Hack Your Time Like a Wealthy Pro: Four Must-Try Strategies
Most people use their time to buy money.
Then they get rid of the money as quickly as they can and so they can start the “work hard for money” cycle again.
That's the model most of us are taught.
Work hard FOR money, spend it.
Work hard FOR money, spend it.
… over and over and over again.
The financial equivalent of the movie Groundhog Day.
Wealthy living is knowing how to use money to buy time.
That is what this video is all about. Watch it now
Do you use money to free you up so you can do more with your precious time?
A wealthy life is having the TIME to do the things we want, with whom we want, when we want, where we want, and to have the RESOURCES to live this precious life to the fullest.
To have this we must realise that it’s not actually money we want.
What we need to be wealthy is assets,
Assets that earn money for us and buy us back our time.
If we focus on trying to get more money, instead of focusing on building up our assets, we'll never break out of that cycle of using our time to buy money.
When we start our money journey, most of us do need to use our time to buy and create our first set of assets. These assets then do the working for money part and over time as our asset base gets bigger it frees us up to do the living.
Just like you can learn how to create assets and get more from your money by being a wealthy spender, we also need to learn how to get the most from our time.
Think about it...
Are you a wealthy time spender?
Are you getting the most from your precious time?
Time is an area where people rob themselves and deplete themselves by never learning great time consumption strategies to squeeze the most from their time.
Here are four ways to become a wealthy time consumer to get the most from your life.
WEALTHY TIME SPENDING HACK #1:
Do you start your day by choosing you and spending your time first on you and your priorities?
If you wake up to an alarm, flick it off, pick up your phone, start looking at emails and social media, that is NOT a great way to be consuming your time.
Successful people, people who are great conscious consumers of their time, have a routine, a morning ritual.
They are very conscious about how they spend those first moments of their day. It could be a 10-minute routine, a half an hour, an hour.
Some people that I know have a three-hour morning routine which they use to set themselves up for extraordinary success.
They have a process in place to ensure they use this time to best serve them.
Morning routines can include exercising, meditation, down regulation breathing and forward focus practices. For some it includes prayer, journaling or other mindfulness practices like morning notes where the practice creates the space to help the nervous system let go of its clutter and free the mind up for focus, production and creativity.
Whatever practises you choose, set your day up for success by choosing how you will spend this precious time - today.
Your morning ritual should include a process of getting clear on your priorities and wins you are going to achieve in the day.
What are the things that you want to get from the time spent this day?
What are your priorities?
WEALTHY TIME CONSUMER HACK #2:
If I'd done this video a few years ago, I would have said “get a grip on email” , but now it's not just email. We have email (lots of them), Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, text messages, Instagram messenger, Telegram….and on and on and on and on and on and on it goes.
You could consume your entire life just reacting and responding to these digital forms of communication.
It's important to understand that most of the stuff that is coming into these platforms are NOT your priorities. They are NOT your agendas.
Do NOT set your day up by reacting and responding to digital communication. If you do, you are literally giving your time to everybody else to consume.
Have a process for managing your time and managing digital communications.
I love this book, "Getting Things Done" by David Allen.
It is packed full of fantastic hacks about productivity, effectiveness, efficiency and having a system to manage digital communications.
I have a very structured framework to manage digital communication and ensure I am the one controlling it and not it controlling me.
Some juicy rules to free me up and make sure that I consume my precious time effectively.
I look at emails twice a day - once in the morning AFTER I have worked on my top priorities, and once mid afternoon.
I have a communication channel for all The Wealth Chef related business communications with my team. It’s a brilliant free app called Slack. I look at Slack four times a day.
For all the other digital channels, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram messenger, Telegram ... I choose which of these I'm going to be available on.
I choose where and when I’m going to be available, and it isn’t everywhere and it isn’t all the time!
People might try and use Facebook Messenger to contact me and they won't find me there. That’s totally cool with me. If it’s important they will find another way of contacting me.
If you try to be available on every channel, you're never going to have time available for you.
Choose the channels and choose when you will process those communications.
WEALTHY TIME SPENDING HACK #3:
Thanks to digital technology we have the extraordinary ability to get in touch and connect with the whole world…
… that also means the whole world can get in touch of us, anytime, anywhere!
This always on, always reachable connection is the greatest thief of time, attention and the ability to be present with life.
Notifications that you have a message is one of the biggest rats in your time pantry.
I’m referring to visual notifications where you get a pop up that an email has arrived, you've got a message… etc.
I'm referring to auditory notifications. Bing…
I’m referring to sensory notifications like a vibration…
...and like Pavlov's dog all attention is taken away from where you were and onto someone else's agenda.
If you truly want to claim back your life and be the master at the helm of your own ship, TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS.
Perhaps you’re thinking…
“I always thought Ann could be mad, now I know for sure! How am I going to know when I've got a message? What if I miss something important?
You will know because you will have a system to manage digital communications.
This is the whole point about being a wealthy time consumer - you choose how you consume your time, on what and when. This is freedom.
Claim back your agency, claim back your sovereignty.
Make you and your priorities come first.
Go into your digital devices. Your laptop, your tablet, your phone..., and turn off all notifications.
I challenge you to try this for one week and tell me how it's performed for you.
I do not have a single notification turned on on any of my devices.
Instead, I have processes around how I go and check the communication channels at a time and a place that aligns and suits me.
I am not going to be a slave to a digital device and neither should you. Your life is too precious.
WEALTHY TIME SPENDING HACK #4:
The 4th and final time hack is to block off chunks of time and cluster activities.
Another book I highly recommend is the book "The One Thing” by Gary Keller"
It debunks the multitasking myth.
Multitasking is a lie. We absolutely can't multitask and be effective.
Being truly effective is focusing on one thing at time and clustering like for like activities.
I have five primary activity categories that I cluster activities into and block off time to do these.
My first category is blue sky thinking time - Blue Time.
This is strategy time. I block off, and I'm very clear about when am I going to do strategy and high level thinking and planning. For my business and for every other aspect of my life.
The second category is creative time - Green Time.
This is my writing time, the time when I plan these videos and content, for the programmes like Financial Freedom University and Savvy Investor.
Creativity is super important. Block off time to do the creative work.
The third category is play time - Yellow Time.
Are you blocking off time to go and play?
That juicy living stuff, the stuff that has no objective outcome,
except to bring you joy, to connect you with life, to enliven you, to top up your batteries?
You must carve out and prioritise playtime.
The fourth category is administrative activities - Red Time.
This is “the working ON” the business called life.
This is the admin and greasing that is required to keep the wheel of our lives turning smoothly.
It’s for clearing emails and messages and doing payroll and invoices and paying bills and updating insurances and doing your money date ...
This is…
- seeing what's going on in your spend tracker.
- contacting the handy person to come and re-hang that picture that's falling off the wall.
- Fixing the water pipes destroyed by elephants…
Chunk your life's admin activities together. If you've got a list of all of that admin stuff and you chunk time off and do it all together, you're going to be amazed how much more effective you are during that targeted time.
If you try to do strategy, creative, play, and admin activities altogether, all you get is brown time.
Why brown time?
As a kid I remember getting a wonderful new paint set with fresh primary colours of blue and red and green and yellow, all clear and crisp.
I’d get the paint brush and shove it in the blue.
Whoo-hooo - there’s the sky…
Then into the yellow it would go..
But now the colour that came out on the page wasn’t so yellow, more like green.
On we go and into the red pot the brush gets plunged…
Before you know it, everything is dog-poop brown!
💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩
This is what most people are doing with their time.
Creating dog-poop brown time.
They muddle all of these different activities together and end up with a pile of dog poop brown inefficiency.
The fifth category is buffer time - Purple Time.
I schedule in time to catch up. I can use my buffer time for any of the other four categories. For admin, for creative, for blue sky thinking, or for play if I’ve run short on any of these.
I hope these 4 wealthy time consumer hacks help you be far more effective and get more from this precious thing called your time.
When all is said and done, there are only three things that we have agency over to create our wealthy life.
- Our money and how we manage and spend it.
- Our time and how we manage and spend it.
- Our energy and how we manage and spend it.
Remember, your wealthy life is created by small habits consistently done.
Choose one for the time spending hacks, implement it into your life and reap the wealthy benefits.
Big love
Ann
