Dear Financial Times. I love you, but I’m leaving you…
It had been good for a while. Great even. Especially with the weekend editions. Sometimes, it even felt ‘productive’. But then something happened. It’s not you. It’s me. I’m no longer satisfied and I’m not entirely sure why.
I knew something was up when I got this crawling sensation up my back and over my shoulders. Telling me I’m doing something wrong.
It was telling me I was wasting time.
I’m in my late 30s, with a busy finance job and two young kids to raise. Time wasted actually means something now. It means a lost chance to exercise, spend time reading something that matters, or having half and hour to spend having a meaningful conversation with my wife.
So when I feels like I’m wasting time I take it seriously.
The quick answer, I discovered, is to kill the things I love (but which probably don’t add any value to my life).
But what do you kill?
About a year ago I recall sitting in at my desk taking a quick break from the due diligence work. I was checking the the latest updates on Financial Times website. They update at least three times a day. It’s well written and also about as politically balanced writing as you could find. After reviewing it I would go back to my busy day job.
And then it clicked. I was addicted. I couldn’t stop checking this website. I had been doing this for three years. It was a habit. It was comforting.
If I was addicted then the answer was obvious. Chalking up checking the FT at least four times during work was easily costing me an hour a day. Over a week that’s a hell of a lot. Ouch.
I wrote a note to the subscription team at the FT and explained my reasons for leaving their esteemed publication. And I quit.
The initial feeling was = what’s going on in the world? Finance is my career. It’s my job to know where interest rates are. I’m meant to be able to recount the latest opinion from the Fed Chair and correlate this to current swap rate prices.
This was the mild panic stage. It comes when you have let go. And then of course what followed was: a phase of calm.
And then after a few more days I noticed that I was no less happy than I was before. Plus, I now had some extra time on my hands = perhaps, if I were really wild, I could even use it for something meaningful.
What’s in a formula?
And so I developed a formula I would apply any time I clocked a habit that was consuming time:
- Note some daily, yet addictive behaviour (buying coffee on the way to work, a glass of wine before bed, social media, Netflix, etc)
- Kill said habit for a week or two
- Decide if it makes me any less happy not having this in my life
I’ve concluded that:
- Comfort habits are an addiction
- Because we love comfort we slip into habits without really ‘deciding’ to
- Slipping into habits is not the same as testing them and concisely deciding to make them part of everyday life
- So far every comfort habit I’ve killed has not been resurrected (sorry, New Yorker and Monocle)
- Happiness is therefore not linked to creature comforts
- Killing time consuming comfort habits creates time and headspace to do things I actually care about
I’m now quite addicted to killing comfort whenever I notice I slipped into another habit. Something I may have to keep a check on too.
Comfort, I now understand, is really meant to be a reward for doing something hard / challenging / all consuming, beforehand.
Two final thoughts… (and future posts)
Perhaps our current pursuit of comfort is actually the thing that is making us big, fat and unhappy. As things get easier we keep feeling worse. I’m sure they covered that in the first Matrix film. But that’s another story.
Killing time consuming habits that are really just wasting my time created a lot of extra pockets of time. What I’ve begun filling them with is personal challenges. That’s probably best saved for another post…
