Asher Sisneros

In this business essay, I have to write 250 words on three time allocation changes that would (positively) affect me the most.

I’ve already written an article about unnecessary parts of my schedule. You could regard that article as a prelude to this one. Both articles are inspired by the book, Living The 80/20 Way, by Richard Koch. Koch starts the book off by establishing both what the 80/20 principle is, and true it is. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the principle states that 20 percent of action taken accounts for 80 percent of the results. Throughout the book, Koch demonstrates how beautiful this law of nature is, and how everyone can benefit from finding their biggest strengths (the 20 percent) and leaning into them. In principle, everyone agrees that it all sounds great, but even people who know the rule is true barely take it into practice. That’s why Gary North recommends listing 3 bad habits you could remove from your daily life, and supplementing it with three positive habits. That is exactly what I’ll be doing in this article.

Some of the three biggest for me are probably YouTube, spending too much time chatting on email or the RPC forum, and video games. The culmination of all of these destructive habits comes with an overdose of screen time. The screen was the focus of my last business article. I spent so much time on it because of how dangerous it can be. Americans spend on average a whopping 7 hours a day on their screens, the bulk of which is spent on social media or watching TV.¹ By any standard that’s a lot. Screen time overall consisting of video games, social media, TV, movies, etc. Most of these things can be cut down tremendously. Someone may argue, “Why? Because, after all, if you’ve had a stressful day at work, it’s only fair you should be at liberty to enjoy your free time.” And I agree with that argument. The problem is when you spend seven hours playing video games, scrolling social media, or watching TV. Remember, what’s bad is screen time overdose, not screen time period. Spending over one third of your day “relaxing” constitutes an overdose. Furthermore, too much exposure to the screen can lead to temporary loss of analytical thinking, i.e. it makes you dumber.²

The question then becomes, what’s the solution? How can that time be better spent? Well, the beautiful thing is in that amount of time you just about learn anything. If you wanted to learn a new language, you can do that. Learn an instrument? That too. How about a skill, like speed reading or typing quickly? Maybe something less practical, like juggling? You can learn all the above. With just one hour a day, you can learn just about anything. It just requires that small step of allocating time to what’s truly important.

¹Screen time statistic: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-stats.

²https://www.salon.com/2019/07/23/it-turns-out-staring-at-your-phone-might-really-be-making-you-less-intelligent/