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Your Time: Are You SPENDING It or INVESTING It?
By JLP | November 6, 2007
This post was inspired by “Principle 6: Studying” in Jeffrey Gitomer’s The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching!
Being that the title of this blog is AllFinancialMatters, I spend a lot of time talking about spending and investing money. However, there’s something else that we can either spend or invest: our time.
I don’t know about you but I “spend” rather than “invest” a lot of my time. I watch too much TV (this is good to know since I just bought a new TV!). It’s bad enough to watch new shows or sports but even worse to watch sitcom re-runs. They add absolutely no value to my life and yet I keep watching. I’m sure some of them (like the Andy Griffith Show) are a form of escape from the real world. I mean it’s hard to watch Andy Griffith and not think about how nice it would be to live in such a simple time. I realize that Mayberry is fictional and that the “simpler time” never really existed but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it.
Anyway, the point of this post is we (me too) need to take our time more seriously and quit frittering it away doing meaningless stuff. For instance, my two biggest “spending” activities are:
- too much TV
- too much time spend checking my blog’s stats - I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person with this problem.
If I could pare back those two activities, I would have 6 or so more hours per week to put towards “investing” activities like:
- spending quality time with my wife
- spending quality time with my kids
- reading a book that will help me grow
- taking a course
- learning a new hobby
- serving others
Those are just a few “investing” activities that I could think of off the top of my head. If you can think of some more “investing” activities, let us know. For me, changing from spending my time to investing my time won’t be easy. I think we are all creatures of habit and it is normally easier to just give in to our old ways and never make the required changes. So, it is going to take deliberate action on my part in order to make the necessary changes.
I’ll keep you posted.
Topics: Books, Personal Growth |
