Once there was a fisherman arrived at the bank of a river before dawn. The morning was too dark so he was unable to catch fish from the river. He sat near the bank of the river waiting for the sun to rise. He found a small sack near him. He thought that the sack contained the tiny pebbles so he started throwing them one by one into the river. As he was about to throw the last pebble, a ray of light fell on it. He was surprised to see that it was a diamond. He felt sorry for himself for throwing the precious diamonds into the river. Still, he had one precious diamond that was enough to make him wealthy.
Our life is also similar to the fisherman. We waste our precious yet limited time by thinking of it as a useless stone only to realize its importance at the end of our life. Time is the most valuable asset in our life. We have a limited number of years in this beautiful galaxy. Still, we squander it on useless activities.
Let me ask you a simple question: Why do you want to earn money?
The most obvious answer is to fulfill the basic needs of our life. Once the peace of the stomach is taken care of, then our next priority is happiness. Happy people have a great amount of control over their time. Spending time on the activities we love greatly enhance the quality of our life. It gives more meaning to our life. People spend a large amount of time to save money. Instead, they have to spend money to earn time. Always trade money for time not the time for money. Money spent can be earned back but once the time is gone, it is gone forever!
Naval Ravikant on the value of time:
No one is going to value you more than you value yourself. Set a high personal hourly rate, and stick to it. When I was young, I decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth. And I started treating myself that way.
Factor your time into every decision. Say you value your time at $100 an hour. If you decide to spend an hour driving across town to get something, you’re effectively throwing away $100. Are you going to do that?
Say you buy something from Amazon and they screw it up. Is it worth your time to return it? Is it worth the mental hassle? Keep in mind that you will have less time for work, including mentally high-output work. Do you want to use that time running errands and solving little problems? Or do you want to save it for the big stuff?
Our day must be filled with activities that will make us creative, productive, and joyful. There are two kinds of activities: Beer activities and Coffee activities. In Coffee activities, we are working towards a specific outcome. Laser-like concentration is needed to complete them. We are highly productive but not creative in this mode. In Beer activities, we are in a relaxed state not focusing particularly on anything. It's more likely a diffuse mode where we become the sky and the thoughts are like the clouds that come and go. Best ideas come to our mind when we are not thinking about them. Beer activities are not a waste of our time rather these activities make us more creative and joyful. Fill your day with a mix of Coffee as well as Beer activities.
Paul Graham on Beer activities Vs Coffee Activities:
Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is you can control it indirectly.
I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they were allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. This means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.
So far we have discussed the importance of time, the effect of Money on our well-being, and the kind of activities that should be present on our to-do list. The important question is:
How to allocate our precious time to various activities to get the maximum yield?
Eisenhower's Decision matrix will help us to solve this problem. Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t only the 34th President of the United States. Before that, he was a five-star general in the Army, responsible for command of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. He was also the Supreme Commander of NATO and President of Columbia University.
Eisenhower divides the cohort of activities into four categories.
Important and Urgent
Important and Not Urgent
Not Important and Urgent
Not Important and Not Urgent
My Framework of Eisenhower Decision Matrix
Important and Urgent: Make these activities to be the top priority in your to-do list. These activities need to be done immediately. Don't get overwhelmed by the big and complex tasks. Divide them into small and manageable chunks so that it looks weird to say no to such simple tasks. Given long enough time, you can easily complete them.
Important and Not Urgent: It includes your Long term goals. You are more likely to procrastinate these tasks due to the lack of urgency. Always think long term. Play long term games with long term people. Spend huge chunks of your time doing these activities. Most of you want immediate results so you develop a myopic vision(Short-termism). Short-termism means to focus on short term results despite knowing the usefulness of long term results.
Doing work-out for a single day is not going to help you to get in good shape, Reading a single book won't make you a smart person, and Meditating for a week won't make you a calm person. When you don't see results then you stop doing them. Don't be too result-oriented. Of Course, the result matters but it's the right process that drives out the result. Focus on the process. Do the work for its own sake.
Not Important and Urgent: Spent the least amount of time on these activities. The fundamental delusion is to consider urgent as important. Yeah, there are some activities that are urgent and important but most of them are urgent but not important. If you let them consistently interrupt you then it will significantly decrease your performance on important matters. One approach to counteract this effect is to turn off notifications while doing deep work. You can respond to a phone call or an email once you are done with 1st and 2nd quadrant activities. These are low energy tasks so do them when you are less productive.
Not Important and Not Urgent: If possible, eliminate these tasks from your to-do list. It is nothing but a sheer waste of time. These are very attractive tasks because they provide immediate gratification. Cheap dopamine is the modern devil. It would be unhealthy to get rid of leisure completely in your life but is essential to evaluate how much of your time is being spent on unimportant activities so that it doesn't get in your way of achieving long-term results.
Lay the bricks of wisdom hour by hour to build the inner citadel to protect yourself from the storm of Misfortune.
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