by BRIAN HALL
Our close friends, on the other hand, should get much larger pieces of our social pie. We tend to lose track of these people with age but maintaining these friendships over time can be one of the most important things that we do to preserve our mental health heading into our waning years. These are the people who typically arrive at the more sordid details of our lives that our parents never know about. We can tell these people different kinds of things because they are usually more similar to us in age. For this reason, we need to keep them around for longer so that we can get their advice whenever it may be of use.
There are toxic friends, then there are close friends, but we also have friends that live like Peter Pan: refusing to grow up and choosing instead to live in Neverland. These are the people in our lives who end up having behavioral health issues (typically people who we meet at parties in our youth and continue in that vein for longer than is becoming) and may never live as adults. We should try to help these people as much as possible, but we cannot afford to exert much energy on them. Here, the necessity of disregarding personal history asserts itself: the people who gave us joy in the past may fail to do so in the present and may need to be avoided entirely.
As adults (and hopefully, we are adults if we are reading this book about time management), we should allocate more time and energy into our spouses than anyone else. When we are married, we agree to bind ourselves to the significant other more closely than to anyone else. One common problem in marriages is the tendency of partners to spend more time with other people besides their spouses than with their spouses themselves. If traditionally married, the spouse is the person we plan on living the rest of our lives with, so to invest in our relationship with this person is to invest in our future. When we neglect this person right in front of us, we set ourselves up for disaster in the long run.
We should always keep our social life within a golden mean, not conversing too much or too little. Likewise, we should split this time devoted to others up according to those who we are spending it with, and how happy or miserable they happen to make us.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
Your social life is just as important as any other part of your life
Your spouse, or significant other, plays the most important role in our relationships with others
Making time for family is equally important in our lives
Things to try out:
Spend time with those friends whom your truly love and treasure in your life
Don’t be afraid to schedule time for your spouse; it will show how much you truly appreciate them
Scheduling regular time with family (for instance, a family get-together once a month) can go a long way toward fostering the ties among you
Chapter Sixteen: Health and Wellbeing
The term “health” could be loosely defined as a state of complete social, mental, and physical wellbeing rather than the mere absence of physical infirmity. The biopsychosocial model of health is a holistic system of analysis of overall health, which takes into account the social, psychological, and physiological, as well as the interplay between these factors. This definition of health is explicit with wellbeing—the term applied to which refers to the positive affirmation of health, which is constantly built up upon and required as a tool for living a healthy life, rather than being the object of living that life itself.
By this definition, most of us remain “unhealthy” most of the time. After all, very few can get through all of life without having any ailments whatsoever—whether they be physiological, psychological, or social. This definition, therefore, challenges our traditional definitions of what health and wellbeing truly are, and where this seemingly indistinguishable line between flourishing and suffering is drawn in the sand.
The areas of concern in managing health for most modern western people are nutrition and exercise. As far as preventable diseases are concerned, smoking and alcohol consumption prove to be the most common causes of these issues in both the long and the short terms.
Smoking effects each and every organ in the body, especially the heart and the lungs. It leads to an array of lung problems including tuberculosis and to any number of heart problems including high blood pressure and, in some cases, heart diseases like cardiomyopathy. This habit can even lead to alterations in the chemical makeup of our blood, usually decreasing overall levels of oxygen being supplied to the rest of our organs. This is especially damaging to our brain, considering the copious amounts of oxygen that are required to keep this organ functioning properly.
Alcohol consumption is similar to smoking in that it has detrimental impacts on all parts of the body. This substance affects our mental health more saliently than smoking, leading to higher rates of anxiety and depression, damaging our memory consolidation, and making us care less about the consequences of our actions while we still remain cognizant of them nonetheless. This behavior can also lead to strokes and aneurysms and also diseases (including cancers) of the liver, pancreas, and heart. In addition, alcohol consumption can lead to headaches and higher rates of accidents of all kinds. Both alcohol and nicotine are highly addictive substances that often put great strains on users’ biopsychosocial well-being, as well as their financial lives.
Nutrition is the first thing that most of us should focus on in order to better our overall health. When we pay no attention to what our intake is, we almost invariably end up making poor decisions as to what we are eating. This is especially true in the developed world in which there are far too many options available for us at any given time, most of them being very bad for our health. We tend to prefer fatty and sweet foods, loaded with grease and sugars, and will naturally invest more in these options if we are not paying attention when buying food. In order to curtail the negative impacts of this standard American diet so loaded fats and carbs and sugars, we should look primarily for foods that are healthy for our heart and brain. This is due to the fact that most of the main health issues affecting first world people today are related to heart and or brain health.
A diet that is low in fat, carbs, and sugars is arguably the most beneficial for people in the developed world. Typically, people eat far too much meat which could, for the most part, be supplemented with poultry and or fish. This will stop the blockage of arteries caused by excess fat and usually leads to better neural health. Fruits and vegetables are often neglected in people’s diets, which is a shame considering that these food groups can supply most of our energy throughout the day without giving us the negative effects that meats and other animal products often produce. Nuts and seeds should also be invested more in as they can supply lots of protein and many provide heart benefits. We typically consume too many carbs within most of our diets, mostly stemming from the bread and the sugars that we eat. Foods rich in B vitamins should be consumed instead as they provide the same levels of energy as those rich in carbs do without having the damaging effects on our brains that those in the latter category do.
Physical activity is a natural part of human life. Many of us, however, live largely without this activity due to our workplace and our health subsequently pays the price for our doing so. We need to invest at least 30 minutes a day to some sort of exercise, whether it be walking, jogging, weightlifting, etc. Doing so will keep our muscles active, reduce our fat, and lead to less stress (among other things).
If the measures presented above are taken in order to lead a healthier lifestyle, the reader can expect the following results: a reduction of the risks of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, the improvement of overall joint health, the maintenance of coordination, balance, and flexibility with age, maintaining bone density and reducing fractures, reduction of the symptoms of stress, depression and anxiety, improvement of self-esteem and self-confidence, improvement of sharpness, memory, and clarity of mind, and the overall increase of expected length of life in years.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
We tend to neglect our health most of time
Poor physical health has a direct effect on the brain
A healthy lifestyle improves the overall quality of our lives
Things to try out:
Make a list of the healthy and unhealthy habits you have in life; this will certainly be an eye-opener
Resolve to improve your brain health and cognitive ability by adopting healthier habits
Determine which aspects of your life require the most urgent attention and start off there
Chapter Seventeen: The 80/20 rule
The Pareto principle is one of the most important things to keep in mind when managing time. This principle was founded in 1895 by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, originally in his observations of economic society—which is then and still now split up among the “vital few” who held the top 20% in terms of wealth and influence, and the “trivial many” defined as the bottom 80%. What turned out to be most surprising about this principle was its widespread applicability. Today, we know that this phenomenon of 80% of the overall product being brought about by 20% of the work and vice-versa applies not just to economics but is indeed found wherever the product is found—whether it be in computer software, sports, hazard precaution, or even time management.
80% of our overall results will stem from only 20% of our efforts. From the perspective of an entrepreneur, this entails that 80% of our overall profits will stem from 20% of our products, while the remaining 20% will stem from the less profitable 80% of overall products. If we were to, for example, complete ten tasks, the Pareto principle tells us that one or two of these tasks would produce five to ten times the results of any of the others. If all of these tasks were to take the same amount of time to complete, then it would be clear that these one or two tasks are the most profitable and therefore should be paid more attention to in the future. It also follows that we should finish these tasks before any others.
Naturally, it is usually the hardest and most complex tasks that are assigned to use which yield the greatest results. These results are usually found in just proportion to the difficulty involved in completing the task at hand, so it should come as no surprise that the tasks at the top of the Pareto distribution are going to be exceedingly difficult to complete. With this added degree of difficulty comes an additional consumed time, which is why we should never start on the tasks which produce less until we have completed all those that produce much more. In this way we have to work our way down the hierarchy, ensuring that we do not give up the more valuable ground to work on any of the lower tasks.
Our minds can only become ensconced within a certain task after we have started on it. Once some momentum has been firmly established, we find it easier and easier as time goes on to continue working towards our goal, but this can only occur once we have initiated the sequences by which we can get our work done. We are usually going to be much better able to start on the tasks that provide the most product out of their completion. This starting on the harder tasks first will also give us the momentum necessary for finishing all of the tasks of the lesser order.
The distinction between the management of time and that of life itself is a blurry one. We are temporal and transient creatures who have bodies which are in no way divorced from the temporal dimension. All that we can truly manage are our own actions, and without managing the time at which these actions are performed, we are giving these actions no greater rules to be governed by. Personal management is a game of taking over the order of the sequences of events constituting our lives. Without any control exerted over the ways in which we are spending our time, events will simply come to us as they are, with little to nothing that we can do to stop them or adjust their flow. When we determine our own course of action throughout a given period of time, we should keep the 80/20 rule in mind, dealing first with the small number of tasks that give us the highest payouts and working our ways down to the less profitable and subsequently less urgent and important tasks.
We are always free to choose what we are going to do next. There is ultimately as much flexibility in how our time is spent as we allow them to be. In this way, we are the architects of our own lives, building their foundations and choosing their contents. We should use this power of choice to our own advantage though, which always entails using this time to complete our tasks, ordering them in terms of their difficulties from hardest to easiest. Here, it is often the things that we want to do least that we have to focus on first. We should do these things first just to get them off of our plates so that we can move on to the things that we enjoy more.
If we want to find the things that we should spend most of our time on, we have to organize our tasks by how much we expect to get out of them. We can do this with a pen and paper if necessary, writing down all of the things that we have to do for the day and estimating what percentage of our overall product (if such a thing can even be determined) will be produced by each of these tasks. Taking this step will give us a great directive as to how to spend our time for the day.
We should now resolve to make this analysis of the values of our tasks an everyday practice to be constantly developed on. Effectively doing this will require much time, but if we get into this habit and stick to it, we will spend our time much more wisely in the future. But this will only happen if we genuinely apply what we learn in our actions. Once we determine what tasks benefit us the most, we need to stick to these tasks first before starting on any others.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
We get the best results from a core group of tasks
There are plenty of other tasks which do not contribute as much, but take up a great deal of time
We tend to place greater attention on unproductive tasks rather than on productive ones
Things to try out:
Identify the tasks which yield the best results for you
Cut down, if not cut out, unproductive tasks from your life
Set your priorities straight in order to avoid placing greater emphasis on unproductive tasks
Chapter Eighteen: Techniques for Increasing Productivity
As humans, we are creatures largely driven by instant gratification. We tend to look more for the things that will give us payouts right away than for those that take time to give us their rewards. With this trait comes our preponderance towards completing all of the individual tasks required to meet a goal with haste, only looking forward to seeing what is coming next. Once we do start taking action on those tasks that offer delayed rewards, we are often off-put by all of the work that goes into them, and it is common for us to give up on these projects before their completion. For this reason, very few are willing to go all the way through on bigger tasks that take longer to hand out rewards to us.
In order to cross over these humps in which we are seeing no rewards for doing what we are doing, we need to supplement ourselves temporarily with smaller more instant rewards along the way. These are like the snacks that we have in between the meals, the ones that hold us over while we are on our way to bigger and better portions. These rewards can here be brought about by the smaller tasks that we go about completing, most of which being merely parts of the larger, more overarching tasks that we have to complete.
We should wake up every morning asking ourselves: “what good will I do today?” From our answer to this question, we can deduce what it is that we should do with the day ahead of us. Here is where rumination should be avoided, as well as soothsaying, we cannot work properly on the tasks that we have at present when our imaginations are rummaging through the past and future. All we can do while we work is remain present, and while we should try to keep every task within its predetermined time frame, we cannot bother ourselves too much with time when going about our business, as doing so is likely to make us lose our concentration.
Next, our health should be addressed if we are to increase our productivity. Our body, which is the engine of this p
roductivity, should be well maintained and given everything that it needs to function. Creating a healthy diet, getting adequate sleep, and remaining physically active are the three main things that we should do to improve our overall health. Despite the importance of these cornerstone health habits, many never make time to make changes on these fronts and are left with worse health as a result. Once these changes have been made, they can become habits that we can benefit from for years, but in order to establish these habits first, the changes have to initiate their progress. While we may not pay immediately for bad habits regarding health, the penalties charged to us for these habits only accrue over time, and often sink our ships when we are least expecting them to.
Our morning routines determine the trajectory of our entire days. If we are needlessly exposing ourselves to external stimuli such the content on our phones or TVs as we wake up, we are making ourselves more anxious than we need to be. When we start off our days in this way, we are bound to not only see a decrease in our productivity but one in our overall well-being as well. For these reasons, it is absolutely crucial that we develop good morning routines for ourselves.
In order to better our morning routines, we need to analyze the habits that go into these routines. Are these habits helping us in the present? Will they help us in the future? The odds are that our habits are a mixture of beneficial and detrimental, with certain things needing to be altered and others being fine the ways they are.
The next area that should be addressed is that of our daily priorities overall. We should always take care to clarify these priorities as well as we can and should keep in mind the sequence in which we need to address them. Clarifying this sequence will help us stay focused and avoid distractions throughout the day, which usually stem from our inability to stay guided by trains of action within whatever it is that we are doing.
