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Recently I shared some of the things in my life that were making it hard for me to focus on my goals. I decided that everything that wasn’t absolutely needed for the completion of what I truly wanted to achieve had to go.

Here’s what that has meant for me:

I’ve learned that making huge financial commitments can compete with other decisions that impact ones quality of life.  For me, I’ve always valued certain aspects of entrepreneurship.  Doing what you love, on your own terms, while making a positive difference in the world directly or indirectly, have all been ideals that I’ve been working towards.  However, huge financial commitments can also mean huge time commitments, making the realization of full-time entrepreneurship a challenge.

One decision in particular proved problematic.  I decided to buy my first home.  Well, the bank was more than happy to help me with this.  Although I was pretty excited, and grateful, this decision to take on a mortgage, and all the related fees that come with home ownership, immediately placed tension between some of the other goals I had set.

Now, we all have expenses, but how much income we need, can also be heavily influenced by how much we desire.  So for me, the choice of becoming a homeowner, made it hard to break away from an unsatisfying job.  And yes, we should all be thankful for any job, but I do not think a spirit of thankfulness, also demands a spirit of settling, or dissatisfaction.  And, although extremely grateful for employment, I also wasn’t happy.  I had to ask myself, what is more important to me at this point in my life.  Being grateful that I “just had a job” that paid the bills, but afforded me little time to focus on being my true self?  building a business that would eventually give me more time freedom, mobility, and the ability to spend more time volunteering in causes that I believed in.

So I decided to do two things:

• Quit my job. I had enough saved up, to buy me about a year or so without having to worry about going hungry, but I also realized I had to significantly reduce my expenses in order for this to work.
  

• Lower expenses. This led me to sell my house, and reduce other unnecessary expenses.

I mentioned that the internet/media and T.V also proved to distract me from what I really was trying to accomplish.  Here is what I had to do, and continue to implement in order to keep the main thing, the main thing.

Get rid of the T.V

I managed, by default to do this about 3 years ago, and it has made a world of difference.  When I moved into my home, there seemed to be a wiring issue with the cable, and it only worked in one room.  Before calling an electrician to fix the problem, I decided to use this as an opportunity to see how long I could go without watching TV.  Besides a movie here or there, and catching up on whats going on online, it’s been about 3 years since I’ve personally owned a T.V, and I can’t say I miss it.

Now if it sounds like I’m advocating that we all revert back to the stone age, and join a commune in the country somewhere, well, although that idea has crossed my mind, I am simply evaluating the myriad of things that threaten our dreams and goals, and determining if they are worth it.

Fixing the internet addiction

As proud as I may sound about getting over the TV addiction, the internet has almost replaced that past time.  If you’re anything like me, the internet represents at least 1-2 hours per day, if not more, of your disposable time(if any time can be considered disposable).  I started to try to self correct this time waster by scheduling when I’d check emails, facebook, twitter, and the list goes on.  The thing about habits, is that they die hard.  Having immediate access to anything you want online a few clicks away, proves to be a proposition too tempting to pass up most of the time.  And when you’re trying to actually get some work done, and accomplish the things that really matter to you, at some point enough becomes enough.  That’s when I heard about a simple software program while reading Nancy Rawlinson’s Blog.  The program is called Freedom, and what it does is simply block your internet use for the amount of time you specify.  If you’re serious about reclaiming your time, this may help.  And its free.

As 2009 wraps up, I guess you can say that I’m a bit more conscious of how I can continue to simplify my life, and get more stuff done.  What ways to you stay focused?

“When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.” — Henry David Thoreau

“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. ”
— Henry David Thoreau