Instead of New Year's resolutions, consider making 'New Week's resolutions.' This approach fosters continuous reflection and helps you stay present and mindful of how you're spending your time.
Your life’s time on a grid
This month I decided to move away from the technical, statistical and market comments and focus on something more mindful. It is a short piece, and I hope it is uplifting, rather than depressing. In my opinion, it provides an interesting perspective worthy of consideration.
Let’s start with a day. If we break a day down into 10 minute blocks and take out eight hours of that time for sleeping, then on average we have 100 blocks of 10 minutes each day; a thousand minutes a day. How do we use those blocks? Do we enjoy them, how many of them are spent with other people, and how many are spent on yourself? Which are your favourite blocks of the day, and which are your least favourite? Which blocks are not negotiable, and which blocks are flexible? If we read a book for 30 minutes each evening, that’s three blocks a day, which might allow us to read 10 or 15 books a year; that seems like good value use of blocks. Three blocks of video games might be a favourite pastime, but it is worth considering how much value you place on that time. There are no rules, but it is worth thinking about.
Not everyone will live to be 90, but let’s use this as the base case. When you think about your life in terms of blocks on a grid, you realise that time is so precious and it is important to use your weekly, or daily blocks to their full advantage. It’s quite scary that we can fit our lives in weeks onto a grid that fits onto one page!
Our weeks are precious!! We need to use them to build something for our future, or we need to use them because we built something in the past to benefit from it now. Sometimes we have good weeks, and sometimes we have bad weeks, but the point is to be conscious of what we are achieving each week and changing things if we are not using our weeks for good. Continual awareness and reflection are important so that we do not fall into a rut and waste our precious weeks.
Perhaps we should do away with New Year’s resolutions and make New Week’s resolutions each week.
What about if we think about things in terms of events rather than blocks. If I am 55 years old, and I live to 90, then I only have 45 more summers. If I read 5 books a year, then I will only read 225 more books in my life, there will only be 9 more presidents elected in my life, if I go out for dinner once a month, that’s 540 meals out. It starts to get a bit scary when you break it down into numbers!
This is the important thing for me; the time you have to spend with other people. We spend ninety percent of our days with our parents from when we are born to when we leave for university. But as we settle in different towns and countries, that time with our parents and siblings drops precipitously. You may have many more days and weeks ahead of you, but you realise that their weeks and months are diminishing. By the time we finish school we have used up 93% of our time with our parents. The same goes for old friends, the school friends that you spent every possible minute together playing sport, or hanging out with, scattered around the world and suddenly the opportunities to get together are diminished.
What does all this mean? Quality time matters. Priorities matter. Staying close to the people you love matters. If you enjoy this, I would encourage you to have a look at the website www.waitbutwhy.com which has lots of diagrams and visual representations of these thoughts.
Asset Class Returns
The table below represents a rolling year view of the major asset class returns that we track. It offers a view of the asset classes we use to diversify your portfolio.
Your life’s time on a grid
This month I decided to move away from the technical, statistical and market comments and focus on something more mindful. It is a short piece, and I hope it is uplifting, rather than depressing. In my opinion, it provides an interesting perspective worthy of consideration.
Let’s start with a day. If we break a day down into 10 minute blocks and take out eight hours of that time for sleeping, then on average we have 100 blocks of 10 minutes each day; a thousand minutes a day. How do we use those blocks? Do we enjoy them, how many of them are spent with other people, and how many are spent on yourself? Which are your favourite blocks of the day, and which are your least favourite? Which blocks are not negotiable, and which blocks are flexible? If we read a book for 30 minutes each evening, that’s three blocks a day, which might allow us to read 10 or 15 books a year; that seems like good value use of blocks. Three blocks of video games might be a favourite pastime, but it is worth considering how much value you place on that time. There are no rules, but it is worth thinking about.
Not everyone will live to be 90, but let’s use this as the base case. When you think about your life in terms of blocks on a grid, you realise that time is so precious and it is important to use your weekly, or daily blocks to their full advantage. It’s quite scary that we can fit our lives in weeks onto a grid that fits onto one page!
Our weeks are precious!! We need to use them to build something for our future, or we need to use them because we built something in the past to benefit from it now. Sometimes we have good weeks, and sometimes we have bad weeks, but the point is to be conscious of what we are achieving each week and changing things if we are not using our weeks for good. Continual awareness and reflection are important so that we do not fall into a rut and waste our precious weeks.
Perhaps we should do away with New Year’s resolutions and make New Week’s resolutions each week.
What about if we think about things in terms of events rather than blocks. If I am 55 years old, and I live to 90, then I only have 45 more summers. If I read 5 books a year, then I will only read 225 more books in my life, there will only be 9 more presidents elected in my life, if I go out for dinner once a month, that’s 540 meals out. It starts to get a bit scary when you break it down into numbers!
This is the important thing for me; the time you have to spend with other people. We spend ninety percent of our days with our parents from when we are born to when we leave for university. But as we settle in different towns and countries, that time with our parents and siblings drops precipitously. You may have many more days and weeks ahead of you, but you realise that their weeks and months are diminishing. By the time we finish school we have used up 93% of our time with our parents. The same goes for old friends, the school friends that you spent every possible minute together playing sport, or hanging out with, scattered around the world and suddenly the opportunities to get together are diminished.
What does all this mean? Quality time matters. Priorities matter. Staying close to the people you love matters. If you enjoy this, I would encourage you to have a look at the website www.waitbutwhy.com which has lots of diagrams and visual representations of these thoughts.
Asset Class Returns
The table below represents a rolling year view of the major asset class returns that we track. It offers a view of the asset classes we use to diversify your portfolio.