Getting Things Done

Here are several stages that people seem to get into when they think of something to be done. The level you are at largely determines how effective you will be in accomplishing that task. From my experience, these are the states people tend to get into:

It’s Impossible

At this stage, the task seems preposterous to you. Not only can you not do it, you can’t even conceive of doing it. The thought of the task doesn’t even merit serious consideration in your book. If someone tries to convince you it’s possible, you’ll be annoyed at such an obviously impossible thing. Your mind is completely closed here and it’ll take a lot of proof from various sources before you’ll move into the next stage.

Only The Smartest People Can Do It

This is almost as bad as the “It’s Impossible” stage in getting something accomplished. Here, you acknowledge that the task is doable by somebody, somewhere, just not you. Generally, you get to this state because you actually think it’s impossible, but somebody seems to have done it, so you grudgedly acknowledge that it can be done. It’ll probably take a lot more people doing it or some significant mental breakthrough for you to move into the next stage.

I Can Do It But It’s Really Annoying/Hard

This is the first stage where something is actually accomplished. However, it’s done with great mental power and probably over a long period of time. That’s because while you can do the task, you don’t really want to do it. You see the task as some really hard and almost insurmountable hill. This is where you try to procrastinate as much as possible, in hopes that somehow you won’t actually have to do the task. Once the task becomes familiar either through repetition or some extra knowledge, you’ll naturally move into the next stage.

Yeah, It’s Kind Of Boring

This is probably the stage where most people work at. A lot of mundane work that doesn’t challenge or excite you. You go through the motions because you’ve done it hundreds of times before. You don’t really learn anything new, and don’t really want to. It’s all just a grind. After a while though, your might come up with something interesting and move on to the next stage.

I’m Going To Build A Tower!

This is where you see a lot of excited people talking to everyone about their big plan to make tons of money. “I’m going to build a huge tower!” you tell everyone you meet. “No really, I AM!! Come on, why don’t you believe me?” Except the only problem is that they’re wondering, “Hmmm, then how come you’re telling me about it instead of building the tower?” Just a lot of idle speculation and hype at this point. Although, after a while of everyone getting tired of hearing you talk, you’ll either give up or move into the next stage.

Leave Me Alone – I’m Working!

This is the stage where a lot of stuff gets done. You don’t tell anyone about your big plan, you don’t brag about it, you don’t sit around thinking about it, you just do it. People walk by and wonder what you’re doing, but you’re too busy working on your plan to explain it to them. Months later, you have this awesome tower standing up and people wonder just how on earth you managed to find the time to do that.

In college, I focused on the this level all the time to take 8 classes per semester and do well in all of them. People look around after the fact and wonder how that’s possible. Instead of explaining or bragging, I simply worked on next semester’s stuff.

However, with just yourself though, you can only accomplish so much. Eventually, if you want to accomplish great things, you’ll need other people.

Look At How Cool This Is!

This is a level that I’m currently struggling to work at myself. A single person can only produce so much, even if it is 1000x the average employee. To be able to produce 100000x, you need the help of other people. That means inspiring them and motivating them to work for you, which is why solid relationships are so important.

This takes a lot of time, patience, imagination, and understanding though, so it’s definitely not an easy level to achieve!

So which of these levels do you work at?

Growing up, I remember watching a show on the Discovery channel that talked about different species of human beings, one of which is the Neanderthal. They had the incredible to focus on doing one task at a time, producing far greater amounts than their smarter, but “lazier” cousins. It occurred to me that in terms of production, even if you are only half as fast as someone else, you can still produce more if you work three times as long! In the end, people judge you by how much you produced, not how much you were capable of producing.

Fast forward a few years, to where I was taking 7-8 of Cornell’s most challenging courses per semester, and getting all As in them. Was I smarter than my peers? I really doubt it. My success was due mostly to this concept of focusing on one thing at a time.

Why Focus On One Thing At A Time

Our brains, like computers, really can’t think of that many things in parallel. In fact, most of the time, it can only think of one thought at a time. That means if you are thinking about donuts, you probably aren’t thinking about how to finish your project at the exact same time. In some sense, every project can be completed given a certain amount of thought dedicated to it. If it’s a computer science project, the actual change might only be a few lines of code, taking a few seconds. Therefore, most of the cost of doing something is in figuring out exactly what to do.

Following that logic, the more thought we dedicate to a project, the more likely it is to be complete. Since thinking about donuts isn’t a thought about the project, you essentially waste a “computer cycle” when you could have spent it on your project. Focusing on one thing at a time will help you save these cycles. This is a very literal interpretation of “you become what you think about”.

Secondly, thinking about several things or switching between them incurs a “context switching cost”. It takes time for you to gather the relevant information for a project into your brain. For example, if you were to consider buying a house, you’d have to remember the mortgage rates, how much you have in the bank, how much income you expect, the cost of the house, etc. All that information takes a while for you to actually comprehend before you can make a decision on whether you’d like to buy a house. What if you had to go to sleep today? Tomorrow, it might take you another little while to fetch that same information into your brain again (although it’ll probably be faster this time).

This extra fetching time can add up to very substantial amounts, especially if you are switching between two things constantly. Consider working on a project and talking with a friend on IM at the same time. Every time you switch between your project and an IM window, it takes maybe 5 seconds for you to gather yourself and figure out where you were in the conversation. It then takes another 15 seconds for you to figure out what you were working on before being interrupted. Say there’s about 100 such interruptions an hour, that’s about 33 minutes of time spent on switching between the window and your project alone!! The worst part about this is, you’re not having a conversation OR doing a project during those 33 minutes.

Someone else might be able to do their job twice as fast as you, but if they’re wasting those 33 minutes and you’re not, you’ll still produce more than them. Additionally, your work and your relationship with your friend would probably be better too, as they’ll both get your full attention.

How To Focus On One Thing At A Time

Since it’s so important to not waste your brain cycles on switching between things, how do we go about minimizing this loss of time? Well, my personal method is to use a schedule. Then, during the allocated time on your schedule, focus on the task at hand. Just having a schedule itself is helpful since it drives your thoughts towards your goal. Most of the time, our thoughts aren’t focused just because we don’t exactly know what we’re supposed to be working on.

Then, try to tune out distractions during your allocated time. Go to quiet spot where you can get things done in peace. Discourage people from interrupting you and schedule them in to other time slots. For example, if your coworkers continuously interrupt you during work with questions, ask them to use email or schedule meetings to you for less important questions. If your friends are always sending you instant messages during your study session, simply stay off IM.

Additionally, try to focus on one thing at a time to completion. That way, you don’t have to go back to it later and spending time getting into context again. These can really add up!

These are only physical distractions though. This actually also applies to thought. Since our memory is associative (i.e. you think of something and something related comes up), random thoughts can start pulling you in different directions. Therefore, when you are studying say a math problem and a thought of a watermelon pops up because the question talks about watermelons, recognize that and don’t get pulled into a memory of interactions with watermelons! My way of doing this is to give yourself a mental “slap on the wrist”. Imagine that image and start doodling it out with like a big X, all the time giving yourself a “this is bad” thought. If you do this often enough, it becomes almost second nature to hold off certain thoughts.

There you have it: Many, many extra hours per day – if you choose to use them!

In these cases, consulting your short term feelings might get you motivated.

Start by imagining yourself tomorrow. What would things feel like if you didn’t do anything? Wouldn’t that assignment still need doing? If you are stressed about it now, wouldn’t you feel even more pressured then? You and your teammates would be all frantic to get stuff done; your boss would keep asking you for your progress; you may not even have time for food or sleep. Now, imagine yourself having somehow finished the assignment by then. Think about how peaceful you’d feel and how free you would be. Your teammates would be happy with you; your boss/professor would be proud of you getting your project done early; you can sit down with a pina colada in peace. Doesn’t that sound a lot nicer? The truth of the matter is – you have the power to put yourself in either one of those situations! Why not pick the second one?

Not only that, but between now and the time you do your project, you’ll have to keep worrying about it. Every second that passes, you’ll need to worry more about whether the project can now be completed within the shorter amount of time that you have. You’ll have to worry about what your partners would say, what your professor would say, what you would do if you fail, etc. That sure sounds like a pretty unpleasant period. Why put yourself through all that worry and doubt? You’re going to have to “suffer” through the project later anyway, so why not just “suffer” through it now and save a day of worrying? Besides, the project is often easier than it seems. The effort it takes to start the project is often the hardest part.

Go ahead – get that project started and finished. You’ll be really glad you did. When you’re lying around stress free tomorrow, be sure to thank yourself. Good job!

The All Nighter

We’ve probably all had this experience at one time or another: There is something you need to get done tomorrow and you can’t finish it by tonight. So, being the responsible person that you are, you try to stay up late to get it done. Here’s a couple of very important tips that’ll help you on your next adventure.

The Cause Of The All Nighter

First, realize that if you have to pull an all nighter, you have already screwed up. Somewhere along the line, you had thought you would be finished by tonight, but you haven’t. The plan had not gone as you had anticipated, and now you are paying your dues. Therefore, you should examine your planning errors, as that will be of greater value in the long run. Did you spend too little time planning (or didn’t plan at all)? Did you procrastinate and not follow your plan? Did you not allow enough time for random factors in your plan?

All of these things are situations that come up time and time again in your life. Therefore, it’s important to recognize these inefficiencies and try not to repeat them. You don’t have to do this right this minute, but it should be done as soon as possible while your memories of the events are fresh in your mind. Maybe a quick summary right now, with a more in depth analysis after you’ve finished your stuff and had some sleep. In the long run, a couple of wasted hours every once in a while can add up to substantial amounts of time throughout the course of your life.

The Cost Of The All Nighter

The all nighter is not a way to get more time. That seems to be a common misconception that if you worked over night, then you basically gained those extra hours with no consequences. Nothing could be further from the truth! You will give those hours back by sleeping more the next few days, dozing off at school/work, etc. In fact, from my experience, I would say for every all nighter hour you spend awake that you should have spent sleeping, you need to sleep about 1.1-1.5x as many hours just to get back to the same level of alertness. Not to mention the diminished level of work that you would accomplish during those hours, which will have to be taken out of your other awake time to be made up. Therefore, all nighter hours need to be repaid by 2+ normal hours.

This is not to say there isn’t a place for pulling an all nighter. One hour now could be worth more than two hours tomorrow. For example, there is a final exam in a few hours and you really need the extra couple of hours to study. In this case, doing poorly on the exam may cost you many, many more hours later in terms of retaking the course, speaking with the professor, etc. Or maybe your plane is taking off at 4am and you need to be on board. If you don’t make it, then you’ll have to spend many hours waiting at the airport for the next flight (although if I had a laptop or something else I can do, then it would be partially or wholly mitigated – see Give Me A Little More Time).

Your Motivation For The All Nighter

If your reasons for getting into the all nighter in the first place is because you procrastinated, then the all nigher really isn’t going to help that much. If it’s something you really don’t want to do, no matter how much caffeine you put into your body, or how long you stay up, you are not going to do it. It would be better to fix this problem by addressing the root issue by finding out what you really want. It would be easier to just fail the class or not do the assignment, and start focusing on the things you want right away. Tomorrow, explain to the person in charge that you are not really interested in whatever it is, apologize, and move on. What’s the point of doing a lousy job on something you didn’t want to do anyway?

On the other hand, if your reasons for going into the all nighter is a lack of planning for something you are passionate about, then you are in the right frame of mind. Back in college, when I wanted to live up to my word in finishing a project for my research professor, I very very easily worked from 6pm until 3pm the next day, completing the project in the nick of time. I didn’t even need any coffee or caffeine, and wasn’t really that tired. If you are actually interested in what you are doing and excited about it, you really don’t even notice the time or how tired you are.

If you didn’t want to do it to begin with, even with all the coffee in the world, you’ll be looking for reasons to fall asleep, and you’ll do exactly that. At best, you won’t be able to fall asleep, so you’ll be stuck in a dreamy world where you’re not getting anything done and wish you were sleeping instead.

Tips For Pulling An All Nighter

Motivate Yourself – As stated above, motivation is the most important thing in terms of keeping awake and working on the project. You might as well go to sleep if you don’t want to do it.

Focus On the Task – In NAVY Seals training’s “Hell Week”, where people have to stay up for 5 days with only a few hours of sleep, it was reported that the key to staying awake is by focusing on tasks in the present. Try not to let your mind drift at all. Forget about going to the bathroom, or sleeping, or anything else. There is just you, and the task. If you conquer it, you can get the thing you want most – sleep.

Go Easy On The Caffeine – Each little bit you drink now will make your recovery from it that much harder (see How To Recover From Caffeine Addiction) later. Yes, you are already spending your “later hours”, so try to keep that to a minimum. Focus on the two tips above and hopefully you won’t need any caffeine. If you must, drink a minimum amount that’ll keep you awake. Remember that the placebo effect can be pretty strong, so if you just believe that 1/2 cup of coffee will keep you awake for another 12 hours, it probably will.

Don’t Take A Nap – While theoretically, you can be more clear headed after a 20 minute nap, I find that not to really hold up in reality. If you can talk yourself into taking a nap, you can talk yourself into sleeping until past when your project is due. Not to mention that you’ll probably be groggy when you wake up if you don’t do it right.

Get Some Sleep – In contrast to the tip above, it may not be such a bad idea to get some sleep if you have a presentation or test in the morning. By sleep, I mean complete cycles, in about 90 minutes – 2 hour increments. For me, 4 hours equals two sleep cycles, where I’ll wake up quite alertly. In these cases where you need to memorize stuff, sleep helps bury it deeper into your long term memory. After you wake up, continue studying.

Take A Shower – This is generally very refreshing. The pounding water is exciting your sensory impulses, while the heat relaxes you so that you’re not too tense (but not so relaxed that you’ll fall asleep).

Go Out For A Run – Exercise will speed up the heart and increase blood flow and metabolism. This is the same thing as described in How To Recover From Caffeine Addiction

Eat Some Sugars – Fruit Juice, or other sugary stuff, should provide your body with a good source of energy for the short term. Caffeine’s not the only thing that can juice it up!

Let Your Alarm Clock Ring – I’ve found that years of training in jumping out of bed when the alarms rings has created in us a kind of a built in automatic “awake” reaction to the alarm clock. Set the alarm clock to ring at random times in the next few minutes. Go about your work, and that “shock” from the alarm clock can keep you awake for hours.

Turn the temperature down – It’s just damn hard to fall asleep when it’s freezing, so make it really cold. However, it shouldn’t be so cold that it distracts you from working. I find that about 60-70 degrees in your pajamas should do the trick. Of course, adjust that depending on your size and the amount of body hair you have.

When All Else Fails

Remember that whatever it is, you can always not do it. You can fail a test, miss a flight, or disappoint a partner. However, you cannot get another life if you permanently damage your health. Face the consequences and remember to plan better next time – it’s usually not that big of a deal!

Here’s another very common situation: You asked someone out on a date or they asked you out on a date. Or perhaps, you already went on that date. Now, you’re sitting around, thinking about that person. Yet, you’re afraid to call for fear of sounding desperate. You think to yourself, “Well, I should at least wait a couple of days, but I don’t want to miss a call or email from this person”. So what do you do? You carry the phone around, or constantly glance at your email throughout the day.

When you go to work, every time there’s a break, you check your email and messages. When you get home, you wonder why he/she hasn’t called. You take a shower, and when you get out, there’s a message on your phone. Unfortunately, it’s from your mother asking you why you haven’t called her in a while. Maybe this goes on for several days. You’re starting to lose concentration at work thinking about him/her. Then, one of two things happen.

In the first situation, you get a call or email from that person, and eagerly respond to him or her. Now, the cycle repeats again. Once again, you’ll start wondering about the next time you’ll be in contact with him/her.

In the second situation, you do not get a call or email from the person you’re thinking about. Either you decide to break if off with him/her, or call that person. If you break it off, then the situation is resolved. If you call him/her, you’ll start wondering about the situation again.

Aside from all that thinking making you jittery and nervous, it’s wasting a ton of your time. Whether you think about it or not, either the first situation or the second situation is going to happen. No amount of thinking would change that. So why think about it? Not only does thinking about it put you in a probably negative emotional state, it wastes precious time that you could’ve used to think about something else. It’s something you have absolutely no control over, so why waste time on it? If you spent 2 hours a day, 3 days a week thinking about it, detracting from the other things you do, that’s 24 hours of wasted time per month, a value of $720 at a salary of $30/hr.

Personally, I’d rather have that $720 instead of the anxiety from waiting for someone to get in contact with me.

Remember, focus on what you have control over. Ignore the things that don’t.

You can also read about the application of this principle in investing: Stop Checking That Stock

Here’s a very common situation: You decided to invest some money into a stock. Day and night, for weeks, you labored and searched for the perfect stock to put your money in. Then you found it. You eagerly open your brokers account and hit the “Buy” button with glee. The little ticker shows that now you have 1000 shares of that stock you wanted. Awesome!

For the rest of the day, you peek at it from time to time, seeing it go up and down. “Yes, I made $100″, you think to yourself, “Good Job!” or “Crap, it’s down $100, but it’ll definitely go back up again!”. This cycle continues. Day after day, you get up and look at your stock to see how it’s doing. You are kind of happy when it’s up, and a little annoyed when it’s down. Then one day, one of two things happen.

In situation A, the stock suddenly gets some amazingly great news. It starts to go up and up every single day. Every day, you wake up, go to your monitor, and look at the extra money you’ve just made. “Haha, that’s awesome!” you think to yourself. “I’ve so hit the jackpot! It’s great that I picked out such an amazing company!” Of course, you hold on to them, seeing how great the company is and how bright their future is. There’s probably more profit to come!

In situation B, a CEO commits suicide or something, and the stock suddenly plunges. At first, it doesn’t bother you that much, because you knew that you made a solid decision to buy into the company. However, as the days and weeks go by, with the stock getting lower and lower every day, you start to worry. Your confidence starts to shrink and you feel like you might’ve made a wrong decision. Part of you is wondering if it’ll go even lower, and that maybe you should sell. However, your ego won’t let you do that, as you’re way too deep in the hole. You hold on to it, waiting to get even.

What is wrong in both of these situations? Well, you spent a lot of time looking at the stock, but you weren’t going to do anything in either situation. This is equivalent to watching TV. You stare at a ticker going up and down for many days of the year, and at the end of the year, you don’t actually do anything. You might as well have just taken that chunk of time watching the ticker go up and down and pretend it doesn’t exist, since you’ve basically wasted it.

Compare all that watching with just looking at the stock once at the end of the year. You’ll gain the same amount of information, but only take up a few hours compared to days and weeks of watching. Since you weren’t going to sell it when the stock goes up, and you weren’t going to sell it when the stock goes down, why waste all that time? If you spend an hour a day looking at the stock and following up on the news, that’s 365 hours a year. At a mediocre salary of $30/hr, that’s $10950 of worthwhile work you could’ve done. Does your watching it somehow make you more than $10950? If it somehow does, I’d love to know

Well, then why do people like Warren Buffet look at the numbers all the time? Well, that’s because he can and will do something about it. If there is something wrong with the business, he might sell it, or work with the current managers to fix the problem. Sure, you could sell your stock also, if you were swing trading or day trading (which by the way I wouldn’t recommend), but why do all that work to find a good investment if you are just going to sell it? I’ll further explain this in why you should invest for the long term.

Bottom line: Focus on the things you can/will do something about. Ignore the things that are out of your control.

And that was that. My friend didn’t really follow up on it, and I just gave up on the idea without much of a fight. The result of this was a net loss of a few hours worth of my life, with absolutely nothing gained. What was the point of discussing a money making idea if I had no intention of doing it? I realized at that point that this happens day after day. People are constantly talking about this and that, with no intention of actually following through. What’s the point of talking about it then?

I thought about what would have happened if I’d just went to the bank, took out my money, and bought some computer parts. Sure, my mom would have complained, but I would’ve built a computer. Either I would’ve been able to sell it to someone or not. Either I would make a profit or not. In all of the possible situations, I would have gained experience, and be better prepared for other business opportunities that came along. If I had succeeded, my mom would probably change her attitude about my business idea. If I had failed, I would have been able to make the money back through something else at some point (like a minimum wage job of some sort). At that point, would I not be in the exact same situation as before I bought the computer parts? The only difference would be that I’m a little bit older and wiser because of the experience. I really can’t lose! Coming to this realization, I decided that at any point, if there was something I think of that I could do, I would do it.

Fast forward a couple years. I’d gotten into Cornell University and had just completed my freshman year. Coming in to college, I already had 29 credits from advanced placement classes, and I took 27 and 28 credits (7&8 classes/semester) for my first and second semester. By the end of freshmen year, I was already more than half way done with college! Moreover, I had a 3.8 GPA. What is the difference between me and the other students? How did I manage to accomplish this? Was I really that much smarter than my peers? I would say absolutely not. The only difference is, while they were at a party drinking beer, I was working. While they were sitting around wondering what to do, I was working. While they were passed out from being drunk at night, I was sleeping. That’s pretty much it. I didn’t waste any time thinking about what to do, and simply did it.

When I look around, there are just so many situations where people just spend so much time thinking about stuff that would’ve taken much less time if they simply did it instead of thinking about doing it. Let’s take my computer example. I probably spent a few weeks thinking about building my own computers, talking it over with people, and talking to my mom. How long would it take to actually make the money and build the computer? Say a $500 computer, $15/hr, a couple hours to get the parts and build it. That’s less than 40 hours. Yet, I probably spent more than 20 hours talking to people and thinking about it. 20 hours of work – $300. 20 hours of talking with people and then not doing it – $0.

Whenever I’ve found a successful business on my own or with a friend, there’s never a whole lot of worrying or doubt. Whether you spend 40 hours doing stuff or worrying about doing stuff, it’s still 40 hours – except in the first case, you’ll probably get it done, and if not, be in the same situation as if you spent the 40 hours worrying about doing stuff but with more experience. Kind of hard to go wrong with option #1.

Think less, do more. Catchy slogan, don’t you think?

Easy To Control Your Thoughts?

There are many articles on the law of attraction out there. The general idea is that the more you focus on one particular thing, the easier it is for that thing to manifest itself in reality. Well, that sounds pretty easy right? If all you need to do to get a billion dollars is to think about it, why isn’t everyone a billionaire then? While it would seem really easy to focus on one thing at a time, it’s actually surprisingly difficult to do this.

For example, maybe after you read this article, you’ll start thinking about how you can get your billion dollars. A couple of minutes pass, you fidget around in your seat a little. Hmmm, nope, can’t think of anything. Can this really work? It seems kind of stupid. Then again, that article I just read told me to keep concentrating on it, so I’ll try some more.

The Negative Thoughts

That is probably a relatively common thought process. However, even in this relatively good “I’ll keep trying” scenario, notice how much of that time is actually dedicated to thinking about the billion dollars. “Hmmm, nope, can’t think of anything. Can this really work? It seems kind of stupid. Then again, that article I just read told me to keep concentrating on it, so I’ll try some more.” – This train of thought has very little to do with the actual billion dollars, even though you’re supposedly thinking about it. In fact, you’re thinking about the opposite of getting the billion dollars – about how making a billion dollars is probably not possible!

If this is the general thought process, where an approximately equal amount of time is spent on focusing on how the thing can be done and how it can fail, it’s no wonder that attracting the things you want is hard. Your own doubts repel the very thing you are trying to attract!

Changing Your Thought Patterns

To change your thought patterns, you have to start with the confident knowledge that what you want can be done, since any doubt will result in thoughts about whether the thing you want is even possible. Luckily, this is one of easiest things to do as an INTJ since anything can be done. Things are only impossible until they’re possible! It’s just a matter of finding a solution to it.

Next, you’ll need to try to think about your goal as much as possible. This is the really hard part. In the above example, the thoughts about the item in question essentially ends after that blurb about whether it’s actually possible to get it. In those instances, you have to continue thinking about it, looking for ways to obtain what you want throughout the course of the day. For example, you can look it up on google, talk to a friend, ask family members, but no matter what, you must continue to think about it as much as possible.

How Your Thoughts Become Solutions

This is how controlling your thoughts leads to what you want in my experience:
- You have some problem you need to solve
- You think about how to solve it
- Some leads comes to you, whether be it through a thought (which is what the book Think and Grow Rich talks about), other people, etc.
- You follow the leads, which generates more questions
- You think about how to solve the questions, and the process repeats itself
- Eventually all the questions are answered and you have what you want

Of course, this might just be that I’m an engineer by profession, and that’s just the way I solve all problems in my life, but there seems to be an abundance of confirmation on this in books, personal development websites, etc.

Controlling Your Thoughts With a Schedule

So the question is, how do you think about the subject as much as possible? It’s extremely easy to be distracted throughout the day. You could recieve a phone call, which will change your thoughts to the conversation at hand, or one of your thoughts can lead to thinking about another task you need to do, leading you off topic.

The method that I have found to be most effective is to create a schedule, and stick to it absolutely. During any period of time on the schedule, you may only think about the subject in question. For example, if you have scheduled reading a financial book for a period in your schedule, then you must stick to reading the book. You may not go eat, pee, sleep, accept phone calls, or anything else. This sounds extreme, but it builds your feelings so that ignoring distractions becomes second nature to you.

Doesn’t this make you extremely inflexible though? What if you’re doing something on the list and then suddenly, you had a passing thought that you can come up with a better way to do it? Well, you can simply schedule in a planning time into your schedule, as often as you feel is necessary. If you have a thought about another job that you need to do, just write it down, so that you can think about it at the next planning session, but don’t think about it now. That way, you still have quite a bit of flexibility, but once you’ve decided what to do (i.e. you’ve drawn out a plan), you do not deviate from the plan no matter what happens. This way, things get done.

There are of course pros and cons to this. What if you’re reading and your boss calls you and you’re unreachable? Sure, that’s a possibility. However, the majority of the time, the things you ignore aren’t that important, so that overall, you’ll get a lot of a extra things done. Additionally, you can adjust for these things in your plan for the next day. For example, you can schedule in a 10 minute break every 3 hours to take a walk and check your messages.

The very great thing about doing things this way is that you know what you are suppose to be doing at any given time. There have been countless times in the past when I don’t really feel like doing anything, because the stuff I should be getting done is just a jumble of random stuff in my head and I’m really sure about their urgency or what exactly they are. This kind of haze makes it very easy to turn on the TV and start watching re-runs, or surfing the internet looking for things to waste time. Think about all that thinking time that is going to waste! When you watch a re-run, you form practically no new memories and your thoughts are focused on some extremely trivial and insignificant details. When you’re done watching, there is basically nothing gained, and that time might as well have been sucked into a hole. You might as well have been dead for those couple of hours.

Yet, this is one of the most common activities people do on a regular basis!!

Hit the off button, draw up a plan, and start getting the things you want and deserve!

Need a Little More Time!

At the end of the day, are there tasks that you wanted to get done but couldn’t get to? Do you find that you need a little more time to do what you want? This article will show you how you can get a couple more hours out of your day, and hopefully give you that extra time you need to do the things you want.

The very first step is to make sure that you actually want to do the things that you “want” to do. Most of the time, people don’t get things done because they don’t actually want to do them. So figure out what you want to do, and it shouldn’t be a problem killing procrastination. So now, the problem isn’t having a bunch of stuff on your “want to do list” that you hate doing but “have” to do – it’s that you have all this great stuff you want to do but don’t have time to get to it all!

Making That Little Bit More Time

Well, now that you have a list, make sure to [[prioritize the things you want to do]], so that in case those extra couple of hours isn’t quite enough, you can make sure you’ve maximized the stuff you can get done. Now, take a look at your list, and see which ones you can do together. For example, let’s say your list looks something like:

- Do laundry (1.5hrs)
- Travel to work (1hr)
- Finish assignment (~6hrs)
- Eat lunch (1hr)
- Catch up with old friends (2hrs)
- Work Out (1hr)

If you did all of these tasks separately, it would take you 12.5 hours total. However, there’s so many things that you can do together on this list. For example, you can do laundry while catching up with friends, or work on your assignment while traveling to work. If I was planning this to do list, it would be something like this:

- Put clothes in washer (5min)
- Travel to work while working on assignment (30minutes)
– notice that I’ve used 30 minutes of the traveling time to do my assignment while doing my laundry!
- Get lunch (takeout) and continue to work on my assignment (1hr)
– again, we’re doing two things at once here, plus the laundry
- Do most of the assignment (4hrs)
- Work out while chatting with friends in between reps (1hr)
- Chat with friends on the way home (30min)
- Finish up laundry and continue talking with friends (30min)

This could probably even be improved upon, but using this sequence of events, this list of tasks would only take 7 hours and 35 minutes. If you used 25 minutes to plan this out, you’ve saved about 3-4 hours (we’ll give you some credit and say you would’ve put some concurrency in those tasks already so it doesn’t take up the full 12.5 hours).

Making Even More Time

In general, each task only has a specific amount of time that you actively need to be involved in. For example, doing laundry requires 5 minutes to start the wash cycle, 40 minutes of waiting, 5 minutes to start the dry cycle, 40 minutes of waiting, and another 25 minutes to carry it back and fold/hang it up. That’s only 35 minutes of actual work you need to do, even though the entire process takes 100 minutes. Here’s a break down of the other tasks listed above:

- Travel to work (assuming public transport) – 2 minutes to walk to train station, 56 minutes of train, 2 minutes to walk to work from the train station
- Finish assignment – if it’s something like programming, you spend maybe 1/3 of the time actually writing code, and 2/3 of the time waiting for the code to compile. So your assignment time slot might be, 2 hours coding, 1 hour thinking, 3 hours of waiting for code to compile.
- Eat lunch – 20 minutes to get to and from the food place, 5 minutes to buy food, 15 minutes of actual eating, 20 minutes of sitting around
- Catch up with old friends – this is highly dependent on the person, but most of the time, you should be able to do another activity with the friend while catching up, with no loss of the quality of catchingupness.
- Work Out – maybe 15 minutes of actual weight lifting time, and 45 minutes of resting/talking in between.

As we can see from the breakdown above, there is actually only 4 hours and 24 minutes of active work involved (excluding the socializing time). Depending on how you schedule things, you can possibly shave another hour or two off that 7 hours and 35 minutes.

That’s about half the time those tasks seem like they would’ve taken if you did them in sequential order!

Where People’s Time Go

Yet, the interesting part is that most people do these things more or less sequentially. Have you ever been on a train? Most people spend hours a week standing/sitting there, doing absolutely nothing, while I’m writing hundreds of articles Yet, these are the same people who stay up all night drinking coffee, complaining that they don’t get enough sleep!

Well, now you know better. Extra time comes to those who make it.

First and foremost, the car is a depreciating asset. If you spend $10,000 for a car, not only are you spending $10,000, you also lost the opportunity cost that $10k would have brought you. That $10k invested in the stock market, would appreciate at 10% a year on average. That’s $26k in 10 years, $67k in 20 years, $175k in 30 years, $1.17 million in 50 years, not inflation adjusted of course. Taking an average inflation rate of 2.5%, that’s $20k in 10 years, $42k in 20 years, $87.5k in 30 years, or $370k in 50 years. Would you rather have one car now or 37 cars in 50 years?

In addition to a pure [[opportunity cost of money]], there is also an opportunity cost associated with the time spent driving. It take concentration and time to figure out where to go and drive there without crashing. This is time that can’t be used for anyting else. Even if you try to do something like listen to an e-book while driving, part of your concentration must be on the road so hence, your e-book reading experience would be slightly less than if you’d just sat around and listened to it. Since it’s also kind of not safe to do other stuff while driving, we can assume that people don’t do anything else while driving. However, this is a large amount of time. Some people drive upwards of an hour a day.

Let’s say on average, you drive 40 minutes a day. If instead, you took public transportation, it takes you 10 minutes total to walk to and from the public transportation service, and an hour on the bus or train. However, if you can use that hour effectively, performing tasks you would otherwise have performed anyway, then that hour essentially doesn’t matter! For example, when I go to work in the morning, it takes me 2 minutes to walk to the train station, 40 minutes to work, and 3 minutes to walk to my work place from the train station. Hoewever, on the train, I simply open my laptop and start doing the work I would’ve done at work anyway. I then go to work 40 minutes later, and leave 40 minutes earlier (which is just fine with my boss). In effect, my transportation time has been reduced to just 10 minutes. That’s a savings of 30 minutes per day!

30 minutes a day, times 50 work weeks a year, times 5 days a week – that’s 125 hours. If my hours are worth $50 each pre-tax (so about $35 post tax), that’s an additional $4375/year of value. So that $10k car, now essentially costs you $10k (the car value) + $4.375k(the opportunity cost of using the car) = $14.375k. So the opportunity cost of this lost out money, if invested in the stock market, is $534k in 50 years (inflation adjusted). Additionally, there is a decent chance that you might actually think of some sort of business opportunity or investment and return more than 10%/year.

Obviously there are other considerations such public transportation fares and the “freedom” of having a car, but looking at the numbers, that is one damn expensive thing to get!