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_{Exploring the bottleneck, regret, and others’ items}

Happy Thursday! Thanks for reading Intentional Dollar — where we look at old money ideas through a new perspective.

What’s inside?

• One tool to experiment with

• Two quotes from others

• Three questions to dig deeper

• Four lines of poetry for the point

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.

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_{One tool to experiment with:}

The Bottleneck

When you’re manufacturing a product, your process can only move at the speed of your bottleneck.

In this light, the identification of a bottleneck is crucial. Once spotted we begin the work of improving the constraint or removing constraining forces.

Bottlenecks and money? The connection here might appear invisible to you.

But say you always feel money stressed, like you never quite have the time to make positive money changes.

Time is your bottleneck, or at least it takes that title from the surface. This is the case because you’re essentially saying, “If I had more time, my money would be great.”

But is this true?

Let’s assume it is. How much time, then, do you actually need to allocate to money? An hour per week? Two hours? More?

With your number in mind, let’s look to your calendar. Is it true that you don’t have this amount of needed time each week or month?

If so, where’s your time going? It’s not possible to tack an extra hour to the day. And it’s not productive to rob the sleep bank of an hour to do a little more. So with these constraints in mind, we have to look at the things that take the time. We have to become ruthlessly efficient at doing them.

We create a jam when trying to stuff all of our tasks and “priorities” down the bottle. By default, a select number of activities fit into the day. Ignoring sleep, you can do 48 30- minute tasks, 24 hour-long tasks, 12 two- hour tasks, and so on. The reality is that most of us have enough fluff in the day that we shouldn’t have to stop doing our existing priorities to engage more with money.

That’s the good news. The bad news is we need to be better stewards of our time and reprioritize our lists. I’m willing to bet that many of us have a laundry list of priorities. But there’s a dark side to the priorities list. With a crew of priorities, we can’t focus on the one priority. And of course, this cascades into diffusion of our time and energy, which scatters our minds and jams our bottleneck.

We spent time looking at time as a bottleneck, but the other common money bottleneck is knowledge.

We have the time to sit down and focus on money, but we lack the know-how of where to start and what to do. You aren’t required to be a professional investor, or financial guru.

It’s a little like taking care of your teeth. You have a basic responsibility to brush and floss. But you still see the dentist for exams and cleanings. Take care of the essential and learn how to do them proficiently. Track your spending, save and invest consistently, avoid debt, spend less than you earn. Those are the core tenants. The rest is valuable, yet meaningless, if you don’t master the essential.

What’s your bottleneck?

_{Two quotes on the regret:}

Regret will be waiting for a future reflective day, but you may erase it now, if you do the things today.

_{Three questions on others’ items:}

1. What sacrifices has that person made to get the things they have?

2. Would I be willing to accept everything that person does to get what they have?

3. Looking through those things, what’s missing? Is that the life I want?

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:}

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Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.