9th Priority MONEY

6% of my energy/focus/time or 7 hours/week or an hour/day is devoted to correspondence, business, bills, managing investments, taxes and financial health. I do not enjoy this part of the day, at all – except for getting it done. I basically hate money and detest spending time with people who chase money, but I gotta keep the lights on and pay my bills. I wish I could spend zero time to this chore … but it has to be taken care of, or else …

We might spend a few moments thinking about how this priority supports others.

1) MINDSET … 24% of my waking energy/focus/time or 27 hours/week, 12 on Sunday and 2 1/2 hours of every other day is allocated to keeping the Sabbath holy, keeping holy hour holy upon waking, attending Mass, bible study, journaling and spiritual health. Sharpening the axe or MINDSET is easily my favorite part of life! I sort of have to try not to spend all of my time on my highest priority because if I neglect the other areas, they have ways of becoming urgent and demanding … but a spiritual MINDSET is everything.

2) MEETING … 13% of my energy/focus/time or 14 hours/week, 2 hrs/day, goes to meeting new friends and finding new colleagues, new interactions/outreach through philanthropic ventures and open source, community devotions, sustaining old friendships, messaging/commenting, and everything of a exploratory social nature that drives my emotional health

3) MACHINES … 11% of my energy/focus/time or 12 hours/week or 2 hours/weekday goes to working on things like AI, neural networks, deep learning development, and cognitive health. To a large degree, BigWhy is entirely about cognitive health … but learning these new things is also the supporting basis of meeting new friends OR engaging in meaningful spiritual dialogue.

4) MOBILITY … 8% of my energy/focus/time or 9 hours/week or 90 minutes/weekday goes to staying active, gardening, landscaping, different forms of exercise but ensuring that I get at least 30 minutes of Zone 2 exercise to sustain better levels of VO2max. Diet for me is mostly about what I remove, but I need to work at getting most of emotional support from things like martial arts solo drills, weight lifting, mobility drills to maintain my physical health, so that I can have a decent level of cognitive, emotional, spiritual health.

5) MELONCAVE … 8% of my energy/focus/time or 9 hours/day or an 90 minutes/weekday is stopping the bad habits of being myself, renunciation of stupidity as well as removing crutches and little bad habits … starting with example of fasting challenges, eg Lent and not just other parts of a fast-mimicking lifestyles but more time in prayer/contemplation rather than eating, optimizing biochemistry by cutting out the crap … this but avoids most additives and supplements … being sure to get the just right amount of sunlight, and all kinds of “cave in the melon” of the demons stuff about renunciation of comfort, laziness and gluttony.

6) MATRICULATION [and measuring]… 8% of my energy/focus/time or 9 hours/week or an 90 minutes/day is allocated to autodidactic learning, which means studying completely new topics, reading pre-print papers and gathering new business/tech intelligence. If I don’t spend the time matriculating and measuring my success in learning something [by making something work, passing a certification exam or some other measurement traceable to a verifiable standard] then all kinds of things fall apart, eg I can’t meet new people; I can’t maintain my stuff, I can’t work on AI/machines to make my life easier.

7) MINDFULNESS … 8% of my energy/focus/time or 9 hours/week goes or 90 minutes/day to improving my mindfulness, coherence, clarity and cognitive awareness [of my cognitive awareness] to ensure that I stay on the path to becoming the kind of person that I want to be … MINDFULNESS is primarily about meditative prayer walks and a range of meditation and breathwork exercises in my Christiaan Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction repertoire.

8) MOMENTUM … 6% of my energy/focus/time or 7 hours/week or an hour/day goes to maintaining momentum and that comes through sleep hygiene and everything necessary to ensure good rest. This was not always obvious, ie I used to be one of those “I sleep when I’m dead” kind of guys, but good sleep is about allowing the subconscious brain to rest and unravel all of the knots, paradoxes and puzzles. Getting good sleep for me depends upon having my house in order so that I can just sleep; doing this is just simply little average things like 5S activities, putting my tools and books and stuff in order, puttering in my kitchen or garage, various housekeeping chores and everything else that I need do beforehand to put my life in order to set the stage for optimizing my sleep during the 56 hrs/week I spend sleeping.

10) MAINTENANCE … About 8% of my energy/focus/time or 9 hours/week … 1 per weekday and 3 on Sunday, since Sunday is my “wrap my head around the bs and sort through the stuff causing chaos day” … you could also say that this is my MISCELLANEOUS JUNK box to collect everything that doesn’t fit into the other priorities … MAINTENANCE is for the stuff that I didn’t really plan or think about before, but things have a way of bubbling up – so I need to acknowledge that some of my time is just going to need to go to uncategorized miscellaneous stuff to sort through and address … it’s not all bad, many more unexpected GREAT things pop up than negative ones … but the surprises that have to be planned/timeblocked and miscellaneous things that haven’t yet forced me to re-categorize my 9 priorities. These surprises can be ignored if they are not important – but if they actually are important, they will be urgent [and maybe BAD] when they arise again … the time lost to these things is significant enough to demand it’s own miscellaneous class, but they just don’t neatly really fit under the other headings.