Concentrate on the things that really matter to you now that we were talking about money. Money is still an obstacle I believe for most of you watching this course. The biggest chunk of your time is spent trying to earn your income, which can be working in a job or in business. For students, it’s basically spent going to school or college. Next, let’s talk about how to use your time wisely.
Fun fact: I wrote the script for a major part of this course sitting in an airplane. This tells you two things about me: one, that I use my time efficiently, and two, that I travel a lot. I actually end up spending a lot of time in flights and taxis. Normally, it would be a big time wastage, but I find that airplanes are a pretty cool environment for reading or writing. They offer peace, no internet, no distractions, and almost perfect conditions for focusing deeply on something. However, I find airplanes a bit too shaky to do more precise work on laptops. So, I never edit videos on a flight, but always ensure that I use that time wisely for reading scripts or writing.
Taxis, on the other hand, are too shaky to even read or write something on a phone. In a taxi, I listen to audiobooks or relaxing music. The point I’m trying to make here is that every environment around you provides different opportunities for using your time wisely. It’s good to acknowledge that different people also have different preferences regarding this. For someone else, maybe taxis are good for laptop work. This is your personal preference and you should work according to your personal preferences.
Perhaps the airplane is too stressful of a place to do focused work for you. In that case, you should spend your time watching movies and enjoying the time to relax and recharge. Another example would be if you’re in a family gathering and you want to do some focused work on your laptop, but you just cannot focus because the house is too loud and attractive. In that case, you should better spend your time meeting people, enjoying yourself, and do the focused work later.
Now, you might think that it is better to do some work rather than no work, even when it’s harder. Sometimes it may be the case, but more often than not, it’s not a good idea. Your attention and focus are limited currency. It’s not about working the hardest every second of your life, but understanding the environment around you and recognizing the opportunities that these environments give you.
Environments are not something that are outside your control. You can tweak your environment to make it more suitable for yourself. In a future video, I will talk about how you can change your environment to suit your activities.
In the homework section for this module, you need to track your time for 24 hours in a day. Write down exactly what activity you did for every hour or every half an hour. Mark all your wasted time, those blocks of time and activities which you felt were something that you should not have done. Then, write down how you plan to use that wasted time next time in your day for something more productive, something from your ideal week. In the next module, we’ll talk about how you can get from where you are now to where you want to be.
