Archive for ‘Time Management’

August 12th, 2010

Escaping Sisyphus

In Greek Mythology, we learn the story of Sisyphus. He was a king; a mighty man with great ambition, interest and power. The stories told of his earthly life tells us that he was witty, crafty and very clever. Yet this is not why we remember him. After his death, he made a deal with Persephone which allowed him to return from the land of the dead to set some minor affairs in order so that he could rest. However, this was all part of an elaborate ruse, and he had no intent of ever returning to the halls of the dead. Eventually, Hermes had to go look for him, find him, and forcibly bring him down to Hades.

His punishment for this transgression was to forever more push a boulder up a hill and then watch it roll down again, only to repeat the process.

The interpretations of this story are legion, ranging from it being an allegorical explanation of the movement of the sun across the heavens to being a tale about the hard work that it is to be a human. Some have chosen to regard it as a story about the punishment one gets when one transgresses the law of the Gods. According to Albert Camus, the story of Sisyphus was a personification of the absurdity of human life.

My own interpretation is not far from that of Albert Camus. I chose to interpret it as a strict warning by means of example. We all look at Sisyphus and his endless task and pity him; it must be thankless work to push the boulder up the hill, only to see it roll down and have to start all over again. There is nobody there to congratulate him when he gets it all the way up the hill and nobody to commiserate with him after it has rolled down; there is only his mind-numbingly dull routine. He knows that he has no means of escape from these tasks and that he will never be free again.

Despite this terrible warning, all of us fall into Sisyphusian routines of our own.

I’m sure that all of you, given time, can find your very own Sisyphus. It may be your job; the place where you go every day and drudge through, not getting any pleasure, respect, recognition or the salary you deserve. It may be the relationship you’re in; the partner that you know is bad for you and which gives you the impression that he/she doesn’t really care if you live or die. It could be the computer game that you sit down in front of every evening, going through the motions of having fun instead of actually enjoying it the way we used to. It may even be the creative project you started – a book, an album, a web page or a quilt you’re sowing – but that you’re now just spending time on without getting anywhere in particular.

We are all Sisyphus and we all owe it to ourselves to identify these areas of our lives. We all need to ask ourselves if what we’re doing is truly worth it or if we’re just going through the motions because of sheer force of habit or because of we fear what we would have if we were to abandon it.

Find your Sisyphus.

October 22nd, 2009

Don’t Get Organized. Eliminate!

My office room, as it looked a few months ago

My home office as it looked a few months ago. Click to see it in all of its horror.

A couple of days ago, I decided that I probably needed to (re-)organize all my stuff. Things were piling up again and nothing seemed to be in the right place anymore. I had books piled on other books on my desk, pieces of paper where I’d taken important notes here and there, clothes, empty boxes, receipts, magazines and plenty of other things.

My first instinct was, as I said, to organize everything. After all, the books belong in the book shelves, the magazines in their own folders, the receipts need to be cataloged, the clothes put into the closet and so on. It wasn’t until I picked up one of the magazines that I took a good look at the front cover. “May 2009″, it claimed, talking about the fantastic advances going on in computing at the time. I looked at the cover again and asked myself: “Will this ever be news again? Will this ever be as interesting to read as it was the first time? Will I ever need to refer back to this magazine?”

The answer was, of course, “no”, so I threw the magazine into the garbage can, where it should have been put long before.

Next up, I grabbed a receipt for a book that had also joined the rest of the detritus on my desk. It was for a book I bought in June. Will I ever need the receipt?

Nope, into the garbage can it goes!

Before I knew, I discovered that I needed to empty the garbage can in the home office, something I usually only do once every two weeks. It didn’t take long for the garbage can to fill up a second time, either. Old magazines, receipts, notes, bills and even clothing that I never actually wear all wound up being sorted into the same garbage can. I know I should probably have recycled, but I was on a roll and just needed to get things out of the way. I’ll sort my trash properly next time.

When I finally finished cleaning out the room, it seemed almost empty. By eliminating before I started organizing, I had suddenly made my job so much easier. It got me thinking; if I could do this to my desk, why can’t I do this in other areas of my life? Instead of organizing my schedule and trying to fit everything in, why not just eliminate the things that didn’t have to be there?

What I’ve now done is create two lists of things and events. They are:

  1. Things that cost money (bills, consumables, habits, clothes, everything)
  2. Things that cost time (work, hobbies, friends, reading, bathing, everything)

These lists will then be sorted in order of relevance and importance to me. Things that don’t need to be there will simply be removed from the lists as I decide to restructure my life. I won’t tell you exactly what’s on these lists, but I will post the results of this experiment as I’m done with it.

To follow this experiment and the many more that will follow, I have added a page to this weblog where people can quickly see what is happening. The page can be found here: http://www.lonelysavage.com/experimentation

October 7th, 2009

Designing your Freedom: Passive Income

This blog falls into a particular part of the self-help niche called Lifestyle Design. Wikipedia defines this as: “the design of a lifestyle, especially an unconventional one, providing good opportunities for personal fulfillment, leisure and adventure. Detailed methods include: career planning, entrepreneurship and travel”. So what does it mean to be a lifestyle designer? What is a lifestyle and how does one actually begin to design it? This is something that I’m going to be looking at in detail in the next couple of entries.

Like so many others, I first became aware of the term Lifestyle Design in Timothy Ferriss’ book The 4-hour Work Week. While the book itself didn’t promise to automatically create gold and riches for any of us, it asked a series of very relevant questions and showed us by means of an example how people can make a good life for themselves. It was inspirational, to say the very least.

To me, the term Lifestyle Design comes from the observation and recognition of a flaw in the old philosophies of how to make a good life for yourself. In the past, people (and I was no different) would focus on the goals they had. They would set up targets and milestones and eventually the results they were going for; something similar to “I want to earn $200,000 a year” or “I want to own a beach house in Malibu”. While the actual contents of these goals are all fine and good, I think that by doing this, people were avoiding the main issue and what their actual goals were. While I am sure it’s well within the reach of many people to earn $200,000 a year, I am equally sure that most people would need to be working double or triple shifts, have no family and no social life to speak of if they wanted to pull it off. If people want a beach house in Malibu, I’m sure that if they save money for long enough – or take a large enough loan – they can afford the beach house.

What these people actually want, and what they’re failing to ask for in their wishes, is the lifestyle associated with that beach house or the money. Instead of working 40 hours a week – or more – and feeling like there is no sense of control and direction, the Lifestyle Designer will set out to actively control the way that his life looks and works. We want to be able to spend hours of quality time with our friends and families, pursuing our hobbies and catching up on reading. What we usually don’t want is to be waking up early, hurrying to eight hours of sitting in the office waiting to go home for the day. We want to have the benefits of working five hours a week without the disadvantages. Enter Passive Income.

The first step towards Designing your Freedom is, unfortunately: Money, money, money. To be able to design an optimal life, we need to be able to afford to do this. Since most people are already earning money in one way or another, it is usually not enough to just find a new job. What Lifestyle Designers usually look for is a passive income. This usually falls into one (or more) of these categories:

  • Advertisement revenue on a homepage
  • Selling a product of some sort
  • Affiliate marketing
  • The inevitable “other”

I don’t need to spend much time on these, as they are so well covered in other places. For example, Pat and his Smart Passive Income Blog does a great job at covering the way he set up his very own group of income streams. The important thing to note here is that the various passive income methods are not goals in and of themselves. The goal is not to be earning large sums of money without any major effort but to be enjoying the life that the money permits.

That, I suppose, is the key issue here. So many people start trying to earn extra money from blogs, micro-niche pages, affiliate marketing and typing up a simple e-book, so why aren’t all of them earning massive amounts of money? While I don’t have any proof on this, I feel that many people fail because they focus too hard on the actual earning of money. I’m not ready to accept many of the old axioms – “If you build it, they will come” or “If you write good content, you will get readers” – but I do believe that trying too hard quickly becomes transparent. Nobody wants to click the affiliate advertisement of the guy screaming the equivalent of “CLICK HERE SO I GET MONEY”, but they’d be happy to click a link if it appears in combination with something that they find interesting.

Generating a passive income is, for many people, the first and only step in their Lifestyle Design. They feel that if they only had the money, everything else would be great. In a future entry, we’ll look at how important it is to have something to fill your new-found freedom with.