Mighty Bargain Hunter

Seven ways to find time to invest in yourself

November 4th, 2007 | by mbhunter |

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Investing in yourself is important because no one cares for your success or your financial security as much as you do. Businesses will just want your money, and your employer will just want as much work from you for as little money as possible. Community projects will run your life if you let them. Basically, it’s up to all of us to take charge of our own success. Finding the time outside of your normal job, family, community, and social commitments isn’t always easy, but “free” time is a good place to look first. Free time isn’t free; it ticks away just like any other time. It can be put to good use or frittered away. The choice is ours, and if we don’t make the choice, others will.

Here are seven ways to squeeze extra time out of a day to develop other skills or other income streams:

• Fill up your commute with good material. There are only so many things you can do while you’re driving to and from work. (Well, you can try to do a lot of things, but it may cost you a fender bender, or even worse, a ticket for reckless driving in Virginia.) Maybe instead of listening to the radio try listening to a recorded book that would help you to grow or learn something new, like learning how to negotiate better, how to grow rich, or listen to the New Testament as read by Darth Vader. Or use the time to practice an elevator speech or do vocal calisthenics if your job requires you to use your voice a lot. Finally, you can “write” if you fire up your computer with Dragon NaturallySpeaking® and talk into a lapel mic.
• Watch your web-surfing habits. I know that there are certain sites for me that just suck up time, like AddictingGames.com or Digg.com. For my wife it’s Wikipedia. These sites aren’t bad in and of themselves, but it has all of these cool things that just keep you glued there. Once in a while there will be a neat article on Digg that I can get a post idea from, but usually I just end up looking at the posts with the crazy pictures or the YouTube videos of people getting shot in the bare back at point blank range with a paintball marker. (No, really.) For bloggers, and a lot of other professions, a certain amount of reading up on stuff is mandatory to stay in touch, but when things cross the line from reading up into entertainment, things become unproductive. So, if you often get sidetracked into stuff that isn’t creating value, cut yourself off a little earlier than you might otherwise and you’ll find time to be productive.
• Watch your video game habits. As a child of the 80s I really got into video games. Though nothing quite replaces Millipede or Space Invaders, newer games are just as addictive. I let a new game on AddictingGames.com take a few hours from me more often then I’d care to admit. Hundreds if not thousands of hours can easily be consumed by some of these games. One newsletter I used to subscribe to said that anyone past high-school age who was playing video games was wasting their time. Period. I don’t agree with that but we can easily spend way too much time playing games, so if this is you then consider what else you could accomplish if you didn’t play quite so much. (I’m asking myself this, too.) One guy who plays on the worship team at our church says that he feels guilty playing Guitar Hero when he really should be practicing his guitar for real! (Though I must admit this GH3 video of Eric Johnson’s Cliffs of Dover is impressive. Almost unmarketable, but really impressive.)
• Watch your TV habits. This is closely related to Internet and video games. Have any shows that you watch jumped the shark or does it just plain suck? Those are prime (time) candidates for replacement with more fruitful activities — namely active-ities that aren’t just passive entertainment. I hardly ever watch TV these days (I’m not out of the woods because I do waste time on other things, though). Check out how much you watch and see if it’s too much.
• Take advantage of waits. It’s possible to minimize waits at the doctor’s office by scheduling appointments first thing in the morning, but if emergencies come up then that’s the time that the doctor might see them. Or waiting in line. These are the five- to 30-minute blocks of time that could be put to better use than checking out the cover of Soap Opera Digest or reading a dog-eared Smithsonian from sixteen years ago. A notebook and pen, a trade magazine, or a set of flash cards for something you’re trying to learn come in handy at these odd times.
• “Days off” don’t have to be unproductive. Gary North loves holidays because it lets him get ahead of his competitors. Notwithstanding family barbecues, etc., holidays are great for knocking out a lot of projects or gaining traction on things that have gotten out of control, because it’s an unusually large block of time. Saturdays (if you work Monday through Friday) are another good time to invest in yourself.
• Find other things I’ve missed by tracking how you use your time. You may not play video games or watch a lot of TV, but odds are that you have another flavor of escape that is good while it lasts, but doesn’t improve your ability to take advantage of opportunities as they come up. I don’t know what these things are, and you’d probably be pretty creeped out if I did know, so the easiest way to find these things out is to (a) track how you use your time, (b) ask your family how you spend your time, or (c) just watch the tapes of the surveillance cams I’ve set up with the help of my associates. (You can download them here.)

But seriously: All told, it’s likely that you can find at least a few hours a week to spend a little better. Multiply this by 52 weeks a year, and however many years you have left, that’s a lot of hours. It takes on the order of 500 to 1,000 hours of learning and doing something to master it. Five hours a week means that something can be mastered in two to four years. Ten hours a week, it only takes a year or two.

What would you like to master? What could you cut out, and not really miss, in order to accomplish this?

Rate this:

2.5