Five Cents Ten Cents

Posted: 10 Apr 2008 03:36 AM CDT

Flickr! photo by Photocapy.

In my journey towards financial freedom, I have discovered that time management and getting things done has a lot in common with financial freedom.

The Convergence of Getting Things Done and Financial Freedom

Financial freedom is about having sufficient passive income to covers your living expenses. Underlying the concept is the ability to have investments that generate income for you. The speed at which you can accumulate income producing assets and the rate of return of such assets will determine how quickly or slowly you achieve this target. All of us who strive towards financial freedom know that time is a huge factor in financial freedom.

The power of compound interest grows your nest egg works with time. All of us have limited time and to some extent, the same amount of time in a day, i.e. 24 hours. How we apply these 24 hours to achieving our financial freedom goals determines if we are successful in 20, 30 or 40 years.

How to Better Use Your Time Towards Financial Freedom

I recently watched this video on time management delivered by Dr. Randy Pausch, a Computer Scientist who literally is living on borrowed time as he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The key takeaway that struck me as I observed in my personal productivity blog is that in order to create enough time for us to do what is important to us, we need to re-consider the important/non-important and due soon/not due soon quadrant when we decide what we want to do with our time.

The main idea from the diagram above is that if it is IMPORTANT, get it DONE even if it is not due soon.

How does this apply to financial freedom?

If you want to achieve financial freedom and it is important to you, then you must focus the time, effort and energy to do the things that help you achieve it when they are due soon e.g. pay your taxes on time to avoid fines, invest your monies for better returns by researching different asset classes and their risk-return trade-offs, growing your means now through investing in your career, monetising your hobby, gaining dividends from high yield blue chips etc.

My own experience has been that I have started to watch television less and less because I am focussing more and more of my time on blog monetisation in the evenings and weekends. I have also cut back a lot on my toastmastering activity partly also because I need to be home to help out my spouse with my daughter.

Defining what is important to you is critical because it allows you to focus your resources on taking the next steps to achieve that which is important to you.

If you are serious about financial freedom, you should be devoting time to see how you can live within your means. You should be considering the ways to save and invest and you also keep an eye or ear to see how you can grow your means.

I am now reading David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” book on “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” and it is starting to get me all excited about how productive I can be in terms of pushing with my journey towards financial freedom. Given the competing roles as husband, father and worker, I need to balance the same 24 hours that is given to me as anyone else to achieve my goals by my internal target dates.

What will you be “getting done” to progress towards financial freedom?

Consider what are your next steps in moving yourself nearer to your goal of financial freedom and push on with them. If they are important enough to you, they belong in the top-left and top-right priorities of number 1 and number 2.

As the lady in the picture at the start of the article is trying to tell us, let’s do it before “TIME’S UP!”

Be well and prosper.