Turtles-Paradise

• Pause.
• Close your eyes.
• Stretch.
• Take a slow, deep breath.
• Carry on.

After I read about The Balanced Money Forumla, I started thinking about time, and how we really need a Balanced Time Formula as well. For most people, their day will be structured somewhat like this:

24 hours
8 for sleep
2 for commuting
8 for work
2 for eating
4 for television

with some variations.

Personally, I think life might be more fun if it was structured more like this:

24 hours
8 for sleeping
5 for working
4 for slow eating
1 for exercising
3 for friendships
3 for fun

Thinking about it, I decided ideally we want to spend about 40% of our time on productive activities (producing things of value, doing things of value – work that benefits society), about 30% of our time on friendships, being social, having fun, and about 30% on developing ourselves – educating ourselves, exercising, learning new skills and so on.

What do you think? How is your time currently structured, and what would your ideal breakdown be?

Writing

Using the smallest number of words to make your point is better than verbose and unwieldy chunks of text. In fiction, suggesting a scene and letting the reader fill in the gaps is more powerful than minutely detailing every leaf in the forest.

Photography

A simple composition focusing on one or two subjects, or a single action, is more powerful than a photograph with half a dozen subjects all doing different things.

Friendship

Having a small number of friendships, that you have the time to maintain, is more supportive than an extended network of thousands of people whose names you can barely remember.

This is true of social media, e.g. Twitter and Facebook as well.

Food

Having a small number of flavourful ingredients allows you to focus on each taste. Eating less is healthier, more sustainable, and cuts down on food waste.

Possessions

Owning less stuff means you need less storage space, less electricity and heat, and less money to spend on storing and maintaining. It means your spaces are easier to clean, and you don’t end up paralysed by choice when it comes to choosing an outfit or picking which movie to watch.

Tasks

A shorter ‘to-do’ list is less stressful. More gets done, earlier in the day, and then you have more time to spend on play.

The Great Decluttering Project

Back from holiday, and in the swing of it now. Going to try and get through ten CD’s of archived material a day. Today is on track!

Over the past week, I’ve been lucky enough to have been staying in the rather luxurious holiday apartment you see in the picture. Full of light and fresh air, with lots of empty space and fairly limited elegant furniture, the apartment was beautiful and lifted your spirits the moment you walked inside.

It was the kind of place that makes you want to wake up early, eat a fruit salad and drink some real coffee whilst sitting on the balcony and watching the canal boats pass by below.

Of course, holiday apartments have a head-start on most houses. Because people don’t live there, they don’t accumulate that layer of clutter, kick-knacks, loose paperwork and unopened post. Because it gets thoroughly cleaned between each stay, it never develops those dustballs beneath the furniture, or cobwebs in hard-to-reach corners.

It’s a great way to see how good life can be without clutter though. With no distractions or habitual behaviour to fall into – who watches TV when they are on holiday? – you are free to really focus on each experience, whether it’s drinking a cup of coffee on the balcony, or strolling the streets, or simply sitting and watching the world.

I struggle with money. There, I said it, even despite all the posts about tips on reducing your spending!

The cold hard truth is that I spend over 50% of my take-home pay in one go. My rent payment. If you factor in my utility bills, council tax, and other bills – I pay out almost 75% of my income on bills.

Over at Get Rich Slowly, there’s a post on the Balanced Money Formula originally from All Your Worth. This is what the picture from it looks like:

Even after I pay 75% onto bills, I still have the basic need to eat some food once in a while. I spend an average of £200 a month on groceries for two people. That’s 18% of my take-home pay.

In other words, around 93% of my take-home pay goes on what I would call needs.

Ouch.

There are some basic and obvious steps we can take to make our spending a bit more balanced.

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