In my last post I talked about the importance of investing in your financial wellness. This was primarily focused on allocating financial resources to your self development. The second part of investing in yourself is making time for self development. Even if you set aside the funds, it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t actually do what you set out to do. I’m sure everyone is guilty of buying a gym membership only to cancel after a year because you never managed to actually go to the gym.
So how do we set ourselves up for success and allocate time for our development? It seems daunting but most people are surprised at how much time we actually have available. One of my favorite books is 168 Hours by Elizabeth London. She does an excellent job showing how successful people prioritize their time and manage to fit in a seemingly impossible amount of activities in a given week. The first important step is telling yourself that your financial education is important to you. The author makes a point that people need to stop telling themselves that they don’t have time, and to instead acknowledge that they are prioritizing the wrong things. By committing to your well being, this helps move your improvement to the top of your priority list.
Once you have committed to your development, the next step is planning your education into your schedule. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer has a published paper on implementation intentions which indicates people are more likely to follow through on a plan or goal if it is scheduled with intention. Essentially stating if I do x then I will do y. So if you schedule time for your education and self development, you are much more likely to do it. I personally benefit from this approach and liberally use it in my life to tackle all the things I need to fit into a seemingly unending list of to-dos.
So this is great if you have an open block of time to actually schedule time for yourself, but what if you don’t have time in your schedule? This is a claim I hear almost every day from people I interact with. People are generally not very good at estimating their time. Before I really dug into time management I was convinced I had zero spare time to do anything but work and spend a little bit of time with my family. What ended up enlightening me to my actual free time was conducting a time study. The thought of a time study may give some people shivers if you have done one for work, but I promise it’s not as bad as it sounds. They are surprisingly easy to do and are immensely helpful. Here are the simple steps to completing a time study:
- Determine how you are going to note your time. I personally like a spreadsheet, but you can use a paper journal or whatever makes you happy.
- Create an entry for each hour of the day, and do this for each day of the week.
- As you go about your day, at the end of each hour jot down what you did during that last hour. Try and list each activity as a separate line so we can look at them separately.
- Try and estimate how much time was taken for each task. This does not have to be perfect. If you did four things during the hour you may just say each one was 15 minutes.
- Next to each activity categorize it as follows:
- Value add: did the activity add value? Working, spending time with family, exercise, cleaning, etc. If so draw an up arrow next to the activity.
- Non-value add: was the activity a filler with no value? Watching TV, scrolling on social media, playing games, etc. If so draw a down arrow next to the activity.
- Do this for all the days of the week.
Once you have a completed time study, it is time to look at your week and see where you landed. If you are anything like me you are likely surprised by how much time is spent in non-value add activities. Often times you have hours a day that could be reallocated to things like self development. And as we noted above, you have determined that your self improvement is the utmost priority. Having a time study makes it easy to tell yourself that you can prioritize your development over watching TV or browsing social media. This is an important shift mentally. It is no longer a victim mindset saying you don’t have time. Now you objectively know you do and you are determining that you will better yourself over recreational activities.
I have found that when you start approaching things like self improvement in this way, the act of betterment begins to give you the same satisfaction as the non-value add activities. I can do a whole separate post about the impact of dopamine and serotonin and how TV and social media cater to those hormones. As you expand your knowledge and better your financial situation you begin to feel better all the time, not just when you’re indulging in guilty pleasures. With this you build momentum and you continue to improve and grow your success.
