There is an old adage – if you want to get something done, ask a busy person.
A lot of people seem to think I have a lot of free time given the adventures I do and write about. I probably have a lot less time than most. Running a business is a major consumer of time, daily family commitments eats time. The way I look at is that one needs to budget one’s time and make the most of it.
In any one year there is 52 weekends, around a dozen public holidays and 20 days of leave if you are an Australian worker. That makes for 136 days of recreation time. I get no where near that. There is things like household chores – shopping, cleaning, maintenance and rest required: but these can be reduced by outsourcing or changing the action dates/time to a non-weekend.
One of the important things to do is to avoid getting caught up in work and mundane chores, sure they are a necessity but as the saying goes work-life-balance. I hear on the news how x person is finding it tough to meet mortgage commitments and working a quadrillion hours – why ? Ok those reasons can be many, I was in the lowest income bracket for many years, it is hard. whilst in my 20s, the thing I learnt early after having a terrible crash driving home from the steelworks after a double shift was that it is not worth it ! The best thing that happened to me was the closure of the steelworks, move out of the area, a different job and focus away from earning enough money to buy a house. No more long hours of commuting and slave to work. I lived. (still saved but avoided the slaved..)
The long hours lesson was not learned that early though. I made another error when starting my first business – I think many of us do – spending an inordinate amount of time in it rather than on it, a new family to boot. That business nearly, well it failed as poor credit management and the recession in the 1990s crippled it – those hours meant damage to health and loss of life opportunity at a peak special time in one’s life.
So the sage advice – plan and implement life, make it an adventure for what is available. Time is there to live as well as work and the balance on the former. The trouble is society likes it the other way round at 5 days a week and 8 hours during daylight hours and most of us won’t get life until it is time to retire: something the Government is pushing hard to extend the date of.
There you go – 136 days, and there is a couple of hours before and after work (if you don’t commute).