The Way to Wealth by Steve Shipside Read Free Book Online Page B

balancing your personal and work life.
    ~ ROBERT EPSTEIN, CEO OF CAREERBANK
    Although much is made of Franklin’s repeated calls to industry and frugality, it’s often overlooked that he also rated leisure seriously enough to distinguish between quality leisure time and wasted time. He was an advocate of taking your leisure seriously and using it for something more constructive than vegging out in front of reality TV while tucking into tortilla chips. Not that he personally suffered from the twin plagues of Big Brother and barbecue sauce-flavoured chips, but from the general tone of The Way to Wealth it’s a fair inference that he wouldn’t have approved of either.
    If you’re flat out at work the idea that you need to do more with your leisure time might sound like madness but in fact it makes perfect sense. Doing nothing sounds like bliss when you’re busy and stressed, but in fact doing nothing is not the antidote to stress—far from it. If you can’t clear your mind of work then your downtime is likely to become an extension of your working worries, and a festering, stagnating extension of them at that.
    Speaking personally, I know that as someone who works from home I have to make a special effort to get away from my work, so I really do try to get out more. That doesn’t mean pubbing and clubbing all the time (not quite, anyway), it means outdoor sports, meeting up with friends to try new hobbies, lots of short breaks away from home and plenty of travel. That doesn’t mean I can’t relax at home; far from it. I have sacred relaxation rituals (‘hammock time’) but these are special moments set aside. What I try not to do is lose time to the TV or the sofa. That doesn’t mean I don’t watch TV or slouch happily with a book; it’s just that I try to choose what to watch or when to chill. I almost never switch off at the end of the night with the vaguely unsettling feeling that I’ve just been suckered into watching three hours of junk the way you might walk away from an all-you-can-eat buffet wondering why you did it. However, I’ll admit that I only got to this stage after years of losing my life to wasted moments.
    Benjamin F. spotted a long way back that the only real way to relax from work is not to do nothing, but to go out and do something completely different. Dynamic downtime is more satisfying, refreshing, rich and, above all, easier to share.
HERE’S AN IDEA FOR YOU …
    Take the plunge. Grab a listings magazine, check online—however you find it, pick something you’ve never done before and do it this weekend. It doesn’t have to be hang-gliding; how about a foreign language class or a guerrilla-gardening outing? See how refreshing it can be to do something fresh.

23 TACKLE THOSE TIME THIEVES
    Where lots of other writers dwell dreamily on the possibilities of ‘Tomorrow’, our Benjamin was a resolute ‘Today’ man: ‘One today is worth two tomorrows.’ Make the most of your today.
    Welcome to today. It might be raining, you might have a tough one ahead, but whatever the case this is the only time you’re going to see this day. You’ll never get it back. So why let someone steal it from you?
DEFINING IDEA …
    You cannot step twice into the same river.
    ~ HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS
    There are lots of time thieves out there: institutional thieves that make you wait or jump through hoops, corporate thieves that treat you as one of millions and rank your time accordingly, and individual thieves who either steal your time to add to theirs or else purloin and waste it because they don’t know any better. Learn to spot them and snatch a bit of your time back for yourself.
    Institutions, be they public or corporate, are the hardest to battle. Statisticians tell us that we spend around forty-five minutes of every day waiting for something. PDAs, mobile phones and the dreaded BlackBerry maybe known as digital leashes for their role in tying people to their jobs, but there’s no question that