But wait... there's less!

"Been busy?" is a question we're often asked. Sadly we're often far too busy and don't have time for the things we really want to do. We've made working our number one priority and are suffering the consequences. But it doesn't have to be this way. Author Celeste Headlee explains the reasons work takes up too much of our lives and shows a way forward to being less busy, less overworked and more happy. The title "Do Nothing" might put you off reading this book. I recommend you read it anyway. The subtitle "break away from overworking overdoing and underliving" is a better description of the book. In a world of overworking we seem busier than ever. How is it that our grandparents had so much leisure time even without the assistance of robot vacuums, online shopping, microwaves and the internet? Author Celeste Headlee suggest that instead of gritting our teeth and forcing our "body and mind to work punishing hours" as if they w...

In 2020 two of my friends each published their first story. That's actually a bigger thing than I first thought. Eighty-one percent of people want to be an author. So how many actually do it? In any given year it's not even close to 1 percent. So what happens to the other 80 percent? Sometimes it's the confidence to go for it. Sometimes the right inspiration hasn't hit. Sometimes people need advice on story-writing or editing - or don't have the technical know-how. One way or another they find a reason not to do it. One huge reason is "I just can't find the time" - and it's fairly valid. Writing a book is actually quite a lot of work. Where to find the time? Sure, if you're super-driven you could do it in your after-work time. But it takes severe dedication to punch out a novel after working a 40-hour week. Staying up late, or getting up early, or giving up weekends. My two friends who published novels this year both took some time out of the...

Ever felt your life-satisfaction dip as middle-age approaches? It's not just you. It's quite normal. Here's how it works and what we can do about it. The title and the cover of the book give away the main point. As humans we tend to be less happy in the middle part of adulthood. Even if we're successful we can still get dissatisfied. Of course this is an average. It is "possible to be satisfied in middle age" - but it is harder. While genetics, circumstances and voluntary actions are crucial to explaining life satisfaction, there seems to be an aging component also. It's all relative This graph from the book shows average happiness (darker points) compared to expected happiness (measured five years earlier). For instance, the average 22-year-old's happiness is just above 7. But when asked for a prediction as 17-year olds, their average answer was 7.7. Clearly our expectations are high. Experts call this "optimism bias" and it appears to dec...

If we spend less, or waste less, then we don't need to trade away so much of our lives for dollars. So what are the other options for our time? Recently I've been looking at social enterprises - businesses whose primary goal is a social outcome rather than a profit. Last month I reviewed the Fruit Butcher . Today I'm looking at the ground-breaking work of Green Fox Studio - who I also discovered at a local social enterprise showcase. Who are Green Fox Studio? Green Fox Studio trains and employs people to do graphic and digital design. By itself that sounds unremarkable but Green Fox has a difference. Their students and designers are serving time. How does that work? We like to think prison somehow sets people straight. But 46% of people in prison end up re-offending and returning to prison. Others end up homeless. Many have reduced employment prospects due to their record. Most organisations aren't willing to train or employ people with a criminal record. Green Fox stu...

By now we should be working 15-hour weeks thanks to the advances in technology. So what happened?  David Graeber argues that the maths is right. The amount of actual work needed has reduced, so now we invent extra jobs that serve no purpose - what he calls BS jobs. Why does this happen and how can we avoid it in the future? Here is what I got from the book. What are some examples? The guy who has to double-check every computer scanned application form to make sure the computer interprets people's handwriting correctly. (Spoiler alert: It does. Every time. But it's in the contract that each one has to be human-checked.) It would bearable if they were applications for organ transplants, but they are applications for loyalty rewards cards. Ugh! The German military outsourced its IT and logistics. Now when a soldier at a base needs to move his computer two doors down the hall, Kurt has to drive up to 500 km to move it for him - and fill out all the requisite paperwork. The travel c...

One theme of mine is that if we buy less stuff we can work less. But what to do with all the extra free hours? Some people choose to start a business, or more specifically, a social enterprise. These are businesses that have a social outcome as their main goal. If they make some money along the way, that's good - but it's not the main purpose. I recently attended a webinar of social start-ups pitching their enterprise. One of these is  Fruit Butcher . The Fruit Butcher? Elliot Carter calls himself a Fruit Butcher. After an animal safari in Africa, he and his wife decided to go vegetarian for a month but found the options limited. A fruit wholesaler by trade, Elliot realised he could use his fruit knowledge to provide tasty vegetarian options for people who want a great meat alternative. Here's his pitch video: Jackfruit's back, alright While Elliot's got plans for a range of plant-based alternatives the first is a pork-like product that's made from jackfruit. A...

"What am I meant to do with my life?". Whether you're choosing a career, changing career, retiring, or reaching financial independence and no longer need to earn a paycheck; discovering your purpose is key. This is where Jeff Goins' book The Art of Work can help. He encounters hundreds of stories to discover the common characteristics of people finding their vocation / calling / life's purpose. He identifies several key themes and illustrates them with stories of real people. At the end there are exercise and questions to help you along the path to find your purpose. Here are some of the key points I took away from reading this. Why it's more important than ever We live longer than any generation before us. Generations ago, men "rarely got to see life beyond careers" . Even our parent or grandparents usually worked for several decades to pay the bills before getting the chance to consider their calling. Only 13% of workers are engaged in th...

Go Fund Yourself is a basic money guide. Written for younger adults and usable for all, it covers many aspects of money - jobs, businesses, spending and investing. It's British, so some information is UK-specific. But this is far outweighed by helpful information that transcends national borders. Reason for being The Japanese word Ikigai means reason for being. It originates in Okinawa, where they view work not so much as a necessary chore that we retire from, but something that is innate to us as individuals. Ikigai is about fulfilling work by finding a combination of work we love doing something the world needs, while earning money and doing something we're good at. It's about finding the centre of the diagram where all the circles overlap. Ideal income It's easy to think that an ideal income is the highest one possible. Perhaps that's why we don't consider Ikigai as much as we could; why we sometimes just take the job or career with the highest pay. ...

As we wrap up 2019, here are the most-read posts here on But Wait There's Less . 5. Books. Do we need them anymore? Why do we keep books? To read them again? How many do we ever read a second time? I worked it out .For me not many. This lead to a second post on my technique for streamlining my book collection . 4. Living in a converted barn. This was something my wife and I tried on a trip away this year. Check out the pictures . I still reckon it could be possible long-term. We really don't need as much space as we have. 3. What's your retirement age? It's not 67. At least it doesn't have to be. If we spend less, compulsory work can become optional at a very early age . It could even be in your 30s. 2. The automatic guest room On the same trip as number 4, we stayed with a friend who (with some clever furniture ) converts her living room into another bedroom. It's a clever way to be able to have guests, but without paying a heap of money for a bigge...

Today was the sad passing of Marie Fredriksson of Swedish pop-duo Roxette. She is best known for the song It Must Have Been Love , from the Pretty Woman movie. She died of a brain tumour at the age of 61. Why it matters to me? I'm not normally affected by celebrities passing. But this is different for two reasons. As a youngster I was a big Roxette fan. Most of their best stuff was before my time, but I scanned records stores (when music was sold in shops) to find their older stuff. Those CDs got very heavy listening in my younger years - and again tonight as I write this. Also Marie was 61, the same age my mother passed away - almost to the day. So it's an extra stark reminder that the phrase "life is short" is often truer than we expect. On average we live longer lives than generations before us, but it's obviously not the case for everyone. What does it mean? For me it's a reminder of that we only have a finite number of hours on the planet. ...

How far would you go for financial freedom? It's the subtitle of Scott Rieckens' book and also his year-long quest featured in his documentary . What is Financial Independence? Basically it's as simple as spending way less than you earn, investing the difference and getting to a point where the investment income supports your lifestyle. For some people, financial independence comes very naturally. And then there's Scott and his wife Taylor (and baby Jovie). Their income is good, but they also lease a BMW, are members of a boat club, frequently spent hundreds on dinner and live in an expensive part of San Diego, California. At least, until now. Why the book? Scott says that the idea of the book (and documentary to come) is to show "a journey with all of the anxieties, disagreements, negotiations and mistakes that I imagine so many others would expect or fear" . He makes good on that promise. He figures that this is an option for many people - and he ba...

Irish Leonard explains how his family of four lives on a sailboat. No inheritance. No lottery. Just not wasting money - or his time. How does he afford it? He explains by showing the average Irish household expenses, converted into hours worked. Here's the result shown as a working week: We work a lot to pay for our cars. As he puts it: Almost 20% of our working lives is spent so that we can afford to get to our working lives. So Leonard eliminates or massively reduces most expenses. On the family boat, he sails "in a climate that requires no heating or air conditioning, doesn't own a car and generates what energy he needs using solar panels". Remove the unnecessary costs and you remove most of the need to work. He calculates that we can feed and clothe our family on 5 days work per month, or the equivalent. By contrast the average Irish couple devotes 19 hours a day to work, including commuting. Why all this focus on time? In Leonard's words "I...

Work seems to be compulsory. But it doesn't have to be that way, according to Tanja Hester and her book Work Optional . It's essentially a guide book; showing you how a Work-optional life can be done and giving you the practical and psychological guidance to achieve it. We work full time, with increasing hours and responsibility. There go most of our prime years. We spend our money to "soothe the stress" and get a few years of retirement at the end. That's the script we're given. But what if we write a different script. That's what Tanja's book is all about. She found that even in her chosen career, working full-time forever is not all it's cracked up to be. Alternatives to tradition Traditional retirement, and the pension, were first invented to entice older workers to quit and open up jobs for younger workers - not for the benefit of the retiree. It's "no reason to shape our entire lives in a conventional way on a made-up timeli...

Two mock ads. Opposite points of view. Head-to-head. Which is better? That's The Pitch - part of Aussie TV show Gruen . The ads are just for fun, but the topics are real. The latest episode focuses on retirement. Hiring more elderly workers versus compulsory retirement at 65. Here's the ad in favour of retirement. It features retired people making (pretend) regretful statements about work. None of which are in the least bit convincing - especially when said while the person is enjoying their post-work life. "I wish I'd spent more time at work" "I'd kill for a conference call." "I miss my emails" "What I'd give for one more rush hour" The ad ends with the slogan "Retirement never gets old" . While it's talking about retirement at 65, the same point could be made for 60, 55, 50, etc. For many the only reason to continue as far as 65 is monetary. Basically, we spend too much money on questionable ...

I've learnt some surprising and shocking things in this Yale University course on The Science of Wellbeing . The professor gave the class the warning "Everything you thought was important for being happy is not" . Miswanting We want the wrong things. Typically people think happiness comes from a good job, money, cool stuff, good grades, good looks etc. A range of studies show the effect of these things on our well-being to be either negligible, non-existent or even negative. It reminds me of that quote "People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall" . 4 ways our thoughts trick us Our intuitions are often wrong - much like the way our eyes are tricked by optical illusions. Even if we know the trick, our eyes still get tricked by the illusion. We judge things in relative terms rather than absolute. Bizarrely, many people would prefer a lower pay...

We live in one of the richest countries but even the 'rich' feel poor. That's what Richard Denniss calls affluenza. Here are some of my highlights from his book. "Just as a fish can't taste the water it swims in" , it is hard for us to notice how weird our culture has become. "We have built a culture where buying things is increasingly unrelated to using things." Each year we "throw away mountains of perfectly edible food, perfectly wearable clothes and fitness equipment that has never been used." Advertising is a big infector He points out that advertising's aim is to make us feel insecure. While there are truth-in-advertising laws, they don't stop the big lie that "a new car, a new soft drink or a new credit card will make you relaxed, popular or sexy." We cure it by changing culture Culture decides the desirable options. This is why we pay through the nose ($14 billion in the USA in 2015) for bottled water (whic...

Australian singer Guy Sebastian has a new song out and it got me thinking. It's clearly an ode to a friend whose "book ran out of pages" . Now he wishes he could have said "out of all the moments in my life the ones I got to share with you were probably my favourite." In a later verse he puts his finger on the problem. "We fill up all our days with workin' ... just to make ends meet. Too busy to call, we'll catch up next week. And then it gets to next week and we say maybe next week..." . Obviously this isn't good (as the singer now realises). We don't have that many weeks All this talk of pages and weeks reminds me of Tim Urban's Your Life in Weeks . Tim graphically represents each week in our life with a box. 52 boxes across and 90 boxes down. Shockingly, this grid of our life fits easily on a page. In the follow-up post The Tail End he did the maths of how many times he'll get to do the things he loves. He includes...

The FIRE concept (Financial Independence Retire Early) seems to be a new one to many people. There's a brand new documentary about it: Playing with FIRE by Scott Reickens. It's his family's journey into the FIRE movement. Their attempt to buck the consumer culture and bring forward financial freedom. Check out the trailer . I was stunned that 69% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings - and that one-third have no savings at all. It seems US advertisers have milked Americans for every last dollar they earn. Who is Scott? If you want to know more about the leadup to how Scott Rieckens got into this you may want to check out this episode of the Choose FI podcast . His earlier life Scott talks about "lifestyle creep" - moving to bigger places and buying stuff just to fill the space. He was paying $2850/mth for rent (that's $34,200 a year). On top of that he paid a nanny to watch his kid (which he'd prefer to do himself) and realising that...

The inventor of paint-by-number, Larry Robbins, recently passed away . Paint-by-number kits come with a numbered picture and a series of small paints, each with the corresponding number on it. We simply paints all the "1" areas with paint number 1. The "2" areas with paint 2, etc. It meant that anybody, regardless of talent, could create their own artwork. All we had to do was follow instructions. The only downside is that after all that painting, nothing new or creative is ever painted - except by mistake. The whole idea is that if 50,000 people buy the kit, there will be 50,000 almost-identical paintings. Paint-by-number life It struck me recently just how much of our lives is like a paint by number. We think we're painting our own masterpiece but often we're just filling in the colours. We're taking the standard options and so a lot of our lives look very similar. We work similar hours, buy similar houses, have a similar number of kids, do...

Carl was chasing his dream of becoming a millionaire. He had severe anxiety and stress. His book, Less-Stress Lifestyle is his recipe for reducing stress. A lot his answers are about having less. Less Clutter Less Stress "The things we own end up owning us." Carl advises us to "start getting wise about the stuff you own and future purchases" . For instance he scaled down his wardrobe to only the items he regularly wears - and now only buys quality items that he wears often. He saves money by not buying things he'd rarely or never wear. "Clutter prevents focus" he says, and focus is one of his keys to having less stress. As well as the home and office, he say it's important to declutter the brain. Writing his problems down clears them from his mind. Then his brain can focus on dealing with each problem (one at a time) rather than getting anxious and stressed about them. Less TV Less anxiety "One of the biggest challenges we face to...