Time Management as a discipline.

One idea which I'm hatching is that time management is no different from portfolio management. We all have a fixed 24 hours a day but a key challenge is to divide it between a number of portfolios.

a) Work portfolio - For earned income.
b) Investment portfolio - to plan for future income.
c) Sleep - For health reasons.
d) Family and friends - for personal well-being.

An essence of lifestyle design to do more with less time. i.e. Generate income, shrink (a) and (b) to expand (d). There should exist a series of steps to meet this objective in such a way as to make time management a discipline.

a) Virtual assistants can be hired to run your lives.
b) You can adopt a organizational framework like GTD to make yourself more productive.
c) You can scale down your work by working part time or at least remove transport requirements by telecommuting.
d) Time can be recycled. I use transport to read and prepare for my certification exams.
e) Time spent doing hobbies can be enriched with economic resources toward more enriching activities. For example, I can read to daughter but I can also bring her to a book making workshop when she's able to.

What currently missing in my model is something analogous to my dividend investing model. Where more time spent today means much less time to be spent tomorrow. In IT management, I always tell the new administrator to consider working overtime to script some common service requests so that he can reduce the time spent performing service requests.

There has to be a consistent way to measure and manage how time spent today results in less time spent tomorrow. This, potentially, is better than compound interest.

Of course, we need to be mindful of some solutions offered at the extreme ends of time management, where you destroy your ability to earn wealth by dropping out of work entirely.

Many people take on silly projects and initiatives of their own and permanently impair their ability to be useful to society. My instincts tell me that this half-assed bohemian faux entrepreneurship class will become more prevalent as people lose faith in capitalism and bite back at society one day in the form of increased tax burdens for future generations.