Retire Happy - Part II

Alright, you've started your dream list from Part I. Good job. Now it's time to look at your present life and see how your spending your non-work time. Think back about the last twenty four hours. What did you do when you were not at your job?

In this exercise you are trying to isolate your leisure time, so make broad categories for everything else and try to track everything to the nearest half an hour. With you leisure time, stop and replay that time in your mind. Did you enjoy it? How much: a little, some what or for not being sex that was really good? Next try to define if it was passive or active. Passive leisure time takes no input from you (for example, TV or a movie). Active requires you to do something like reading, writing, talking to someone, or building something. Basically most activities outside of TV or a movie are active.

In the end you will have a list like this:

5:00pm to 5:30 Go for a walk with family (really good, active)
5:30 to 5:45 Prepare dinner
5:45 to 6:00 Eat dinner
6:00 to 6:45 Watch news (some what good, passive)
6:45 to 7:30 Read Blogs (some what good, active)
7:30 to 8:00 Put kid into bed
8:00 to 9:00 Play computer game (a little, active)

Now isolate out how much time you spent on passive activities. How much did you enjoy it? If it only ranked 'a little', this is good area to look at. Otherwise, some passive leisure time is good for you, but just make sure your actually enjoying what your watching. If you only like it 'a little', you might want to consider cutting back on the passive and dropping in more time on some you did enjoy a lot. Then you do the same analysis of your active leisure time and start to drop out those items you didn't enjoy that much. Depending how much time you free up you might be able to start working on your dream list.

The above exercise is just to show you where your time goes. We have time management training for our work, but why don't we use that to improve our happiness with our leisure time?