Time

**Most things we need to do to succeed are boring. **But we all want a perfect formula that does the work for us. Something new, flashy, easy. That’s why ridiculous fad diets, get-rich quick schemes and overnight success are all the rage. We know what it takes to change, succeed, and win, but we know those things are hard. Everyone knows how to lose weight. You just need to burn more calories than you consume over time, and viola the number on the scale starts reading lower. Building a popular blog means writing well, over time, and boom you’re an overnight success. Retiring well means spending less than you earn, over time, and investing wisely in boring mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that return well, consistently, over time and wham you’re a millionaire who never even made six figures a year. Building a movement of university students fits here too. Helping students walk with Jesus, by sharing your faith with them and teaching them to do the same, over time, leads to lots of people walking with Jesus and leading others to him. But it takes time. You want an instant formula for success? Here you go. ...

Subscriptions are the future of sustainable, growing businesses. They can also change your life. It’s obvious by the success of Spotify ($10 a month for all the ad-free music you want, wherever you want), crazy ideas like The Dollar Shave Club ($6 per month and you never have to think about buying razors again) and specialty products like Tonx coffee ($24 per month and you have the freshest, tastiest coffee delivered to your doorstep) that subscriptions are catching on and they aren’t disappearing soon. Businesses love subscriptions because they generate recurring income with no added costs. While they are beautiful for business, costs compound quickly for consumers. We all have a finite amount of subscriptions we can support based on our income, but we can transpose the subscription-model idea to our time as well. **I call it subscription limitation. ...

Naturally, my life is as organized as an elementary school recess: lots of frantic running around, falling down, and then calling it quits once the bell rings for the day. Since I have a tendency to forget and lose things, I’ve had to train myself to spend my time more wisely. I have by no means mastered it. Time is a wild beast that can’t ever be perfectly tamed. I’ve come up with a system to hack myself a bit and make sure I’m accomplishing the most important things, which is ultimately the goal of time management. 1. Do the most important thing first, every day. Each morning I commit to reading the Bible before anything else. I’m trying to kick the habit of catching up on 100+ tweets when I wake up since I’m 6 hours ahead of most of the people I follow. I get distracted, start reading articles, and start thinking and reading and favoriting and linking and then my morning is blown. So, I’ve started jumping out of bed, throwing a pot of coffee on and cracking open the Word. ...