I really like Ramit Sethi’s book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. This Wednesday, I’ll be posting my own book review, but today I want to talk about one idea called, conscious spending. Or better yet, a derivative of that concept that I’m calling conscious living.
Conscious spending falls in the category of budgeting. The basic idea is having a clear distinction between what you love and what you don’t. Then you become frugal when it comes to spending money on anything that is not a love. Then you can spend freely or consciously on what you do value.
For example, you don’t need to be cheap in order to save or budget. If you want to indulge in Starbucks, clothing or vacations — do it! Feel free! Then be cut-throat conservative in every other area. This will allow you live at a standard custom fit for you. Not some cookie cutter budgeting plan.
Now, after I thought about this idea and started applying it, I quickly realized that it could be applied to life or time management.
I can and should have clear distinctions about what I care most about, and what I don’t. The big picture idea for me and others is finding ways to live on purpose or with purpose in the midst of multiple responsibilities and scarcity of time.
We want to learn how to get more out of a limited amount. In money, we don’t want to live in self-determined poverty. Likewise, with our time and life, we don’t want to be so focused on productivity that we have no relationships or fluidity in how we spend time on things we love.
Conscious living works by first, defining what our current values and priorities are.
List them. 1, 2, 3, 4…
(See my “If It’s Important” list to double-check your priorities)
Examples: 1-2 personal or professional goals, and 1-2, health or relationship goals. Or whatever you can think of. Note: Don’t make too many!! I recall the words of Jim Collins, author of Good to Great says, “if you have more than 3 priorities, you have NO priorities.”
Next, I would probably try listing the other 5 – 10 things that we must spend time on that are most common. These are the things we need to minimize or batch as once a day or once a week tasks.
Examples: phone calls (and texts), social media (and blogs/news), driving/commuting, shopping.. or whatever. List your necessary time sucks. You know what would fit best for you. The things you don’t need to focus on, minimize them —push them to a certain time and batch them. (Batching means, don’t do them when you feel like it, nor when someone call/messages you, but do them all at a specific time to get it all done at once.)
The idea of ‘conscious living’ is that you can purposefully neglect the things that are not important without guilt or regret. If you know what’s important and have a plan for handling the other things that are taking a backseat, you will make real progress to your goals.
Yeah, you need to plan to neglect the urgent-unimportant things that can steal large amounts of time.