Most days I work from 1pm to 9pm here in Spain, which translates to 6am to 2pm Chicago time. That gives me all the time before lunch to enjoy the light of day and all the activities that encourages. I find myself more interested in working out, more eager to read books, and generally infused with more energy for both physical and mental activities.

Over the past few years my average sleep schedule has been roughly 10 PM – 6 AM. When you compare that with a midnight to 8 AM sleep schedule, which is similar to what I was on previously, there are really only four hours of my day that are different: 6 AM – 8 AM and 10 PM – midnight. I’m essentially trading a two hour block at night for a two hour block in the morning.

Occasional I slip back in to a later schedule, whether it’s because of work or social life or I’m just being lazy and sleeping later. When this happens I notice that I don’t like how I spend those hours in question and inevitably force myself back on to the early riser schedule.

Similar to @DHH, I tend to spend those additional two hours in the morning reading, working out, or getting ahead on work for the day. I also enjoy the peacefulness associated with knowing that everyone else is sleeping (and therefore won’t be interrupting me). Comparatively I seem to spend those two hours at night watching TV or playing Xbox. Not that I don’t enjoy those things, but ultimately I’m a much happier person when I’m doing more of the former and less of the latter.

Jason Fried on Twitter a few weeks ago

Remember back in 2008 when I absolutely hated Winter? At that time I was fairly certain that within a few years I’d either start spending my winter somewhere down South or move out of the Northeast all together. Now, a few years later, I surprisingly don’t mind winter. In fact, I’m sort of enjoying winter.

What changed?

The Weather

First and foremost, the weather has changed the past two winters. Since Albany is not in the mountains, not on the coast, and not near any of the great lakes, and since the temperatures have been a bit warmer (because of global warming, or maybe because of randomness), we actually have had much milder winters than places like Virginia and D.C that are much further south.

Then there’s the fluky snow storms in Florida and Texas. How mad would I be if I hauled myself somewhere else for a month and it still snowed. I’ve been paying more attention to the national weather, and when I see images that look like this I realize that it’s cold almost no matter where you go:

Still, we’ve had one decent sized snow storm this year and it really didn’t change my mind much. So long as it’s not a monster storm every week for the entire winter, I can deal with it.

Little (Big) Changes I’ve Made

More importantly, I think, are the other changes I’ve made.

Having a better living situation definitely helps. My current apartment has much more space than I’ve had previously. Having four or five different areas where I can work or relax makes me feel much less antsy when I’m inside more frequently.

I’ve made a commitment to getting outside more often too. If I bundle up with a hat and gloves I’m plenty warm to go for a walk. Even something as simple as walking up to the mailbox (about a 10 minute walk for me) makes me feel a lot better.

I’ve also tried to minimize or eliminate all of the little things I hated about winter. I stopped being an idiot and bought plenty of warm clothes, a humidifier, a bottle of lotion for every room that I’m in regularly, and some of this bad-ass Einszett de-icing spray from DI that eliminates the need for me to ever use my scraper.

A big pet peeve of mine is missing a workout, so I made sure going in to this winter that I put together several intense workouts that I can do at home with minimal equipment on days when going to the gym just doesn’t isn’t feasible.

I’m Not Angry at Winter Any More

The biggest difference though is philosophically. People are happier and more motivated when they embrace winter instead of complaining about it. There’s a certain simplicity that I’ve come to enjoy. Since there is naturally less to do, it gives me time to relax, read, catch up with friends over coffee, and of course have some long uninterrupted stretches to accomplish work.

There’s also an interesting by-product of this recent change in attitude. One of the big perks that my partners and I have is the flexibility to take extended amounts of time off, the best example being when Mike went to China for a month earlier this year. I always thought I’d be spending my trips “wintering” elsewhere. Now, I’m more open to the idea of traveling to more places at more times of the year. I already have a few smaller vacations planned for this year, but I’m hoping to plan out a longer extended trip like Mike took by the middle of the year. As of now, I have no idea where that will be…but it’s fun to ponder!

Real quickly I learned that isolating yourself doesn’t make you happy, that relationships are as much a part of happiness as doing work you enjoy.

I think this actualization is quite common amongst new business owners, especially those who are in their twenties. The reason being that up until this point you’ve never had to work for your social life. It was all right there in front of you. High school, college, and work all provided the opportunities you needed to meet new people and do new things.

Think about it: how did you meet most of your friends? I bet it was through school, work, or mutual friends/family. Now, as soon as you leave school and your job you immediately cut those out of the equation, making the third method all the more difficult (if you’re not meeting new people at work, it’s much harder to then meet people through your network of work friends since it’s non-existent).

As much as I detested my job at times, there was a ton of opportunity to commiserate and bond at the water cooler, at lunch, at happy hour, or at the many company functions. There were also thousands of people at my company, just like in high school and in college. You’re always being introduced to new people. Not so much the case when you work in a warehouse with guys you’ve known your entire life.

This realization didn’t come very quickly for me. Not just because this was a new unknown social dynamic, but because I was so damn focused on the business. I was trying to justify my decision to give up my career. Building a profitable business took everything I had. I’d often lose track of the day and the time, completely de-synchronizing myself from the 9-5, Monday – Friday schedule that everyone else has.

Leaving my job also introduced another new life-variable in to the equation: going against the grain. Up until that point I did everything I was “supposed” to do. The stuff that mom’s love to tell their friends about. I did good in school, got in to a great college, graduated at the top of my class, and went to work for a big company. I wasn’t supposed to quit after one year and move back home. When I told people, they didn’t know what to think. For the first time in my life, people were doubting my decisions. I heard whispers at work from people wondering why I really put in my two week notice (“did he get into a fight with his manager?”). I had a friend ask me “where are you going to work when you get home?” right after I just gave him the five minute pitch about my plans for SportsLizard. It was very frustrating, and I’m sure there were much worse things said that I don’t know about. All of a sudden, I had doubters. Being the competitive guy I am, I adopted a “me against the world” mentality. To some extent I still have that. All it takes is one snide comment from someone who doesn’t take us seriously to get it back. And while that may be good for my work productivity, it also drove me to isolate myself even more.

On top of everything else, I’m more of an introvert than I am an extrovert, so I had that working against me too. (I once read that the difference between an introvert and an extrovert is that introverts like to relax by spending time alone, whereas extroverts like to relax by spending time with others. By that definition, I’m introverted. I love spending time with others, and I tend to be pretty social when I’m doing so, but after a stressful day I’d much prefer reading a book by myself to going out to a bar with a group of people).

The good news in all of this is that now, nearly five years later, I can confidently say that I have a great social life. I meet new people, I have many many great friends, I have a wonderful girlfriend, and I spend time with all of my family (cousins and grandparents too, not just my parents and sister). Part of it has to do with the fact that our business has become more successful, leaving me less stressed that I need to be working 24 x 7 x 365, although I think the most important factor is that I’ve realized that given my work situation I’ll have to put more effort into my social life than I did in the past, probably more effort than most people have to

More specifically, here are some of the things that I have found helpful:

Don’t resent the time and effort – I try to stay focused on doing whatever I’m doing. If I’m working, I work. If I’m eating dinner with my family, I eat dinner and conversate and do my best not to think about what I could be doing if I was working, or that I should be working instead of spending time with my family. I try really, really hard to not answer my cell phone or texts when I’m out with people. There’s nothing worse than someone constantly buried in their phone – they’re physically “there” but they aren’t “there”.

Choose people over hobbies – this wasn’t obvious to me at first, I sort of accidentally fell in to this one. I find that I’m much happier doing more socially and having less time to do things like play video games, read or customize. Spending more time alone after spending all day working alone doesn’t work very well for me.

Live where you know people – you’re already at a disadvantage socially by working for yourself. While tempting, I don’t think it’s wise to up and move to just anywhere unless you have a few friends there, ideally in different social circles.

Keep in touch – I do my best to keep in touch with all of the people that I’ve encountered in life that I’m really happy to be friends with. It takes some effort, and sometimes we’re only able to get together once every two years, but keeping those relationships instead of letting them die has really helped me.

Go where they are – my friends are busy. We’re all almost 30, which means wives and kids and houses for many of them. If we’re meeting for lunch, I try to suggest some place close to where they work. If I can make it easy on their schedule I know it’s more likely to happen.

Find other ways to meet people – whether it’s a church group or softball league or cooking class or something else. Believe it or not, I’ve met a ton of great people through blogging. In fact, most of the good friends I’ve met since leaving my job have been in one way or another related to running this blog.

Don’t turn down opportunities – I say “yes” more than I ever have before. If I can fit it in my schedule, I try to do it.

Get out to work sometime – you might not meet people at Starbucks, but just getting out and being in a social setting helps decrease the feeling of isolation, especially if you work alone from home all day.

Treat weekends differently than weekdays – I wish I was consulted when someone decided that we should all work 8 hours, 5 days per week. I would have asked that guy “why?” a lot. Regardless, that’s how most people work, so I’ve tried to adjust my schedule accordingly. I do take time off on weekdays and I do work on weekends, but on average I do most of my work during the week and most of my social stuff on the weekends.

—

I’ve had this post queued up in my brain for a while now. I’m glad I finally got a chance to get it all out. How about you guys? I know many of you are in a similar situation to mine. I’m interested to hear how similar or different your experience has been.

Sometimes though, we’ll pose a business related question. Like “how much would someone have to pay you to teach basic computer skills to the elderly every day for two years?”, or more realistically, “how much would Google/Facebook/Twitter have to pay you to relocate to Silicon Valley and work for them for ___ years?”

Most people would jump at an opportunity like that. This is only an interesting question to us because we all value the lifestyle that our business has created. I generally assume that if you move into an important role with a fast growing, competitive, high-tech company like the aforementioned, that you’ll be working a lot of hours, traveling a lot, and be working in a more stressful environment.

I – like my partners – certainly have my price, but it’s very very high. Almost no company could match the quality of life that I have right now. Consider:

• I have great flexibility with my time. I work two days a week from the warehouse from 9 AM to 3 PM. Otherwise I control when, where, and how I work, and how I balance my work with my personal life. Even the warehouse time can be shifted around – Mike was able to take a month-long trip to China and we simply shifted our resources to accommodate that.
• I have great flexibility with my work load. I can control what I work on and when I work on it. If I’m having a super busy week personally, it’s generally no big deal to push my work back a week or two, so long as I do my day to day tasks and communicate my plans with the team.
• I get to work on exciting, innovative, and challenging projects, which means I’m often choosing to work instead of do other things because I am truly more interested in, say, building a new feature on LockerPulse than I am playing the latest video game.
• I find it highly rewarding to work with great people who are also good friends of mine. I want success for them as much as I want it for myself.

In almost every way, I’m working in my ideal situation. If I was handed a ton of money tomorrow, not all that much would change with how I lived. I mean, I might go on a crazy spending spree for a little while, but I think I’d settle back into a lifestyle very similar to what I’ve got now. In a sense, I’d probably “retire” to what I’m doing right now.

When I think about this, I’m always reminded of the parable of the Mexican fisherman from The 4-Hour Workweek (I posted the full excerpt back in 2007) Once you have all of your basic needs met, you have to ask yourself – what do you want to accomplish with your work? Do you want to make as much money as possible? Do you want a high-status job? Do you want a flexible lifestyle? Do you not want to have to answer to anyone else? Do you want to have a large impact on the world? Do you want to be famous?

There’s no “right” answer, and none of those necessarily exclude you from doing any of the others. I look at 37Signals as the prime example of a company that I’d aspire to own. They’re “small” by many standards. They’re bootstrapped. They don’t have a lot of employees. They’re flexible in terms of work hours and locations. Yet, no one can deny that they’ve had huge impact. They have an immensely popular suite of web applications, a blog with over 140,000 subscribers, a NY Times Best Selling book, they do seminars from their new offices, and oh yeah, they started Ruby on Rails, the open source programming framework that has been the foundation for the success of many other web startups.

I feel like from the time we’re little kids we’re conditioned to pursue the highest paying, highest status jobs. Companies are supposed to be grown to be as big as they possibly can be, in every sense of the term. But if you value your time, your relationships, your health, the enjoyment that your work gives you, and the impact that your work has on others, it becomes a much deeper question.

One study cited in the article that really caught my eye was The Whitehall Study. The study, performed by professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London, Michael Marmot, has tracked 28,000+ British civil servants of various positions in the hierarchical government structure. His findings are particularly interesting, and go a long way in explaining why the stresses of some jobs, like those faced by a small business owner or a CEO who work long hours, don’t appear to have adverse health effects of anywhere near the same magnitude of those working more menial jobs. In a nutshell, it all boils down to doing work that you find purposeful, that you have a vested interest in. In other words, work that you can control.

At the bottom [of the hierarchy] are messengers, porters, and security guards. Just above them are the clerical officers, followed by staff scientists and other professionals. This last group implements the policies dictated by powerful administrators who run the governmental agencies. Marmot wanted to investigate how differences in status “in people who are neither very poor nor very rich” might lead to measurable differences in health.

The differences are dramatic. After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top. Even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate of those at the top.

What, then, determines our health? Why were people in the lower ranks of Whitehall dying at a younger age? Marmot was forced to conclude that the significant majority of health variation is caused by psychosocial factors, most notably stress. People of lower status in the Whitehall study experienced more negative stress, and this stress was deadly. (To take but one data point: Fully two-thirds of an individual’s risk of stroke was attributable to the person’s socioeconomic status.) In fact, we’re so sensitive to the effects of status that getting promoted from the lowest level in the British civil service reduced the probability of heart disease by up to 13 percentage points. Climbing the social ladder makes us live longer.

However, the Whitehall results aren’t a straightforward analysis of stress, at least not as it’s usually defined. After all, people in leadership positions often describe their jobs as extremely stressful. They work longer hours and have more responsibilities than those at the bottom of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Consider the self-report of Nigel, a high-status administrator: “There were 2,000 people, and I was responsible for all the personnel aspects, contracts, and all the common services … It had every sort of challenge that you could ever wish to meet. A very active job and a lot of stress, but a very enjoyable job, and you got a tremendous amount of satisfaction from doing a good job.”

Notice the reference to stress; undoubtedly Nigel thought of himself as a person under lots of pressure. In contrast, here’s the self-report of Marjorie, a lowly typist: “I went to the typing pool and sat there typing documents. Which was absolutely soul-destroying … The fact that we could eat sweets and smoke was absolute heaven, but we were not allowed to talk.”

The recurring theme in the self-reports of people like Marjorie isn’t the sheer amount of stress – it’s the total absence of control. Researchers call it the “demand-control” model of stress, in which the damage caused by chronic stress depends not just on the demands of the job but on the extent to which we can control our response to those demands. “The man or woman with all the emails, the city lawyer who works through the night has high demands,” Marmot writes. “But if he or she has a high degree of control over work, it is less stressful and will have less impact on health.” (This helps explain why the women with mean bosses and menial work showed the highest incidence of heart disease.) The Whitehall data backs up this model of workplace stress: While a relentlessly intense job like a senior executive position leads to a slightly increased risk of heart disease and death, a job with no control is significantly more dangerous.

The same effect applies even to the rich and famous. A few years ago, Donald Redelmeier, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, led a study of Academy Award-winning actors. His hypothesis was that having an Oscar gave people more control over their stressful careers. Instead of being forced to accept bad roles or work on mediocre movies just for the money, these stars could pick and choose their parts. This creative control, in turn, would lead to improved health outcomes. Redelmeier compared the award winners to two groups: (1) actors who had appeared in the same film as a nominated actor and didn’t get a nomination and (2) actors who had been nominated for an Academy Award but never won. The results were clear: People with Oscars lived, on average, four years longer than their less-successful peers, which represented a 28 percent reduction in death rate. As Redelmeier notes, this longevity boost is roughly equal to the effect that would come from “curing all cancers in all people for all time.”

The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list – it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair.

One thing I’ve come to realize lately is that the vast majority of people who constantly say they’re too busy, really just suck at time management. “I’m too busy to cook” or “I’m too busy to exercise” or “I’m too busy to keep in touch with my friends” and on and on. It’s total BS. None of those things take very much time and effort at all. In particular, I remember seeing this a lot in the corporate world. Guys that would work 6 AM – 6 PM and somehow take pride in not taking a lunch, never going to the gym, and missing their kids Little League games…yet spent half of the work day conversing at the water cooler, managing their fantasy football teams, boning around on YouTube, texting every 30 seconds, and sending chain emails. Then the next day they’d know every single thing about last night’s episode of Lost or Survivor or 24.

It blew my mind. Every day we’re faced with a multitude of choices on how to spend our time. In reality, those guys could have worked 8 AM – 4 PM and taken an hour-long lunch and two 30 minute breaks with the same productive output. They just have to cut out the 2 hour conversations at the water cooler. And the 1 hour spent on ESPN.com. And quit whining and complaining about how “busy” they are.

In reality, they were trading potential time doing things they want with their friends, wife, and kids for time spent complaining, procrastinating, and staring at the TV.

When you give it your all every day, not only do you feel awesome for having done so, but you are making progress.

And at the end of the day, I’ve never felt better from taking a day off of laying bricks than I have from a hard days work of laying them. Ever.

One brick at a time.

That’s so true. That article was in the context of dieting and exercising, but it just as easily applies to entrepreneurship.

I enjoy taking time off. But I never quite enjoy it as much as the feeling I get after a hard day’s work. It doesn’t get any better than going to bed knowing I’ve done my very best for the day. It feels great knowing that whatever I worked on is one little tiny bit better than it was when the day began. I value hard work…in myself and in the people around me.

Increasingly as we learn more and more about what makes us as humans happy, we’re becoming aware that those who are work hard, believe in their work, and achieve things they believe in, are happier than those who don’t. To be honest, that’s so obvious that we really don’t even need studies to tell us this.

Yet somehow this value seems to be one that is increasingly lost in our current culture. It’s sad that I can honestly say I know plenty of people who have never put forth their full effort into anything. There are so many variables that you can not control in life and in business. One of the few that you can control is your work ethic.

In the past several months a lot has changed about the way I do things, all for the better in my opinion.

I’m getting a lot less customer service emails since we changed the way we handle errors on Detailed Image and are in the process of getting rid of Amazon and Tastefully Driven.  In terms of customer service, I used to handle all DI technical emails, all of Amazon, all of Tastefully Driven, all of SportsLizard, and then the other misc emails that trickle in now and again (Music-Alerts, Z.ips.ME, iPrioritize).  Knocking the first two off of my list has decreased my emails by about 65% (educated guess).  Don’t get me wrong – I love handling customer service issues. I love hearing the feedback.  It makes me an infinitely better developer.  But in these cases, the emails I was getting were repetitive and adding little or no value to the business.  Those are the types of emails I dislike, and therefore am really happy to rid myself of.

For the past ~6 weeks I have only been doing two warehouse days per week. That will probably go back to three once volume picks up in the Spring, but two is where I’d like to be back to by the end of Summer.  Hopefully we’ll have our full-time warehouse manager in place by then. We should each be able to do Monday + one other day, with a part time employee and the manager giving us 3 people per day.  The extra day off makes all the difference.  At least one day off is always primarily an errand day.  I go to the bank, visit my parents, grocery shop, shave my head, etc etc.  So by going from one additional day off to two, I can get a lot more of my project work done.

Speaking of which, I’ve really taken to batch processing my tasks based upon where I’ll be for the day.  For example, on my two legit days at home, I’m trying to do nothing but develop LockerPulse.  Those days I can go long stretches without being interrupted, which is really what you need to “get in the zone” and program effectively.  I try to save everything else for my warehouse days or my errand day.  Those days I often only get 15 or 20 minutes at a time to do stuff.  Especially on warehouse days.  There are interruptions left and right.  So when I add something to my to-do list that will take less than 30 minutes, I make sure I add it to one of those days and keep my days off totally free.

I’ve really taken to listening to podcasts when I’m in the car. It started when I listened to the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders and has kind of blossomed into a routine for me.  I really look forward to getting in the car now by myself.  I’ve got it to a point where the podcasts I listen to come out at roughly the same pace that I drive.   Originally I tried using my old iPod, but found it a pain to carry around, keep charged, and plug into my car, so instead I’ve just been burning a new MP3 CD every few weeks and just leaving that in my car.  When I start the car it picks up right where I left off.  In addition to the Stanford talks, I’m subscribed to the 37Signals Podcast, This Week in Google, TechStuff, Diggnation, and Business Week’s Behind This Week’s Cover Story.  If you have any suggestions for me I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Last but not least, I’ve changed my sleep schedule to get up an hour later.  Sleep has been one of my favorite topics on this blog, mostly because 1) it’s really really important for health and productivity, and 2) everyone I know (myself included) pretty much sucks at it.  Check out the sleep category if you want the full run down, but basically in Jan of 2008 I decided I was going to become an early riser and stop getting up late and sleeping erratically as I had for my entire life.  I worked my ass off and was disciplined as hell and after several months got my body on an awesome 10 PM – 6 AM schedule.  I didn’t realize how tired I always was previously until I did this.  One or two good nights sleep just don’t leave you feeling as rested, happy, and productive as months upon months of great sleep do.

Anyway, 10 – 6 worked great for a while.  It enabled me to get to the gym before coming to the warehouse.  Back then we also had clients, so it let me get a few hours of work done before they started harassing me with phone calls.  The past six months or so, I kept finding myself in more social situations that kept me out later.  The only way I could keep getting up at 6 was to nap a lot.  I love napping, it can be a great supplement if done right, but I didn’t want it to be an every day routine.  Napping is horribly inefficient when you factor in the time it takes to wind down and wind back up afterward.  I also found myself going to the gym on non-warehouse days after doing some work  (9 or 10 AM), so the need to be up at 6 wasn’t really there.  The last straw was when my girlfriend got a new job that will have her at the office most days until around 7 PM. I want to make sure we have some time at night to spend together. I finally decided to start getting up at 7 AM about three weeks ago.  This really wouldn’t be a big deal for most people, but I always thought I’d stick to my 6 AM forever and ever because of how much I liked it.  Since the change though, I’ve realized that it’s a much better lifestyle fit for me now.  I haven’t napped since.  I’ve never been tired at all during the day.  I just feel more relaxed and less stressed overall.

One of my favorite parts about Food, Inc was at the end of the movie, after revealing just how bad things are, they give you specific steps that you can do to take action.  The list is up on the website.  I love the fact that they encouraged action.  How many documentaries, heck how many people in general, just whine and complain but don’t ever suggest a better alternative?

I do a pretty good job following those rules, but the ones that always get me are #6 & #7 – “Buy organic or sustainable food with little or no pesticides”  and “Protect family farms; visit your local farmer’s market”.  I actually do buy quite a bit of organic food.  My girlfriend and I shop farmers markets.  But, that stuff is expensive.  Really expensive.  So we pick and choose what we buy.  It’s important to me, but not so important to me that I sacrifice other things financially.  So in reality, I only somewhat value organic food and local farms.

Which brings me to my point.  Every day we vote with our actions.  We vote with the time we spend.  We vote with the money we spend.  That’s what’s important to us.

One of my favorite blog posts ever was Adam Gilbert’s post How to tell what someone really cares about (How to tell if someone is full of shit, Part Deuce):

A lot of people always talk about what they want to do, what they want to accomplish, what they meant to do, their intentions, how they want to change the world and on and on and on. It seems as though everyone has intentions of doing big things. Clearly, sadly and unfortunately, that’s not the case. Most people are talkers, rather than doers. Let’s face it. It’s a lot easier to talk than do.

In a world where people are moving a million miles per minute how can you actually tell what someone really cares about? Look at their calendar! It’s that simple. Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our time is our priorities, is our strategy. Your calendar knows what you really care about.

What’s important to you is a very bottom line business:

• If you don’t spend time with your family, they aren’t that important to you.
• If you eat fast food routinely, you’re placing convenience ahead of your health.
• If you don’t exercise or eat right, losing weight isn’t that important to you.
• In business, if you don’t spend time interacting with your customers and understanding their needs, you don’t care about them.
• If your video games keep getting in the way of you starting a business, you’d rather play games than start a company.

And so on and so forth.  I could go for hours.

Now, there are always exceptions to the rule.  But mostly that’s how I see it.  It’s pretty black and white.

Ask yourself two questions: what do I spend my time on?  What do I spend my money on?  That’s what is important to you.  It is.  You might disagree, but you’re wrong.  If you want a different answer, you’ll have to change how you spend your time and/or how you spend your money.

It can be a humbling set of questions.  I’m constantly asking them myself.

For me, there are three really key things that I have control over that I think factor into my overall happiness and well being.

1. My work.  Am I striving for and accomplishing great things?  Am I having fun doing it?  Does it have an overall positive impact?
2. My relationships.  Do I actively strive to spend time with my girlfriend, friends, family, and business partners? When I’m with them, am I doing a good job of focusing on being with them and not on my work?
3. My personal well being.  Am I getting enough sleep?  Am I eating well and exercising enough?  Am I making sure that I get personal time to relax and reflect each day?

Everything else, for the most part, is just ancillary noise to me.   99% of the time, if something doesn’t fall into those three categories I don’t want to be doing it.  So I stop.  It’s not that important to me and I want my actions to reflect that.

Now, time allocation within those three is quite the challenge.  But that’s another story for another day.