How Do You Spend Your Time?

The Boston.com Managing Your Money: Personal finance advice feature has a brief, intriguing May 20 entry by a local accountant, Jamie Downey, The Best Financial Advice I Ever Received. Downey expands on advice he heard from the author/sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer; to invest your time, rather than spend it. Downey examines his own life in a variety of categories, to demonstrate how he invests his time in various activities. His advice and personal example goes beyond finances to give an interesting blueprint for the intelligent, productive use of time. (Most of this time, by the way, is outside of the workplace. It would be interesting to see a similar list for time at work.) He identifies some areas of his life that he tries to use more productively, such as selective television viewing, and using travel and commuting hours productively. He then provides brief examples of  how he invests time in the following areas: reading, exercising, building relationships, time with family and thinking. He says that reading is the activity he increased the most, as the result of Gitomer’s advice. He devotes at least an hour a day to it, usually in the early morning, with coffee. You can probably add other categories to those included here for personal investment of time. But this is thought-provoking and seems reasonable and doable. Just as Gitomer inspired Downey, the latter has now inspired his readers to improve not only their finances, but the quality of each day of life.