Exploring the clock, updating views, and reviews

Welcome to the Intentional Dollar weekly newsletter — great work taking this small step to move your money forward. I’m Logan, a Certified Financial Planner™, and I’m excited you’re here!

What’s inside?

• One tool to experiment with

• Two quotes from others

• Three questions to dig deeper

• Four lines of poetry for the point

_{One tool to experiment with:}

The Clock:

When’s the last time you sat and watched the minutes on a clock go by? 

At work, waiting for 5:00 to roll around? In school, waiting for the final bell to ring? Daily, leading up to meeting after meeting? 

We adept clock-watchers have an interesting relationship with time, and it’s usually a function of waiting for something to occur. We wait for our 16th birthday so we can drive. We wait for the clock to strike a time and release us from our work. We wait for our checks to hit our bank accounts, stamping the value of a period of hard work. 

But there’s another way to look at time. Rather than seeing time as something we pass, or lose, to get something, we can switch our relationship with time to see it as a multiplier.

We all pay time to get something. You pay 8-9 hours of time to get a check. If you workout, you pay 60 minutes of time for health. Read, pay time for knowledge. Every action we partake in has a time cost. We don’t often see it this way. 

Assuming we are all born with a fixed number of time, the balance of this time account depletes each second that passes. The seconds don’t seem to matter because the pool is enormous, but eventually there will only be one second left — it’s the nature of life. We can’t freeze time, and we can’t add time (ignoring longevity boosts from lifestyle changes). 

So it’s why we say time either helps us or hurts us. Time amplifies action, so your good actions will benefit from time, your bad actions will erode with time. Time is not just this thing that passes by; it’s a force multiplier for how you live your life. 

Time is like a set of reps. Each second, minute, hour, day is a rep that moves you in a direction. At some point we have to see that a second matters. Let’s extract this point from the state change a piece of ice goes through during minute temperature changes: at 20 degrees, you have solid ice. Increase the temperature by one more degree, a 5% increase, you still have ice. Do this 10 more times and nothing has happened to the external structure of the piece of ice. You might dismiss the significance of a degree change. But, on the next incremental degree increase, the ice melts.

The same is true with our time. We can’t see the internal structure and changes from our piles of seconds, but at some point the cumulative effect of stacking seconds makes something meaningful.

One second might not matter, but one minute is 60 seconds. One minute might not matter, but one hour is 60 minutes. One hour might not matter, but one day is 24 hours. One day might not matter, but one week is seven days. One week might not matter but one year is 52 weeks — your seconds count.

Don’t delay saving until next year. Don’t wait for your income to increase so you can finally save. You can’t flip the hour glass over, and you can’t pluck the pieces of sand back through the bottleneck; that time is gone. When you see the importance of a single second, you won’t squander the multiplicative effect it carries. 

The clock is always ticking.

_{Two quotes on updating views:}

Don’t carry around the unnecessary weight of a negative belief anchor.

_{Three questions on reviews:}

1. What if I implemented a daily or weekly review?

2. What problems might often pop up on my systematic review — what can I do to fix these?

3. How might this review process facilitate intentional money moves?

Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.

_{Four lines of poetry for the point:}

Contact Me:

Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]