Save 15 Hours a Week by Deleting These Bullsh*t Things from Your Life

This is going to save your life

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

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Families are getting ripped apart because of time-wasting.

I’m a new dad. I have other friends that are dads. It’s alarming how many of them commute to an office and don’t get home until late.

Once you layer in all the time-wasting, their kids would be lucky to see them for a few hours a week. It’s sad. This is no way to live.

For some dumb reason we’ve become so obsessed with money that the importance of free time has been lost. I’ll say it again for the cool kids down the back of the room: money is meaningless. What you want is free time.

Delete as many of these things below as possible to save at least 15 hours a week.

(Note: there are many levels to this game. Not all of you can start at the highest level. I’ll point out the advanced ones as we go that you may need to wait to do.)

Stupid, stubborn businesses

There are so many dumb businesses it’s not funny.

Many still don’t have digital channels. Or they have some out of date computer system that doesn’t sync properly. The worst are banks. Recently I got a home loan. My #1 criteria wasn’t price or service. It was whether they were fully digital.

The cheapest loan came from a local bank but simple tasks like updating an address would force me to go into a branch. So I paid 10 basis points more to go with a digital-only bank that has no branches.

The only business we can’t escape is the government. They have some of the most convoluted and ridiculous processes you’ll ever come across.

Whatever you do, delete dumb businesses from your life. They cost you too much in time. Time is an expensive luxury you can’t afford to waste.

Watching a season of any tv show

The fashion is to watch whatever the latest tv show is on Netflix.

The problem I have is they waste your time. In the early 2000s when I was growing up there were no pre-recorded tv shows.

You could only watch a show at a designated time each week. If you missed it, you missed it. This limited how much of a tv show you could consume.

Now everything is on-demand, and movies have gone out of fashion.

It’s not by accident either. Netflix knows they have to keep you hooked and drain your attention in order to make money and throw more and more ads at you.

I only watch movies. Mostly documentaries. I don’t want to be stuck on a hamster wheel, forced to have my attention outsourced to HBO for the next 5 years. If the producers can’t say it in a 2-hour movie then I’m not watching it. Ever.

Seasons of tv shows are too addictive. We have better things to be doing.

Never-ending to-do lists

To-do lists will be the death of me.

The book “Essentialism” talks a lot about having a priority. The author deliberately doesn’t use the plural form of the word. Why?

Because you should be primarily focused on one thing.

I call it an obsession. When you find an obsession nothing else matters. The idea of having ten hobbies seems ridiculous, and all you want to do is get home from work and be consumed by whatever that obsession is.

Mine is writing online.

Stop living life according to a to-do list. Get one big priority and let all the small stuff fit around it (if you get time).

Adult babies (mostly, those known as a “man child”)

A girlfriend once used the phrase man child. It made me laugh.

I know a lot of them. They can’t do housework. They think the opposite sex is there to be banged or not banged. They’re all about their ego. They contribute nothing to society. If anything, they’re a menace to society.

It’s like sitting next to a teenager, except you just wish they’d grow the hell up.

I know one “woman child” too. She thinks all men are useless. She has cats everywhere. The house is full of crap and smells. She changes careers multiple times every year and has done so for decades.

Every job always has a problem – it’s never her.

She has no bloody clue what’s happening in the world and lives with her head up her ass in fairyland. It just ain’t worth it.

These people waste your time.

Get them out of your life until they at least figure out theirs. We each get assigned one life and can attach it to a mission. Without a mission you have no meaning. But with a mission you know where to allocate your time and everything makes sense.

Email newsletters

It’s easy to become subscribed to someone else’s emails.

As a writer, I have to subscribe to newsletters to read and learn. It’s part of the job. The trouble is most emails are trash and designed to mess with you.

The temptation is to stay subscribed to a sequence of emails or a newsletter in the hope a person or organization will add value.

Don’t do it.

We all get far too many emails and it takes at least an hour a day to sort through them. Unsubscribe from all the trash so you can invest the time on emails that matter.

Plus, you can always resubscribe to a newsletter again if you miss it lol.

Cold calls from weirdos

I don’t know why in this modern age we would ever allow cold calls again.

I have my phone on do not disturb permanently. There are four numbers that can call me and that’s it. Everyone else goes to voicemail. And if I don’t recognize the number then I don’t call them back. And I definitely don’t waste time listening to voicemails.

Phone calls are old school. Time is important. If you have no way to screen a call or book it in advance then get it out of your life.

Random interruptions are the real epidemic.

Notifications that ping your brain to death

The idea we need notifications is one of the greatest lies ever told.

They hijack your attention and help fund other people’s agendas and business models. Turn ‘em off. I haven’t had notifications turned on since 2014.

If I need to check something on my phone, then I do it at the end of the day when my attention battery is at 2% and needs sleep to recharge.

Proactivity over reactivity.

Real estate agents and landlord hoarders

Now we start to get into the more advanced techniques.

One of the biggest time-savers for me is getting out of rental property hell. In my last house I had to deal with a pain in the butt real estate agent.

All she cared about was her commissions.

She was rude and there was nothing I could do. In Australia, where I live, we have a quiet housing crisis. There aren’t enough homes to buy OR rent. So you’re stuck dealing with an industry full of fat cats that can do whatever the hell they want to you.

Over the last few years I’ve had to deal with major defects in the properties I’ve lived in because market forces made it easy for landlords to get away with murder.

A few weeks ago I bought my own house.

• No more broken hot water.

• No more waiting for real estate agents to call me back.

• No more random inspections to check up on me like I’m a criminal.

When you’re wealthy enough, get the hell away from real estate agents and landlords forever and buy your own house. It saves so much time.

(If you don’t have the cash to do so then read more of my money articles. It’s entirely possible to escape the rat race with the right mindset and strategy.)

Outsource your admin

All of us have life admin. For years I did it for no reason.

Then a friend told me you could just get a virtual assistant and not do it anymore. I assumed it would cost 6-figures for this privilege. If you go on Fiverr and Upwork you’ll find virtual assistants are way cheaper than you may think.

The cost feels uncomfortable at first until you see how much time you get back.

It also forces you to start creating systems for everything in life. This makes you more efficient and allows you to scale your time as everything you do grows.

Make enough money so you can afford a VA. Cut back in other areas if it means you can afford one. Or if you’re not convinced, try using a VA for only 1-2 hours a month.

A VA is probably the greatest wealth-building asset you can invest in – and most people don’t even know it because they assume it’s a white boy privilege (it’s not).

Slowly, artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will help in this area of life too.

If you could only outsource one thing, it should be this…

I’d get rid of your email inbox as soon as you can.

Having a VA manage it for you means you’ll save so much mental energy. I have Gmail filters set up to automatically sort my emails into folders. This means my main inbox has very few emails. Then I get my VA to look at everything else.

Random pitches and spam are deleted before I even see them.

Pre-scheduled events are booked in without me touching them. And basic emails that can have a template reply get them without me lifting a finger.

Email has become a full-time job. Steal your time back.

Micro-managing bosses

If you have one then they are literally wasting your precious life.

Maybe you can’t quit the job and go live the laptop lifestyle in the Bahamas. But you can always get another job where you work with a leader instead of for a boss. Don’t tolerate bosses anymore. It’s time to wage war against them.

It starts by voting against them with your job.

Picking up stuff with a car

I used to drive around like a monkey in my Honda Civic and pick up all the stuff my household needs. It saved me money but wasted my time.

Traffic is a b*tch where I live. Now I just pay to have everything delivered. The cost is tiny but the time savings are huge.

Screw doing donkey work and driving around town like a courier. The ROI is low.

Scarcity mindsets

People who have them waste a lot of your time. They make you think everything is harder than it is.

One of my readers left a tweet reply yesterday that said:

“Why do you even bother writing? AI will replace everything including the easiest of all: words. It’s already replaced visual art.

Then it will replace music. And shortly, all customer support.”

This kind of mindset is destructive.

If you have it, stick your head down the toilet and flush out all the crap. Nothing is that dire. AI is here to augment humans, not replace us. If you think with this doomsdayer mindset you don’t leave time to focus on what matters.

AI will save us time. That’s how you should think about it.

The #1 area to watch your time like a hawk

It’s screen time.

I’m saying this to you AND to myself. We spend way too much time in front of screens. We’re basically already living in a digital matrix … and it’s scary.

Get a screen time app to see how much time you’re murdering as you sleepwalk through life. Then think about ways you can spend less time in front of a screen.

When you live life through a screen you miss out on real life that happens in the physical world. It’s one reason loneliness is at an all-time high.

Since 2020 created the Zoom generation, we just don’t like to see each other’s sexy faces anymore. But we should. Human connection isn’t the same through a screen.

When we feel less connected, loneliness sets in.

Loneliness is destructive if it dominates your life. We all need to feel part of something bigger than ourselves.

What to do with your extra 15 hours a week

Now you have at least 15 hours a week of your life back. Let’s reinvest the time.

• Run without listening to podcasts

• Take breaks between events on your calendar

• Drive with nothing playing through the speakers

• Read a book slowly. Then read it again if it’s good.

• Jump in a public sauna and sweat your tits off in silence

• Spend more time chasing an obsession that you can’t stop thinking about

They say billionaires have a lot of money. But you don’t want lots of money. Trust me.

What you want is to become a time billionaire. With extra time, you can live the good life most people only dream of because of their busy lives.

Start saving time as if every minute was worth $1000.

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