I tend to be very hard on myself if I waste time during the day.

If I decide to ride my motorcycle to a destination far away but realise it would have been much easier and more productive if I took a taxi and completed some tasks on my laptop during the commute, I might be a bit annoyed at myself for making this decision.

When you control your own time and you are not an employee of a company— it requires the implementation of disciplined mindfulness, cost-benefit analysis, experimentation and implementing self-imposed rules to structure your day and ensure you are making progress.

You will find yourself becoming hyper-aware of how you spend your time, and of time spent that you may be wasting.

Even if you have the financial means to spend your days however you feel, which could be living every day as a leisure day— chances are, you are going to want to feel productive in some way and have some kind of project you want to work on.

You may have heard this rhetoric from successful entrepreneurs that have built wealth— they get very bored of sitting on a beach and sipping cocktails after about three weeks.

Speaking as a man, I understand that we are generally viewed as useless and relatively disposable unless we are actively producing something for society. Whether it be building things by contributing labour or providing goods and services.

This reality is perfectly fine, males are hard-wired to produce and it is why skyscrapers exist, but perhaps this concept is not broadly understood or accepted.

Therefore, it is essential to implement a vision for your life, even if you are retired and financially self-sufficient.

You need purpose in your life. With that comes the need to control your day in a way thats moves you toward your vision— whatever that may be.

The Balance Of Leisure And Work

Maintaining an optimal balance of leisure and work seems to be an eternal battle.

As a free person with agency who controls your own time, you will be constantly analysing and adjusting how you spend the hours of your day.

You need both meaningful rest and you need to combat entropy by moving forward on a project or task that will get you closer to achieving your entrepreneurial or creative goals.

How you balance these two things will determine your level of contentment and progress.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember as you progress through your day and journey of self-actualisation is to be aware of your being, character and virtue.

Develop a personal code of ethics, distinguish between what is right and wrong and as you progress through your day you will have a higher chance on having a positive effect on the people you encounter.

So how do you go about your day?

You can check out the book Daily Rituals to get an idea of how famously productive artists went about their day.

You need to incorporate work and rest throughout your day. How and when you do that will be different for everyone.

Meaningful rest is where your mind can enter the default mode network and ideas have the ability to manifest.

Your daily work hours will be where you turn these ideas into reality. Usually via building projects and completing mechanical or creative tasks.

If you are still an employee of a business, it is helpful to be mindful of this psychological transition you will have to make when you eventually become a master of your own time.

If you miss the ‘busyness’ of being an employee you will need to channel that energy into creating a lifestyle and daily routine that will serve a new vision for your life and society.

A vision that ideally you create for yourself— rather than one that has been influenced by external forces and expectations.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being an employee with a specialised skill set. You just have to realise that mainstream educational and governmental institutions want you to be this way.

You will increase your options in life if you pursue the path of a renaissance man or woman and develop broad knowledge and skills.

As you progress through your day, be conscious of how you dress and how you want to present yourself. Show respect to the people around you— aspire to be present and elegant in discourse and movement.

Structure And Elements

Work hours can include learning, building and creating.

Think of learning as acquiring the information needed to complete mechanical tasks for a project (building), and to fuel the act of creativity (writing, composing music, creating visual art, developing products, design).

You can segment these three elements into work blocks and you can track your time spent working on each if it helps.

If you need to write to fulfil your entrepreneurial goals, try allocating a certain amount of time in the morning or afternoon dedicated solely to the action of writing.

Prepare your favourite coffee, get comfortable and orient your life logistically so that it removes friction from being able to write freely and creatively.

Write at home, a cafe or a co-working space but give yourself enough time to make progress.

Set aside time during the day to complete mechanical tasks such as building a business website for a specific project or administrative tasks.

A focussed learning block can include tasks such as completing a course or reading specific material that will help you move toward a goal.

If you need a break during your work day and if you suffer from falling into social media doom-scrolling black holes— try going for a walk.

Before going to sleep at night, you can write a journal entry in a physical notebook to analyse how you spend your time during the day and how you could improve it the next day.

Outline the tasks that you want to complete the following day.

This will help organise thoughts in your brain and allow it to discover solutions to problems during your sleep, thereby better preparing you for the next day.

Somehow this process just works and I have experienced immense benefit from it.

When you work toward a goal, you will be feel disappointment with yourself and enter a malaise if you veer off course.

Recognise this as psychological entropy doing its thing. Take the time to re-align and re-focus with purposeful rest.

The Art Of Rest

You only have so much energy during your day.

Once you have completed your work tasks for the day, allow yourself to rest and replenish your creative energy.

Attempt to fill the remainder of your day with aligned restful activities.

This could be listening to an album of music, consuming interesting content, reading a book, enjoying a nice meal, playing tennis, enjoying a nice alcoholic drink, enjoying a cigar with friends or going for a walk.

Whatever floats your boat.

Some of your restful activities should allow your mind to enter the default mode network. A large scale brain network— active when one is not focused on the outside world.

In this state your brain is at wakeful rest and you can enter a state of contemplation and idea generation.

Sleep well and hopefully you will wake up excited and motivated to experience the day ahead.

Embrace

If you have the opportunity to live an international lifestyle and control your day, you can choose to learn, build and create.

You can direct energy into becoming a renaissance man or woman— a man that knows a lot about many things and can also do many things, has a broad range of experiences and has cultivated a moral basis for their life.

You will need to embrace constant experimentation and experiencing failure if you decide to adopt this lifestyle.

But hey, if you are an older person that is satisfied with your life and achievements, why not just live every day as leisure day.

The choice is yours and that is the beauty of it.

-Shernon

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Cover photograph by Shernon Hague | Kyoto, Japan 2016 | 35mm film