Time Allocation to Increase Self-Reliance

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Self-reliant individuals must divide their time effectively to become efficient producers. This is especially true of those of us, myself included, who have jobs that tax a great deal of our time. This necessary but futile (feudal) taxing of my time makes it more necessary that I organize my time outside employment efficiently. If I am going to get out of the need for employment to another, then I will have produce the alternative income source during my free time.

So another way of looking at productivity is how we portion our time. All work & no play makes Jack a dull boy. The same is true when we spend too much time on “research” or "learning". We may spend too much time in the company of others. The fact is we need all three. We need to produce, but we have to have down-time & learning time as well as time for collaboration. I for one spend too much time reading books & studying on the Internet. I believe that I could be happy being a monk in the Middle Ages reading & studying throughout the day, except that I’d probably get tired of the available reading material. When we have to divide our time between employment that isn’t production for ourselves & our free time that we work to enjoy, we have to plan our free time to maximize our needs. This taxing of our time to have income is why we remain dependent. Knowing how hard we work at our jobs to maintain them (don’t let me get started on the bureaucratic nightmare that nearly every job, public or private, demands), we can’t be blamed for spending our free time on pleasures. That is exactly why we should re-evaluate our ‘pleasures’. What is a pleasure? Is it really watching media on our television or on our computer? Is it really drinking & watching the seasonal sporting events? Is pleasure going out to restaurants, bars or clubs? It might be. I’m certainly not going to be the judge or jury on what we should value as pleasure. However I think we have to re-evaluate how we perceive the value of pleasure. The modern society has made life very easy for most people living in the so-called First World. Even the majority of the poor in the United States have access to food & shelter most of the time. What I don’t think we have is the necessary attitude to appreciate what we have. What do I mean by that? Well I think that we find pleasure in being numb on various levels. Pleasure for many of us means sitting and being entertained in one form or another. We don’t find pleasure in activities that might require effort. Oh we do sometimes. We take on projects around the house or keep our clothes, rooms, & kitchen clean. It’s always better to come home to a clean home than a cluttered mess. I know that there are various activities that people do to get out and enjoy their neighborhoods & cities, & some of these activities are valuable to the individuals as social & collaborate activities. Personally, because I won’t speak for anyone else, I don’t spend enough time producing when I’m not producing for my job. I’m trying to change that, & in my last post, I spoke about what production should mean outside employment. Here I want to speak about time apportionment. Namely that we need to divide our free time in ways that allow us to be more productive but still find the pleasure & downtime necessary to feel rested enough to go back to the grind the next day or next week. This division of time should produce some of the areas that I discussed last week. I see the division of time as being divided into three areas: research/learning; creation/production; & collaboration/celebration.

Learning & research are a necessary part of life. The teaching profession attempts more than anything else to develop our students into lifetime learners. We should all aspire to that goal. Autodidacts have it much easier with the Internet. We have so much information & knowledge available to us. This is why I call this sight The 21st Commons. The 21st Century Commons provides a place where we can learn & grow together through shared information & ideas. The Internet is making it more & more clear that sharing ideas, rather than copyrighting & occulting, them will not only benefit us more as fully self-reliant individuals but the hoarding of information for profit will continue to be more & more difficult to perpetrate. We need to spend time daily imbibing deeply in this river of knowledge & human possibility, this marketplace of ideas. We will benefit from joining in the commons of mankind & by contributing to it; we will return the benefit for others. Before I’m described as a ‘socialist, communistic freeloader", I want to point out that I mentioned benefiting & producing. I’m not saying that we should just give away everything we make & live on the benevolence of the Internet. First of all, good luck with that. Second, I’m promoting the ideas of self-reliance & cooperation, not some collectivist utopia. Self-reliance & cooperation aren’t an ideology that can be forced onto the masses. They are voluntary behaviors of free, independent individuals. Mostly though, we should enjoy the time we spend learning & researching. The quaffs of information & wisdom that we gulp down should give us some of the pleasure that will sustain us during the employment periods until we can become self-reliant.

The next third of our time should be spent producing. I’ve already discussed ways to be productive, but we have to recognize that our time away from the employment must be productive for a portion of the time. Why do I separate production from research & learning? Isn’t that a productive activity? No. It may lead to productivity, & it is a valuable use of our time, but it doesn’t produce tangible goods. I’m talking about tangible production here. This production should be focused around making ourselves more self-reliant. The ultimate goal of this production is to produce something that can sustain our lives without continuing to go to the daily grind. So while it may be some of the more basic production of clothing, food, & shelter, it should eventually be about producing our passions. This is the production that I’m doing here. I don’t know right now where or how my writing will lead to producing an income stream that will allow me to be more independent but this productivity aims for that target. I’m also producing a better domicile & hopefully a functioning, if limited garden. I have plans as big as Alaska for my tiny backyard, but I’m made realistic by my spouse about what I can accomplish with the free time that I have (mostly by the Honey Dew List & an 1/8th of an acre lot). Again as we produce what will make us more self-reliant, we have to take pleasure in these gains. I know that I get great pleasure from watching my garden & home bloom into my big as Alaska dreams.The ultimate goal of our productive time must be to become completely self-reliant & capable of walking away from the feudal employment that continues to swallow more & more of our life. Once we can be truly self-reliant, this division of time becomes even easier to accomplish & more fruitful for ourselves & our loved ones.

The final third of our time should be in collaboration & celebration with others. Collaborate by discussing what we’ve learned today during our learning time with our spouse & friends. Hear what they’ve accomplished, & if they can’t provide any ideas outside of their work, challenge them to do so. Most importantly, celebrate the time with those you care about. This is the third that I probably don’t practice as fully as the other two. In fact if I tallied my time, I‘d probably find that I spend way too much time researching & reading. Yet a large part of learning & retaining that learning requires that we communicate that information to others. If I spend a bit of time trying to explain what I’ve just learned to my friends or loved ones, I'm more likely to retain that information permanently. The shared information & wisdom that we gain in this collaboration/celebration time grows exponentially through our community of friends & loved ones. Celebrate with friends by having gatherings that seek to find ways to be more independent & cooperative together. Do our friends share our dreams & desires for more self-reliant independence? We must nurture that relationship through cooperation. We should collaborate & cooperate with people that we trust & love. That makes cooperation less risky & more enjoyable. Find ways to celebrate our productivity together, to share our abundance. As we become more prolific, we must share our abundance & take pleasure in the enjoyment of our abundance with others. Sharing comes from strength & self-reliance. We can celebrate our independence & self-reliance as we grow with our cooperative community that we build.

There is no reason that some of these time allotments can't be combined in meaningful ways. For instance our collaboration time might be spent learning together or producing something together. The thrill of working with friends on a shared project provides joy & becomes the impetus to cooperate again. The cooperative spirit flows naturally from self-reliance. People who feel self-reliant seek the opportunity to cooperate on projects that they can't do alone. We need to dispel our fears that cooperation will lead to one side or the other taking advantage. A self-reliant individual doesn't fear cooperation, because they know that they have voluntarily entered into the process & can leave that process at any time that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits & a resolution of that imbalance can't be found with the cooperating group or individual. Every cooperative activity has risk, just as life has risk. We shouldn't be afraid to cooperate, because when we cooperate with those whom we love & treasure, we build lasting & vital relationships that make us stronger, wiser & better humans. Rather than thinking that cooperation is something new, we need to recognize that cooperation is an innate part of the human spirit. Community is the result of cooperation with our friends & family. Cooperative communities aren't new, they've simply been usurped by hierarchies that have taken them into places that devalued or denied the natural human trait of cooperation.