratitude, and kindness. Doing so will increase your performance and the quality of your work and reduce the energy cost.
3. Clean your mind
Cookies are small pieces of text that the websites you visit send to your browser and allow the websites to remember information about your visit. Right?
Well, that’s the same as “Oh, I have to finish the report,” “Oh, I have to get on the new project,” “Oh, I have to clean the work area,” “Oh, I have to schedule this information. But I’ll get to it later.”
These are little reminders (cookies) that your mind sends you to return to a pending task.
This uses up an enormous amount of mental resources.
It also makes infinite the Parkinson’s law that says that a task expands until it fills the deadline assigned to it.
And so if our deadline to accomplish a task is a continuous “I’ll do it later,” 1) the task takes forever, 2) we find it harder and harder to accomplish it, and 3) the emotional cost of facing laziness over and over again to start x or g task goes up.
So I realized that in the same way that deleting cookies increases the speed of your PC, the same thing happens when you stop procrastinating on a task or write it down in your calendar to set a deadline.
Lesson: when your mind says, “I have to do this,” do it or put a date on your calendar. And this simple thing can be the difference between your venture being a success and a failure.
A virtual hug
AG
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