Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

It seems to be a good idea to invest a portion of my money and time to personal training or learning experiences. Some reflection on 2010 shows that I spend much more time than money on such. Perhaps in 2011 I will pry more money from my wallet.

Last year I realized the concept of the personal training budget. When I was a government employee, I was able to work the system to have the government pay for training courses that I wanted to take. Now in private industry, such is not nearly as easy. Hence, I had to think for myself per learning experiences. I happened across an idea of using one-to-three percent of my income on learning experiences. That justified buying an iPad (see several posts with the tag iPad). I have learned a lot from having an iPad, so it was a good investment.

Aside from the iPad, I failed. I failed to spend even one percent of my income on learning experiences.

I did succeed, however, in spending large amounts of time on learning experiences. By my calculations, I am awake 16 hours a day 365 days or 5,840 hours.

Here is the time I spent on learning experiences in 2010:

• daybook or Internet viewing: 1 hour per day = 365 hours
• two blogs: 1 hour per week = 52 hours
• reading books: 3 hours per week = 156 hours
• working with writers: 40 hours
• teaching (includes prep time): 120 hours
• journal writing: 61 hours
• attending lectures: 52 hours
• attending free classes: 60 hours
• wrote a novel: 45 hours

These sum to 951 hours or 16.3% of my waking time. Whoa!!! That’s more than I thought. I’m glad I took the time to figure this. As an aside, I calculated this three times. Every time I calculated it, I thought of something else to add to the list.

Now, how can I pry some money out of my wallet to increase the dollar portion of my personal training budget?