How do you spend your waking hours?
Everyone has 168 hours per week. How you spend these hours will dictate how successful you are. The Magic Trio defines success as how much of your life you enjoy. Therefore, people who spend more of their waking hours enjoying life are the most successful. Until you obtain financial independence, your work life balance definition should go something like 40-10-10-50 (hours). I’ll explain further shortly. 58 hours per week should be spent on sleep and personal hygiene. That leaves 110 hours per week for you to live your life. If you are working 50 hours a week at a job you despise, you are spending almost 50% of your waking hours not enjoying your life. If this is the case, then you are not very successful. If you are financially independent, you may only spend 10 hours a week or less managing your work-independent income streams. Assuming you are also physically fit, then you are likely enjoying 90% to 100% of your life.
Your work life balance definition should allow you to enjoy your life while still making progress towards long-term goals.
Most people are not at 90%.
If you’re not there yet, you need to take steps to ensure you get there. This means making time to improve your life while keeping up with your current responsibilities. As you can see, time management becomes a crucial skill to acquire. Time management is the key to enjoying life full-time because unless you are able to make the time to take consistent action, enjoying life full-time will always be a dream that’s out of reach. After reading this book, you will learn how to operate efficiently so that these consistent action steps will not take up a significant amount of time, but you will still need to make some time. How should you spend your waking hours? The Magic Trio work life balance definition starts at 40-10-10-50, but if you do it right, it will end up at 0-10-10-90. Next, I’ll give you a hypothetical breakdown of how I would do things, assuming you are an adult with a full-time job that supports your current lifestyle.
Weekly time: 168 hours.
You should be sleeping at least seven hours a day. Sleep is a very underrated component of a healthy and happy lifestyle. If you are one of those people who says “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”, you may be sleeping much sooner than you’d like. Devote at least seven hours each night to good quality sleep. You may not be able to do this every night, but if you don’t get enough one night, then try to make up for it the next night. This sounds weird, but make sleep a goal just like anything else you want to accomplish. I aim for 50 hours a week. Trust me, your body will thank you for it and you will have more energy during the remaining hours of the week which you will need if you’re going to be serious about making the most of this time. Allocate a little over eight hours a day to sleep and personal hygiene, or 58 hours per week. After this, the 110 hours begins.
Starting time: 110 hours.
You are probably spending at least 50 hours per week on your full-time job. What if you only work 40 hours a week? Chances are you are still spending at least 50 hours per week on your job. I’m not just talking about the time you spend in the office. I’m including the time you spend commuting, the time you spend dressing for work, the time you spend thinking about work outside of work, and the time you spend decompressing from work. Eliminate your job and all of this time is freed up. If you love your job, then congratulations. You have taken care of the biggest chunk of time that prevents most people from enjoying their lives and you are already well on your way to enjoying life full-time. You may even already be there. Skip to the next section. If not, then read on. Here is the first component of the new 40-10-10-50 work life balance definition.
Minimize the time you spend doing all these job-related activities. Move closer to work. Negotiate a work-from-home or part-time arrangement. I’m not suggesting you slack off. I’m suggesting the opposite: that you become more productive at your job so that you can get more done in less time and free up time to do other things that improve and enhance your life. I realize most people work a minimum of 40 hours per week. In my opinion, 40 hours is the maximum amount of time you should spend on all job-related activities. If you can get away with 30, then do 30. If you don’t love what you do, then your goal should be to get down to 40 at the most if you’re not there already. Everyone has to earn money somehow and not everyone can do it with WII right off the bat. Suck it up and work hard keeping in mind that it’s a temporary gig to endure until you realize the potential to hit the number you really want, which is zero.
Remaining time: 70 hours.
Now that we’ve gotten the drudgery out of the way, on to the exciting stuff. Allocate 10 hours per week to improving or maintaining your physical fitness. Allocate two to three hours a week to preparing healthy meals. Once you learn how to cook efficiently, you shouldn’t need any more time than this. If you have a spouse to do this for you, that’s even better. Allocate five hours a week to formal exercise. I like to spend one hour a day each weekday and take the weekends off. The one hour includes recovery time. Once you learn how to exercise efficiently, a 30 to 45 minute session should be plenty. In the Physical Fitness section, I introduced you to a killer set of workouts that you can do in only 10 minutes when you are really pressed for time. Allocate two to three hours a week to informal exercise. Join a sports league, go rock climbing, go hiking, whatever. There are physical and psychological benefits to this.
Remaining time: 60 hours.
Next, allocate 10 hours per week to generating work-independent income (WII). As I mentioned in the previous section, WII is either earning passive income or earning active income doing something you love. Passive income may be dependent on building your capital and that, as you’ve read, should be a completely automated process so you shouldn’t need to spend any time on that after initial setup. Therefore, the 10 hours per week should be spent on educating yourself on ways to earn passive income (i.e. real estate investing, stock trading, etc.) or on figuring out ways to earn an active full-time income doing something you love. In other words, spend the 10 hours learning a skill or trade that you really enjoy that you can eventually turn into a full-time income instead of spending the 10 hours taking on a second job that you love but that could never generate a full-time income.
Remaining time: 50 hours.
How much enjoyment does your current work life balance definition give you? The Magic Trio gives you a minimum of 50 hours. With the remaining 50 hours, simply enjoy your life. Spend more time with your family and friends. Take up a new hobby or spend more time on your current ones. Give yourself a taste of what it’s like to live it up full-time. This will do a couple of things. First, it will help get you through the time you may have to temporarily spend doing things you don’t enjoy. Second, it will motivate you to start enjoying life full-time as soon as possible and reinforce the habits you develop to help you get there. Don’t get too carried away here. Remember, enjoying life is important, but you want to avoid things that will cause you to self-destruct or cause major setbacks in your progress. For example, DO go out for a few drinks with your friends a couple of times a week. DON’T become an alcoholic or drug addict. DO treat yourself to a little shopping. DON’T go blow $10,000 on a new wardrobe. Get the idea?
