Enhanced Transcribe:
Hi folks, good evening to you on this beautiful Thursday evening, what a night absolutely stunning. Had a little bit of rain earlier and I just thought I’d get a live in today.
I often have these reflections that go on in my mind and I just thought I’d share a few things with you about time. Something I’ve overheard a couple of people saying and I’ve seen some posts on it, and people having grumbles in the social media space.
But also just general overhearing of conversations if I’m out at a supermarket, standing in a line all sorts of conversations that happen when people are in queue.
And that’s about wasted time and it’s been very interesting as people are saying “oh my gosh, this is crazy, we’re in a downtime period at the moment I feel like there’s all this time being wasted. I’m not getting stuff done, I feel unproductive being locked in like this. It’s frustrating me, it’s pissing me off.”
So these are the common conversations I’ve heard from different people and it made me think actually about statistics. I thought I’d share with you a personal story as well, an inspirational story from somebody I know this week that has done something really powerful with his time.
I wrote down some numbers here on the back of a National trust letter to us and I wanted to talk to you about how much time people spend wasting time or doing things that are non-productive on a general day-to-day basis. To put this in context and if you’re watching this you might smile.
I remember reading an article in the Times about a year and a half, two years ago, and I quote this sometimes when I’m running my seminars. It said that the average person spends approximately an hour getting to work and an hour going back from work.
If you think about it we wake up in the morning and the alarm goes off in a normal situation obviously not now, but a normal situation. You get up brush your teeth, have breakfast etcetera and off you go. The minute you leave the house this is my own personal belief and remember, my beliefs don’t have to be your beliefs.
The minute you leave the house you’re at work as far as I’m concerned, you’ve left home and you are now engaged in the activity of going to work to work for somebody else and then come back.
You might run a business but typically for the average person they’re going to work for somebody else. Now what the Times said from memory was it’s about an hour to work on an hour back. That said, I live here in Sussex in West Sussex so nearest stations is about 10, 15 minutes where I live, and then it’s an hour into London on the train. There’s a lot of people that commute just from here, they hit London, an hour and 10 minutes they get into London and they might spend another 20 minutes going across.
If you do that every day that’s three hours but let’s say the average is two hours. I’ve got some numbers for you because this whole thing about complaining about covid-19 and my time is not being used effectively.
I think that’s bullshit and I want to share with you my thoughts on this. So 10 hours a week on average from somebody travelling to and from work. That’s 10 hours a week lets say lockdown is going to be for the next three months. That could be two months, four months. I think we are certainly looking at least eight weeks that’s my personal view before things start to remotely get close to normal. My personal feeling is it’s going to be longer three months, that’s 120 hours.
For the average person working they’re working 48 weeks a year times 10 hours a week that’s 480 hours. If you take a working day as being an eight-hour day let’s break that down for a minute. 120 hours during covid-19 divided by eight gives me 15 working days physical working days of time that you would normally have just from travelling.
So travelling to and from over covid-19 that’s 120 hours that is equivalent to 15 working days, if you took an eight-hour working day. If you look at the average person for the year this is where it gets scary 480 hours.
So leaving going to and from work 480 hours people are spending going to and from work. Divide that by an eight-hour working day that is 60 working days people spend actually just travelling.
In all the years I’ve been teaching wealth and financial independence to people through property investing and other vehicles people say to me, “I’m busy.” I’m like what are you busy doing? “I got a job at work, got to get to work get back. Work at work eight hours, sometimes nine hours and then I get back I’m knackered. Spend a bit of time with my kids.”
And here we are in the middle of covid-19 I’m hearing people say I feel like my time is being wasted. I’m thinking wasted? You are spending on average at least 480 hours a year wasting your time travelling to and from a workplace for somebody else. I know I might be pressing a few buttons for people but just think about it just for a minute. By the way if you’ve got someone that’s whingeing about the time, you might want to pass this live onto other people.
When I’m teaching people how to become financially dependent on the property seminar one of the first things I say is let’s work out time was from other areas of your life.
If you haven’t got the numbers on this let me just break this down, covid-19 let’s say is three months you spent 120 hours approximately in a week going backwards and forwards over those three months travelling. That’s 15 working days.
What can you do with 15 working days of your time?
This is time you’ve saved. So imagine if you got up on a daily basis and said right I’m going to spend the first hour of my day learning a subject, studying a subjects, studying the stock market, studying property investing, studying how to speak and lookout for this as it’s something I might be doing very shortly actually. Studying a language, playing the guitar just imagine that 120 hours I’m telling you 120 hours you’re going to become really good at something.
If covid-19 lasts longer you’re going to have more time. When you go back to work you’ll have lost over the next year and let’s say we go back to work in September. September 2020 to September to 2021 you’ve wasted 480 hours travelling for somebody else and then you’ll be thinking oh my gosh I wish I had that time back at home now.
We can’t be living with regret over these coming months. We have to start to use this time in a constructive way. So for me at the moment couple things are happening. One of things I’m doing is I’ve got my daughter started to teach me the piano, which is cool. The other one is I’m going back in and looking at the stock market, the currency market, I used to trade and teach trading. I’m going back in to reactivate that passion again and picking that up. That’s where I’m using some of my time as well as finishing off one of my books and creating more products.
Using that time in an effective way. What are you going to do with your time? That is my challenge to all of you watching at the moment. And for someone like Dom who has just come back of this cruise I’m sure he’s bloody itching to do some stuff. TV, now I’ve done a study on this for probably a decade a more now. One of the questions I ask my audience is how much time do you think you spend on average week, watching TV and it varies from no TV at all. I go great what about social media?
People go yeah okay, surfing on Facebook’s going in and out checking on Facebook and Instagram and all these things. Maybe you’re watching a YouTube video whatever it is, but just taking TV alone it’s anywhere from like, typically about 10,12 hours a week, right up to about 20 to 30 hours a week. I’ve taken average and the average person two hours per day, which is what people tell me by the time they’ve got home from work they’ve switched it on, relaxed a little bit. Maybe a bit of social media time as well. Mindless stuff just surfing through plus your TV.
Easily two hours a day and actually now your phones will monitor this by the way for you. Two hours a day, seven days a week and by the way on the weekends people spend more time watching TV. These days it’s Netflix, prime and its social media very little actually physical TV time.
That’s 14 hours a week on average but I think some of you might be more or less. Over 52 weeks I worked out is 728 hours. 728 hours over a year watching TV. We don’t have terrestrial TV and the kids haven’t grown up with it, that’s not a culture we have in our household.
We do have a screen and the screen is basically used primarily for movies and educational stuff; we don’t have it linked in so the kids can mindlessly watch something on TV. That is the philosophy we introduced even before our kids were born.
If you take 728 and divide that by I worked out over the covid-19 period you might want to do this yourself so during covid-19 which I’m saying is three months I worked out that’s 168 hours. Make a note of this, so I’m saying maybe during this period, you could save yourself TV time of 168 hours.
In other words, over a three-month period, two hours a day you do the maths on it. If you’re not travelling to work during the next three months while we are in lock down for the sake of argument you’re not going to work. You’re going to save yourself approximately 120 hours of travel time. If you said I’m not going to watch TV for two hours a night during the period of covid-19 that’s 168 hours you’re going to save.
That is in total 168 plus 120 that is 288. What can you do with 288 hours?
What could you study?
What could you do from a charity perspective?
Imagine if you use that time and just said for the next two months, three months, although I’m not going to work I’m going to take that hour of travel time, I’m going to take two hours of TV time. Granted, I know during the course of the day there’s other time you’ve got maybe with your kids, do some work, maybe you will watch a bit of TV during the course of the day whatever. But the whole point is, imagine you were on a working week. Imagine that you were travelling to work and imagine that you were coming home and going I’m knackered because I’ve been at work all day.
Take that time, I think it’s approximately three hours a day do something valuable with it. Study something, three hours of studying the stock market, trading, studying property doing research, playing the guitar, playing the piano, learning a language, going out doing exercise, whatever it is that you haven’t been doing because you’ve used that as an excuse in the past time.
My goodness me, just imagine how you’re going to feel in three months’ time when you go back to work and you’re thinking oh my god, I’m so passionate about this subject I want to continue doing it, I can’t do it now as I’m at work. What if you studied a new opportunity for creating money. You might want to follow my good friend Harminder that has been doing some stuff online just recently on helping people with online business.
If you haven’t been following our Growth Tribes podcasts, come and follow the Growth Tribes podcast because once a week, it’s about an hour and a half, that’s an hour and a half out of you week. Come and follow us on Growth Tribes we’ve got some great stuff coming up. We’ve been doing some stuff on real estate and property so follow that.
Next week we have one that’s coming out on wills and legacy planning and planning your life in terms of protecting it.
What if someone happens to you?
Have you got your assets in place?
Think about an asset protection, wills, and that type of thing. We’ve got a fantastic interview to share with you. Got a guy who is a nutritional specialist coming on board with us as well so he’s going to do one. We’re really trying to pack in as much as we can over the next few months as a lot of you want to learn this stuff, why not do it with us? It’s free hour, spend an hour, two hours with us once a week on the Growth Tribes. Great place to go and learn there.
If join us in the tribe and I know some of you watching are already in the tribe we’ve got a vault with probably 50- or 60-hours’ worth of content in there. There is money and time management and by the way time management I have a free course.
Normally we charge for it but we are making it available for free at the moment during covid-19. It’s about two to three hours of time management, project management, how to make your time effective. Please go and do it.
My point is this the average person on a weekly, daily, monthly, or yearly basis honestly, they waste a shitload of time doing unproductive non-productive things. The challenge I get is when I’m teaching this is an excuse I get in front of an audience for three days, teaching on property investing.
People would go you don’t understand I want to do this but my wife and I are too busy. I say to people that’s bullshit.
You waste a lot of time in a week and I’m like I do understand, you waste a lot time in the week. Now people are sitting twiddling their thumbs going what do I do? I’ve watched everything on Netflix and watched everything on crime, which by the way is not productive unless you watch the documentaries on health, in which case, go watch the documentaries on Netflix about health and learn about how to become vital and more energised and look great.
Maybe you want to get to 60 I’m 54, 55, I want to try and look the same way in another six years when I hit 60. That’s what I’m excited about, so it’s about keeping that energy and enthusiasm.
I want to ask you a question, we’ve just offered up some time to do deliveries to one of our local organic farms, which is literally a minute from here less than that. We said to them we know you’re delivering to elderly people; we’ve got the time and freedom to do that let us help and the lady was like that’s amazing.
I spoke to a really dear friend of mine and I’m not going to say who it is out of respect, but he’s a very successful property investor. I was speaking to him this week and this guy is a multi-millionaire, he’s got an amazing property portfolio, he’s been a mentor for the last nearly 20 years. He’s 52 years of age and he’s been investing for 10 years longer than I have amazing gentlemen, got huge respect for him.
He and I used to trade together and this is one of the conversations we’ve been having recently and he learnt lots of different things over the last couple of years. He’s done everything from learning hypnosis right through to plumbing and fitting boilers, he is a fully qualified boiler fitter.
This is a guy who is 52-year-old multi-millionaire property investor, he has properties right down in central London up into the north of England. He has helped countless people become incredibly successful, and one of the people I go to when I just want to lean on somebody who I trust that can help me and give me a bit of independent guidance and advice.
He is one of my personal mentors and I was talking to him and he said to me, I put myself forward and volunteered my time about week and ago to help out for vulnerable people. Not knowing how much take up there was going to be, he has been absolutely busy.
He was telling me all weekend four or give call out, he was with a 70-year-old lady this last for five days and he went in I think it was on Sunday. She’d got a boiler who a normal heating engineer had gone out to and bear in mind this lady had no heating for three weeks. She is 70 something years of age, no hot water, no heating, nothing.
A boiler engineer went out to her three weeks ago, said I’m sorry, but your boilers kaput it’s going to cost you three grand to replace it. Do you want to pay three grand and she said I don’t have three grand. By the way this for me is one of things that touches my heart as well because when I teach people who are very 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 years, and they say to a letter to me, we know property is good and we should get into a wealth vehicle and work on other things. But quite frankly, to be honest we’re okay at the moment.
The challenge is most people say they’re okay and they work most of their life. They get to a point when they retire, most of us know this statistically in this country it’s bullshit.
The pension system is absolutely screwed so most pensioners don’t have the money available to look after themselves, which is why their houses are rundown, boilers are failing.
Anyway this lady is in trouble and she does this callout, she is vulnerable, her husband passed away and he goes out to see her and he sends me this message saying, Ro I feel so good. I have been able to help this lady out.
And he is sharing with me because we do these kinds of things.
He says, I’ve helped this lady out and she was told by this boiler engineer three grand £3,000. So he goes in he pulls a part the boiler brings these extra components and somehow manages to get her boiler working and functional. She is absolutely over the moon and leaves her, does the same thing to somebody else. Bear in mind this guy doesn’t have to work for the rest of his life and he makes huge amounts of money on an annual basis, and here is giving up his time.
He said, I’m trying to do something during this downtime although we’ve got a lockdown I can get out and help other people. It gets me out and gets me socialising with people, obviously social distancing.
What I find inspiring is that he sends me this other WhatsApp message yesterday to say, I was driving and I realised I worked out a couple of things we can do to get a boiler working maybe finding a way to be able to get her a new boiler. There might be an opportunity here, some opportunities are coming up with the government supporting vulnerable tenants, or in this case vulnerable house owners, elderly people.
His brain is working overtime. I guess my point is this, don’t go to sleep during this period. Use this as an opportunity to become inspired and, more importantly, to be inspiring to other people. Please don’t atrophy, meaning don’t let your brain waste, don’t let your body waste.
I’ve taken my daughter outside everyday over these last three or four days, we’ve been out walking for an hour today. I’ve got to share this with you. My youngest daughter who’s five has suddenly become fanatical about finding bones, she has become a bone collector.
So my youngest daughter has become a bone collector, we went out today and believe it or not we found another skeleton and we think it’s a sheep, we’re not sure but we’ve got a feeling it’s a sheep. She want to get my old tooth brush and brush these down and we’ve got other ones over there.
We are using this time to do creative things with the kids and let their imagination go wild. Have fun and for the parents watching this it’s a brilliant thing you can do as well.
Don’t hold them back too much, give them a chance to go free rein, because I think the schools suppress our kids a lot, they contain them and they’re like this explosive energy when they come out of school.
It’s a chance for them to let off steam but that’s a conversation for another day.
Thank you for listening and thanks for the lovely messages you’re sending in.
Keep telling me if there’s a subject you want me to talk about. I’m actually looking to do something where I start to read some extracts from my turning point book.
I’d quite like to go back over some of that and maybe read it out and talk about that in an open space, as I haven’t run an event for a while. And the book was very popular when it came out on Amazon, so I thought I’d share that with you all.
I’ve got to love you and leave you. I’m going to go back and see the kids put the skull back in place and I shall speak to you all again soon.
Take care, thank you for watching.
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