Sometimes things fall into place in a way that it’s scary. I’ll get to that in a bit.
For this installment, the topic is financial independence and investing. These activities are something I’ve participated in since I was in college and recently discovered the FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) movement. I’ve always been an investor of some sorts, but in the past, I’ve been very undisciplined. I typically passively found new investment opportunities and would haphazardly invest in them if they seemed okay. This approach led to some good investments, and it led to some bad investments. It led to a potpourri portfolio with no real focus on any one goal.
When I first started focusing on Boredom, I realized that I needed to get my financial strategy locked down. This strategy is a foundational piece upon which to build other efforts. If your fiscal house is in order, that gives unparalleled peace of mind freeing up your energy to focus on other important things. If your finances house is in chaos regardless if it’s doing well or not, then that becomes a dominant storm cloud over everything you do in your life.
As mentioned above, I was a tinkerer. Where do I even start in trying to get my house in order? What project do I do with definitive results? Where do I focus? There was the newly discovered FIRE community that I wanted to explore more. There was the scattershot of existing investments that I wanted to put into some strategy along with how to generate funds for new ventures. There was the education needed to continue sharpening my mind.
I finally decided the first step was to break things into small manageable projects to allow myself to knock out one at a time. Although that let me scope out how I was going to proceed, it also just split my massive pile of effort into a bunch of small collections of effort. Enter Boredom, which helped me tackle this avalanche of thoughts and projects.
Before Boredom, anytime I had a spare minute, I filled it with pointless distractions. New sites and music were the two most common. Any free moment of thought was filled with some passive activity to keep boredom away.
And this is where the stars aligned a bit for writing this post. Yesterday I was writing the previous post, and I took notes about writing this topic. Then I woke up today and pulled up the latest Dilbert comic: https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-13. Wow. It’s like that comic was written for me. But I digress.
Instead of retreating as Dilbert did, I embraced that Boredom. I even blocked my favorite distraction websites to prevent the mindless habit from taking over. From this void of activities, I learned how critical those minutes were. Whether it’s 30-60 seconds in an elevator by myself, 5-10 minutes in a waiting room, or 60 minutes in the car, every minute counted. Every minute could bring me closer to completing my collection of small piles.
All I had to do was figure out how to maximize the time depending on the background activity and amount of time. For my car rides, there were podcasts. I now subscribe to 4 podcasts: Dream Big (for listening with my kids), Big Questions (also with my kids), Mad Fientist (for exploring the FIRE concept), and Money Girl (for re-focusing myself on being financially mindful). I also threw in audiobooks and went through Intelligent Investor and Your Brain At Work, both fantastic books.
For my phone time, this is where the most significant benefits appeared. My phone time strategy was broken down into two main categories. The first was dropping the phone altogether and doing something else. For example, I started reading but with the intention of only reading a few pages. Before this, when I would pick up a book, I would expect sitting down for big blocks of time to read a good chunk of the book. That didn’t work though; there was never time for that block of time. Instead, I shifted my expectation to only reading a few pages per session. I was then encouraged to pick up the book a dozen times a day, and I could make real progress. I don’t remember at what point I applied this technique to my reading, but over the past year, I’ve gone through: The Richest Man in Babylon, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, E-Myth, Profit First, Think and Grow Rich, and the Power of Habits. Possibly others that I’ve forgotten too along with a few pleasure fiction reads. The majority of these were in the latter half of the year. This pace was much higher than I’ve done in the past.
The other phone category involved keeping the phone in-hand. Instead of jumping on the distraction site of the day, I would preemptively think about what I wanted to research so that when I pulled out my phone, I had a goal in place. The first thing I did was join the Reddit FIRE community. Every free minute I had on the phone, I was reading through new threads. Sometimes for as little as a minute, sometimes for much longer. Once I felt like I wasn’t learning anything new on Reddit, it transitioned into fragmented online research. I wanted to figure out a diversification strategy so one free moment I would research one site. Another free moment, I would investigate another. I installed Google Spreadsheets, Trello, and Google Tasks on my phone. I would take notes, determine strategies, research more, tweak things again. What someone might spend a couple of hours at once to tackle, I spread out over a week through a couple of minute increments — the same for figuring out how to fund investments and new projects. Everything was broken up into a few little tasks spread throughout days or weeks.
After all of this is said and done, I look back, and I’ve accomplished quite a bit by making every minute count. The podcasts I curated for myself along with the books that I’ve completed. A diversification strategy and starting the first steps to implement it. I created a “buckets of money” strategy to help fund my projects by ensuring each active project has its set-aside funds. I became exposed to the FIRE community, what they believe in, and how they go about their goals. Even the origins of this blog came from researching things in a couple of minute increments until I could piece together a launched blog (although writing these posts do take a single large block of time to write, I haven’t mastered breaking that into small chunks yet).
Although I still go to my distractions sites and veg out to music when my brain needs to shut down. But by initially removing these distractions initially to aim for Boredom, I ended up finding a massive source of underutilized time. It blows my mind how much can be accomplished with “free” time, even if it’s just a few minutes at a time.
(Written 2019.01.13)
For this installment, the topic is financial independence and investing. These activities are something I’ve participated in since I was in college and recently discovered the FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) movement. I’ve always been an investor of some sorts, but in the past, I’ve been very undisciplined. I typically passively found new investment opportunities and would haphazardly invest in them if they seemed okay. This approach led to some good investments, and it led to some bad investments. It led to a potpourri portfolio with no real focus on any one goal.
When I first started focusing on Boredom, I realized that I needed to get my financial strategy locked down. This strategy is a foundational piece upon which to build other efforts. If your fiscal house is in order, that gives unparalleled peace of mind freeing up your energy to focus on other important things. If your finances house is in chaos regardless if it’s doing well or not, then that becomes a dominant storm cloud over everything you do in your life.
As mentioned above, I was a tinkerer. Where do I even start in trying to get my house in order? What project do I do with definitive results? Where do I focus? There was the newly discovered FIRE community that I wanted to explore more. There was the scattershot of existing investments that I wanted to put into some strategy along with how to generate funds for new ventures. There was the education needed to continue sharpening my mind.
I finally decided the first step was to break things into small manageable projects to allow myself to knock out one at a time. Although that let me scope out how I was going to proceed, it also just split my massive pile of effort into a bunch of small collections of effort. Enter Boredom, which helped me tackle this avalanche of thoughts and projects.
Before Boredom, anytime I had a spare minute, I filled it with pointless distractions. New sites and music were the two most common. Any free moment of thought was filled with some passive activity to keep boredom away.
And this is where the stars aligned a bit for writing this post. Yesterday I was writing the previous post, and I took notes about writing this topic. Then I woke up today and pulled up the latest Dilbert comic: https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-01-13. Wow. It’s like that comic was written for me. But I digress.
Instead of retreating as Dilbert did, I embraced that Boredom. I even blocked my favorite distraction websites to prevent the mindless habit from taking over. From this void of activities, I learned how critical those minutes were. Whether it’s 30-60 seconds in an elevator by myself, 5-10 minutes in a waiting room, or 60 minutes in the car, every minute counted. Every minute could bring me closer to completing my collection of small piles.
All I had to do was figure out how to maximize the time depending on the background activity and amount of time. For my car rides, there were podcasts. I now subscribe to 4 podcasts: Dream Big (for listening with my kids), Big Questions (also with my kids), Mad Fientist (for exploring the FIRE concept), and Money Girl (for re-focusing myself on being financially mindful). I also threw in audiobooks and went through Intelligent Investor and Your Brain At Work, both fantastic books.
For my phone time, this is where the most significant benefits appeared. My phone time strategy was broken down into two main categories. The first was dropping the phone altogether and doing something else. For example, I started reading but with the intention of only reading a few pages. Before this, when I would pick up a book, I would expect sitting down for big blocks of time to read a good chunk of the book. That didn’t work though; there was never time for that block of time. Instead, I shifted my expectation to only reading a few pages per session. I was then encouraged to pick up the book a dozen times a day, and I could make real progress. I don’t remember at what point I applied this technique to my reading, but over the past year, I’ve gone through: The Richest Man in Babylon, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, E-Myth, Profit First, Think and Grow Rich, and the Power of Habits. Possibly others that I’ve forgotten too along with a few pleasure fiction reads. The majority of these were in the latter half of the year. This pace was much higher than I’ve done in the past.
The other phone category involved keeping the phone in-hand. Instead of jumping on the distraction site of the day, I would preemptively think about what I wanted to research so that when I pulled out my phone, I had a goal in place. The first thing I did was join the Reddit FIRE community. Every free minute I had on the phone, I was reading through new threads. Sometimes for as little as a minute, sometimes for much longer. Once I felt like I wasn’t learning anything new on Reddit, it transitioned into fragmented online research. I wanted to figure out a diversification strategy so one free moment I would research one site. Another free moment, I would investigate another. I installed Google Spreadsheets, Trello, and Google Tasks on my phone. I would take notes, determine strategies, research more, tweak things again. What someone might spend a couple of hours at once to tackle, I spread out over a week through a couple of minute increments — the same for figuring out how to fund investments and new projects. Everything was broken up into a few little tasks spread throughout days or weeks.
After all of this is said and done, I look back, and I’ve accomplished quite a bit by making every minute count. The podcasts I curated for myself along with the books that I’ve completed. A diversification strategy and starting the first steps to implement it. I created a “buckets of money” strategy to help fund my projects by ensuring each active project has its set-aside funds. I became exposed to the FIRE community, what they believe in, and how they go about their goals. Even the origins of this blog came from researching things in a couple of minute increments until I could piece together a launched blog (although writing these posts do take a single large block of time to write, I haven’t mastered breaking that into small chunks yet).
Although I still go to my distractions sites and veg out to music when my brain needs to shut down. But by initially removing these distractions initially to aim for Boredom, I ended up finding a massive source of underutilized time. It blows my mind how much can be accomplished with “free” time, even if it’s just a few minutes at a time.
(Written 2019.01.13)
