Time Management

People seem to think that I have accomplished a lot. I mean, sure. Here are some of the things I have done in the last few years:

·      Finished grad school

·      Wrote a daily newsletter

·      Wrote a weekly newsletter

·      Wrote two monthly newsletters

·      Hosted a radio show

·      Published three books, with a fourth coming

·      Wrote a bunch of essays

·      Wrote a bunch of short stories

·      Played racquetball

·      Learned the guitar

·      Had several speaking engagements each year

·      Had several DJ gigs each year

·      Was a dad to seven cats

·      Built a house

·      Did a small amount of philanthropy work

·      Taught at the university level

Here is another thing I did:

·      Gained 30 pounds

Here is a thing I did not do:

·      Watch TV, movies, Netflix, or play video games

So you can kind of see where this is going. There are 24 hours in the day. You’re asleep for eight of them. How you allocate your time, on a daily basis, is the most important decision you will make in your life.

A couple of other notes:

·      I don’t have kids

·      I don’t have much of a social life

·      I don’t have much in the way of family or family obligations

I got married when I was 23 years old. Back then, at age 23, my wife and I decided that we never wanted to have kids. I don’t particularly like kids, but beyond that, we wanted to focus on our careers. I can tell you that I might have been able to do one or two things on that list if I had kids. Pretty much all my friends have kids—and they aren’t able to accomplish much professionally unless they have a lot of resources and a lot of help and a lot of resources to buy help. Having kids is a sacrifice for sure—you’re accepting that you’ll have a lower earnings potential and lower promotion potential and everything that goes along with it. I was not much in the mood to make the sacrifice. People tell me that I am missing out on a lot, the joy you experience when you look in a child’s eyes, and all that. Sounds like a bunch of crap to me. All the parents I know spent the first five years dealing with poop and pee and screaming, and the next ten years dealing with insolence. I think the whole kids thing is a giant cult, and the people in the cult want you to join the cult, like some kind of malignant pyramid scheme. No, I will never be proud of my imaginary son for hitting a Little League home run. I will never be disappointed in him, either.

So I have lots of time to do other stuff. This is my typical day:

0630: Alarm goes off

0730: Out the door to work

0815: Sitting at my desk

1130: Lunch

1200: Sitting at my desk

1530: Leave for the gym

1730: Home from the gym

1800: Eat dinner

1830: Sitting on the couch, writing, with baseball on TV.

2200: Bedtime for bonzo

As you can see, I get a full eight hours of sleep. Sleep is actually the key to my productivity—without it, I’m a banana slug. So if you add up all the hours in this schedule, you will see that I spend about 10-11 hours actually working, which doesn’t seem like a lot. Well, I’m not scrolling through Facebook. I know a lot of finance people spent a huge amount of time on Twitter—I don’t. I’ll lope in every once in a while with a smart-ass comment, but it’s not a huge time sink for me. When I’m working, I’m working hard, and I’m typing relentlessly, and you can accomplish a lot by working 10-11 hours a day.

One exercise I recommend: make a chart of how you spend your time each day in 15-minute intervals. You will quickly see where the time goes.

I’ll tell you a big-time suck for a lot of people: taking a dump. I have never understood how some people can spend a half hour, even an hour sitting on the toilet. In the old days you would bring a magazine; today you bring your phone. I don’t know if my body is engineered differently than everyone else’s, but it literally takes me 60 seconds to crap. I drop trou, sit on the can, take a smash, wipe, stand up, and pull up my pants. One minute, and then I am back to work. A half hour every day over 365 days is 182 hours. Over 40 years, that’s 7000 hours. You can write books—books plural—in 7000 hours. You think I’m joking about this, but I’m not. If you want a quick and easy way to ramp up your productivity, shit with alacrity, shit with a purpose.

And it’s the principle of the thing. My guess is that someone who spends an hour dropping the kids off at the pool doesn’t really act with a lot of urgency in other areas of their life. There was a paragraph in Street Freak that raised the hackles of some of my Lehman colleagues. I wrote about how when things got slow, which was often, people would go to espn.com or start shopping online. The way I looked at it, I was working for the third-biggest investment bank with thousands of dollars of technology at my disposal, and all the resources in the world, and I was going to take advantage of it. Most of the time I’d be dorking around with Bloomberg or flipping through charts. I’d be learning. And on a bank trading floor, knowledge is power. Don’t get me wrong, there was definitely some goofing around, with pranks and eating competitions and such, but I took my job seriously. Also: I never masturbated at work. Roughing up the suspect in the office is a bad idea, for a whole bunch of reasons.

I wasn’t born with my time management ability. I learned it in the military. My 9-year Coast Guard career wasn’t good for much—I pretty much had to unlearn everything I learned once I got to the private sector—but the one thing it taught me was time management. When you are a cadet at a service academy, you have a million things thrown at you. First of all, you’re taking 18 credits at a time—one semester, I took 22. You have to keep your uniform in tip-top shape, polishing brass, shining shoes, and ironing shirts. This can take as much as an hour a day. You are required to do sports of some kind. There is a whole bunch of military B.S. that you have to deal with. You accomplish more in one day than most college students accomplish in a week. So I have the U.S. government to thank for that.

For me, time management is an obsession. If I ever finish one task, and find myself staring off into space for even a minute, I say to myself, get moving, fatass, and then I am on to something else. You might say that I am efficient, which would be an understatement. There isn’t a minute wasted in the day—it is all for a purpose. I don’t fuck around. But I’m not Superman. I’m not as successful as some people, and it makes me reflect on what I am doing wrong, or what I could be doing better. Maybe I work hard, but I am working hard at the wrong things.  Maybe my time is misallocated—maybe I should be spending time on other things. I never saw the benefit to going on TV, but maybe I should be hustling TV appearances. Maybe I should be doing more marketing. Who knows. I may be the hardest working man in the financial media business, but I am not the most successful person in the financial media business, so these are important questions to ask.

Alas, I am a fat fuck. I choose to spend my time working instead of working out. But that is gradually changing—I am back in the gym after a three-year hiatus, while I was going to grad school. One of these days, this will become important to me, and then you will see me posting shirtless selfies on Instagram. Whatever I do, I have to be the best at it. I could spend more time in the gym, but that would mean I would be spending less time writing short stories and such. At the moment, the trade-off isn’t worth it.

If you spent as much time thinking about time management as I did, you would probably be pretty good at it. Because I think about it every second of the day. Do everything with a sense of urgency, as if your life depends on it. Then you will see results.