It’s About Time
Why don't you subscribe to my blog while you're here? I'm a freelance web developer and I blog about Ruby, Rails, and business online.
Go ahead and subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
This post marks the birth of my blog, so it seems appropriate that I kick off with a post about time.
There are only so many hours in a day, and only so many days in a life. For those of us who choose to live a full life, we face the continous challenge of having to prioritise, well.. _everything_!
One thing I have used to help me get more done with my time is to use leverage. Leverage gives me the super human power to get more done than time would seem to allow.
Most people actually leverage their time without realising it. It’s really just a fancy way of saying, “doing more than one thing at once”, or as they say, “killing two birds with one stone”. For example, dropping by the shops on the way home from work is a common form of leveraging practiced by many people.
To get more done with my time I leverage:
h3. My Skills
My business projects are software based, leveraging on my day job as a software developer. This means that when I learn something, I can apply it to my work, and my business projects. Not only can I apply my new found knowledge straight away, I can add it to my resume and benefit from it for years to come. Plus my professional career benefits from my business projects. All this by just applying my single skill set in different contexts.
h3. My Physical Location
Recently I purchased a wireless access point and PCMCIA NIC card for my laptop. Previously I was confined to my _cell_ - the office. But now I can spend time with Allison on the loungue while still getting some work done, even if it’s simply paying the bills, or replying to email. In fact, now even Allison uses my laptop sometimes instead of checking email in her office.
h3. My Money
I have a cleaner come in once a week to clean the whole house over. I still have chores, only fewer than I normally would without my cleaner. I use my money to buy myself some time. Currently it costs me 1.5 hours of my weekly income to pay for the cleaner, but I’d rather work that 1.5 hours behind the computer than do the cleaning work at home.
In fact, commerce is one big impressive leveraging machine. I am better off buying corn off a farmer who specialises in growing corn, than spending the time growing corn myself. A retail merchant is better off asking a computer professional to install their point of sales system than trying to install the system themselves. While the monetary costs may at first seem small, you will pay in time, and this ultimately costs you money.
h3. And Other Things
There heaps of ways I leverage to get more done with my time, and I don’t just reserve the use of leverage to get me more time. I use leverage to make me money, to spend time with my family, to have a good time with my friends, to buy a nice meal.
Leveraging to get more from each day is an ongoing process that I hope I can stop thinking about some day. Unfortunately my time will end some day, and even through leveraging I probably wont have done _everything_ by then.
