Stefan Georgi Shares Time Management For Freelancers/Entrepreneurs To Cut Work Hours By 80%

Hey, what's up? It's Stefan here. And today I want to talk quickly about the truth behind time management and really about how you look at time and manage time and handle time and productivity and things like that. So this kind of comes about because I'm reading a book right now called the Future Is Faster Than youn Think It Might be backwards on my camera, I don't know, but really good, kind of a futuristic book, I don't know, written by futurists, I guess. Right. But about trends and things that are happening over the coming decade and decades, along the lines of Yuval Noah Harari's book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which looks at the next, like 10 to 30 years. And some other really good books. I'm kind of interested in that. Right. We're at the beginning of a new decade and we're about to enter the second year of it, but we're still early on and, like, what is that going to look like? And the truth is there's going to be massive changes that happen. And I think it's good to be prepared for what those changes are. Whether that's in, you know, medicine, technology, the ways we interact, the way, like, virtual reality affects our lives, augmented reality, there's this. There's going to be. Things will not be the same. The mistake we can. The biggest mistake we would make is assuming that, you know, everything in this decade will be the same as it was in the last decade. It's not true. Right? Just like no decade is the same as the decade before. Like, things continue to change. Anyway, while I was reading this book, though, one really interesting part they talk about is like the acceleration of Excel. Of accelerator. The acceleration of acceleration, which is around, like, the idea of the law of accelerating Returns, which was by Ray Kurzweil, who's a futurist, and talking about how essentially there's a positive feedback loop so that when you make a better computer, you can then use that better computer to build an even better computer or a faster computer. Right. When you make the better AI gets that AI can then be used to make AI even better. And it happens in a exponential fashion, kind of like Moore's Law for computer chips. So that the more things are like, as these improvements happen, they actually increase acceleration. So it's sort of like if you looked at a horizon or a timeline, right? If this is like progress, sort of as far as technological innovation and advances go, it's like, you know, this, and then it just starts being speeding up really fast. Right. And that's where we're at right now. Right now we're at this part where we're speeding up really fast. But anyway, one of the first things they talk about is save time, which I thought was really interesting because I hadn't really thought of that too much before. And a couple really good things in here. One of them is about how when the very first Macintosh was created, Steve Jobs came to one of the main engineers and talked about how it drove him crazy that the Mac took so long to. To start up to boot. And basically he told the guy how he wanted to save time. And the guy was like, you know, maybe we can save 10 seconds at best. And then I'll read from the book, right. Says Jobs wasn't pacified. You know, he continued, I've been thinking, how many people are going to use this Macintosh? A million? No more than that. In a few years, I bet 5 million. Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off the boot time, multiply that by 5 million users, and that's 50 million seconds every single day over a year. That's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot 10 seconds faster than you've saved over a dozen lives, that's really worth it, don't you think? So it's kind of a cool Steve Jobsian anecdote. But then they talk about More recently, in 2014 at the University of Michigan, a behavioral economist named Yan Chen gave participants a list of questions. And she had half the participants answer the questions using the Internet, and half of them were put in a library, didn't have Internet access, but they had access to a very robust full library, and they had to answer questions. And what she found, the researcher, is that on average, for the Internet people, it took them seven minutes on average to answer a question, while for people in the library, it took them 22 minutes on average to answer each question. So what the authors then point out here is if you apply that same kind of Steve Jobsian logic to things, right? And look at the time, this was random. It was 3.5 billion queries on Google per day. They're saying Google basically saves 52.4 billion minutes per day, because instead of if every answer on average would take 22 minutes offline to answer, but takes 7 minutes online, that's 15 minutes saved. 15 times 3.5 billion is where you get 52.4 billion minutes saved. I went even further and kind of looked at the math and for the average human life, so say someone lives to 75 years of age, that means there's about 39 million minutes in their life. So even there, that means every day 15, the equivalent of 1500 lifetimes are being saved by just Google alone. But it's not just Google, right? If you look at stuff like another one they mentioned is travel. So the idea that in the 1880s, it took you four weeks to go from New York to Chicago in a stagecoach, and then there was all kinds of dangers and parallels as well, but four weeks, by the early 20th century, it took four days, thanks to the train. And then with airplanes and flying, it takes about four hours to go from New York to Chicago, including travel time to and from the airports and stuff like that. And then with the Hyperloop, which Elon Musk is working on, and Virgin and stuff like that, it's quite conceivable in the next few years, we'll be able to go from New York to Chicago in under an hour. So it's getting faster. And one more really interesting one from the book they talk about is the labor saving devices, which are essentially everything from appliances like the vacuum cleaner or, you know, ovens or microwaves, to running water and electricity, right? And because of the advances in labor saving devices over the last hundred years, what research has found is the number they put it at is that basically the average adult has gone from spending over 58 hours per week on housework and sort of home activities like that to an hour and a half per week. So. So you've literally gotten back, you know, 56 and a half hours per week of time back, which sounds crazy or extreme, but think about it. If you don't have to go and tend to like, you know, start a fire and chop down the wood for the fire and, you know, go to the well and go wash clothes, like manually, like and all this stuff, right? It saves us a ton of time. So the reason I bring this up, and there's a bunch of examples like this, but the reason I bring it up is because I think for a lot of us, we want to feel like, oh, there's not enough time, there's not enough hours in the day. But the truth is we actually have way more time available to us today than we did in the past. Like your commute, most people, because of COVID now, people aren't even commuting as much, which is why you see people moving to suburbs and further away. But even your commute is not, is disappearing for a lot of people. That saves you time, right? We have time. We have a lot of time, actually. More time than we've ever had in history. The thing is that we're choosing. The question is not about how the abundance of time. There's an overabundance of time and it's only gonna get more abundant. Time is more abundant than it's ever been. So it's not about abundance, it's about utilization. Right. If you take that time and you spend two or three hours on like a, like arguing with somebody on Facebook or watching, you know, cable news or binging on social media or going down like rabbit holes on the Internet or whatever it is. Like, you know, I mean, I'm not saying I'm not judging anybody for doing that stuff, but the truth is, right, that's. That's. You're just using that time that way. Or like a text, you know, text chain where you're just staring at your phone, whatever. Like the time is there, it's just how we're utilizing it. So when you think about, from that perspective, like maybe evaluate things that you know, you are spending your time on and are they actually necessary? Right. Like for me, I talk about that. I. In the mornings when I'm taking some time off right now because I'm doing this video right around Christmas. So I'm spending my mornings reading and writing and shooting this video. But in general, what I talk about is when I am working, for me, it's like writing a lot of the time. Then I'll wake up at 5am, 5:30, 4:30 sometimes, whatever it is, I wake up early and the first thing I do is spend two hours on my most important task for the day, which is often writing. When I do that, I'm done by 7:30 or 8. And then really the rest of the day is I've got some calls here and there. I've got weekly things I do. I've got meetings and stuff. But I feel way more in control of my time because I already got my big needle mover done. But then from there, even then it's like if I. Because if I. The reason I bring that up is because otherwise if I wake up and I go on the Internet and I start like reading a bunch of articles and I go on Facebook and then I'm arguing with somebody and it really just zaps my attention, right? And I think attention is that there is a scarcity of attention. I think that's like the bigger issue is that, you know, there's a time abundance, but there's a attention deficit, so to speak. Which is funny because I have adhd, but the point being, right? Like, there's more and more things competing for our attention, and it's harder and harder to give our attention to singular tasks and things of that nature. So I think there's a confluence of time and attention. And when you can give yourself ample time for whatever is most important to you and then dedicate your attention to that, you'll be shocked at how productive you can be. So, wanted to share all that with you. Hopefully you find it interesting. If you do, please don't forget to comment and let me know. Hit the like button. You know, subscribe to my YouTube channel if you haven't already, all that stuff. But I think this is important and I wanted to share it with you, and hopefully you found it interesting too.