A Dad’s Guide to Spare Time: Time Management Tips To Free You Up to Do the Things You Love!: A Dad's Guide

By Anthony Kim

What every dad ought to know about time management is now packed into this essential guide to finding spare time to do the things you love.

Every father has the same challenges in finding spare time in his life:
• "There's just not enough hours in the day to get everything done!"
• "I really want to be an involved dad for my kids, but work keeps getting in the way…"
• "I can't find the spare time to spend with my wife, my kids, my passions… where did my time go??"

A Dad's Guide to Spare Time is one of the most important resources you need to find acres of spare time in your life. Go beyond merely treading water in your daily routines—learn to thrive with an abundance of spare time!

This guide goes over the critical elements of finding spare time in your life. This book tackles time management in a different way than others—there are no stopwatches or to-the-minute ninja scheduling techniques here.

Rather, this book has time-tested activities, habits, and life hacks that naturally throw off spare time as you deploy them. These include:
• How to STOP time-wasting activities to gain back a ton of time every day.
• Optimize elements of your life to create slivers of spare time that together add up to a lot.
• 8 Spare Time Habits that automatically generate your free time.
• Learning how to re-engineer your work life to fill up your bank with spare time.

Finally, this guide goes even further and outlines the very best way to use your abundance of spare time:
• How to build an amazing life.
• Develop a healthy body, mind and spirit.
• Earn more money, respect, and freedom.
• Create your legacy project to satisfy your deepest inner needs as a human being.
• Form strong, emotional connections with your family.

Time is the most precious resource that we have. Time is the primordial fuel of our very existence. Once it's gone, it is truly gone.

You need spare time to do anything in life—this book exists to show you how to get it.

A Dad's Guide to Spare Time is one of the most valuable investments you, a father, can make. This guide teaches you how to capture as much spare time as you can in order to build the life you've always imagined for yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony Kim
• Release date: Feb 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781393480921

Book preview

Part 1:

Stop wasting time!

The first major gain that you can make in gaining back your spare time is to stop time-wasters and being frazzled. It’s your time and it’s your life—let’s start putting some wins in the win column!

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).

- Mark Twain

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

- Steve Jobs

Stop feeling obligated

Most chronic sacrifices originate from a misplaced feeling of obligation.

Is there a commercially-sanctioned holiday that guilts you into finding a gift for your special someone? Have to stay at the office later than the boss every day to get that elusive promotion? Need to hang out with that couple that you do not really like, but they keep persistently asking you out to dinner?

Most of these obligations are not truly important to you, and you know in your heart which ones those are. Stop feeling obligated to do things that are not going to serve you. By serving you, I mean things that will not help you get more love, more money, more happiness, and more of what you actually want in life.

Now obviously I am not telling you to stop living up to your true responsibilities in life and at work. Those are important. You need to keep up your self-care, the maintenance of your home, and your loving presence within your family, because these things are very good for you.

So how do you distinguish between false obligations and true responsibilities?

It is a simple litmus test. You want to ask yourself:

Will this make me a more loving and lovable person?

Will this make me more money so that I can have the freedom to do more of the things that I want?

Will this make me and my family happier?

Will this bring be closer towards one of my lifelong goals?

If the answer is yes to any of these, then you have a true responsibility. Parsing out things that are true responsibilities is a practice that is lifelong. You get better at it with age and maturity.

Here are some examples in my own life of both false obligations and true responsibilities:

False obligations:

Taking on way too much at work to increase my busyness.

Accepting every single invitation for a meeting if it does not help my cause.

Trying to honor every commercially-driven holiday by purchasing crap I do not need for people who do not want it and spending time that I do not have.

True responsibilities:

Spending time with my wife and daughter.

Going to work each day as a radiation oncology physicist.

Mowing my lawn to keep my property tidy.

Writing books for dads.

Working on my self-publishing business.

Separating out false obligations and true responsibilities is a tricky, but it is a necessary ongoing task that you must do to protect your spare time.

First things first: Stop!

The reason you probably picked up this book is because you realized that you are running on a hamster wheel. Modern day life is exhausting . There is just... so much stuff that must get done. The kids’ parties, the chores, the daily dry cleaning run...

The first thing to do then, is to STOP all this running around, wasting time, and being frazzled. Then we can get down to the business of creating our spare time and figuring out valuable ways to spend it.

Before we get down to stopping, let us take a close look as to what the actual problems are.

Problem #1: Chronic sacrifices

At some point, something’s gotta give, and that something is usually a chronic sacrifice. Sacrifice sleep. Sacrifice time with the family. Sacrifice romance with your wife. Sacrifice a goat on a mountain to appease the mercurial gods.

In my life, once something starts becoming a chronic sacrifice, I know I have already lost. Chronic sacrifices (as opposed to acute sacrifices) are things that you give up constantly simply to keep the raft afloat, with no end in sight.

Every man should strive to avoid chronic sacrifices that take time and energy away from the things and people that he loves. A lot of it comes down to attitude: for instance, it should never feel like a sacrifice to spend time with your kids—time with them should be joyfully given. But a lot of it is also avoiding tasks and life situations that gives you that gnawing feeling of chronic sacrifice eating away at your man soul.

Acute sacrifices on the other hand, can potentially be very good things: a student studies for a few years to become a doctor, a mother-to-be goes through nine months of pregnancy in order to experience the joy of having a baby, and a man writes a book about his experiences and it becomes a bestseller. These types of acute sacrifices can bring happiness, balance, and a sense of accomplishment to your life. These good sacrifices are things to strive for.

So, back to the nasty chronic sacrifices. I know lots of people who are, day after day, complaining about what they need to give up in order to have X.

I had to give up my freedom to have kids.

I sacrifice my pride and tolerate my stupid boss.

All my spare time is blown because my wife makes me do all the chores in the house.

Again, worth repeating: once you start thinking like this, then you have already lost. Chronic sacrifices eat into the time that you would prefer to spend on the things that you love, every day of your life. Worse, these kinds of sacrifices eat into your spirit and diminish you day by day.

So, how do we eliminate the parasitic chronic sacrifices that kill our soul, sovereignty, and spare time on the altar of modern life? In one word:

STOP!

Problem #2: Time-wasters.

We all have actions that we perform every day that we know are time-wasters, but we still do these to get through each day. Checking social media at the start of the day. Crashing on the couch to watch TV at the end of the day.

Although these activities seem like ways to use spare time, they actually are time-wasters that do not add to your life. Time-wasters need to be ejected from your life in order to proceed with our mission to free up your spare time.

People do all sorts of dumb things to waste colossal amounts of time. There’s this electronics store close by my house where I occasionally see long lines down the block to get the newest iPhone or video game—people wait for six hours just to get a gadget a little bit earlier than everyone else. When the first McDonald’s opened in Russia on January 31, 1990, the line-ups to get a Big Mac wrapped around entire city blocks. When In-and-Out burger opened a pop-up store in my home town of Toronto, people waited hours for a single burger. These people don’t value their time at all. If you told people lining up for five hours for a freaking burger that they only had 24 hours to live, do you think they would spend another second in line? What about if they had 24 days left to live? 24 years? Time is valuable because it is a finite, non-renewable resource. Burning it on time-wasters is an utter