Almost twenty one years ago we waited with bated breath for the Y2K bug to paralyze every computer around the globe and plunge us back into the dark ages that came before the Windows 95 install disk. Then we woke up on the 1st January 2000 and everything was the same. Turns out it was just another day.

We are in the first stretch of this decade, and in the next ten years we will probably find a cure for cancer, land a man on Mars, and successfully clone a human being. It’s insane to think how far we have come in such a short period of time!

We’ve gone from “Wait, the entire system is going to collapse!” to “We’re cool guys, let’s go to Mars and clone Pete!”.

What will life look like in 2030? Who knows for sure, right?

The only thing we can do is stick to our little individual day-by-day “get the most out of life” play books and make the time occasionally to critique our performance.

A ten-year milestone is always a good time to sit back and ponder, and if you had one money question you wanted to reflect on, what would it be?

How about this:

How much time am I trading for the money I’m earning? And is it worth it?

Technology is supposed to be making our lives simpler. But in truth it just means we are taking on more and more work! Hands up if you feel more overworked, stressed and anxious than ever before?

It’s so ironic because we should be doing less and less, not more and more.

At any given moment, most of us are dealing with several email inboxes, a bunch of chatter on a few different WhatsApp groups, incessant phone calls, face-to-face meetings, Skype and Zoom conference calls, and new software programmes like Slack.

If you are in your 40s, you will remember a time, not so long ago, when you had a work diary filled with actual paper pages, and a map book in your car boot you used to plot your route to your scheduled meeting.

The most high-end piece of technology in your office was the fax machine followed very close by the photocopy machine, which looked like it could have the ability to scan in a document. Ground-breaking, man!

We can’t turn back the clock, but we can still manage the amount of time we are willing to trade for our hard-earned bucks.

If you are finding that your weekdays start at 07h00 and end at 19h00, you must ask yourself how sustainable the pace is? Hurtling around at a breakneck speed means something must give at some stage.

In most cases it’s our health, and if you consider you need to be healthy in order to earn the money you want, so you can buy the things you desire, which one are you going to give up?

Perhaps the idea is simpler than we think.

Do you need all this stuff in your life? Because if you do, what cost is it coming in at?

Doing with less, means working less, which means longevity.

At the end of the day, nobody will be standing about your grave uttering this sentence – “Jeez Paul was the best worker I’ve ever seen. The guy was like a machine. Pity he was hit with that terrible illness at 45.”

Some food for thought.

Until next time

The MoneyShop Team