The point is not to be so effective that you free up time to simply do nothing.

It’s about freeing up your time to do something great.

The goal of increased productivity is to be able to accomplish more in life that is worth accomplishing in less time. This frees up more time to do things like building and maintaining relationships, staying healthy, learning new things, improving your skills, and otherwise fulfilling your goals and dreams.

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, is a well known productivity guru. He often is criticized for his book title — which implies that we could all work just 4 hours per week. Tim defends his title, saying that the goal is to increase per-hour productivity, not to free up time to do nothing.

By implementing productivity techniques which focus on effectiveness and efficiency, we can be 10x more effective with our time, increasing our overall productivity and reducing the time spent on tasks. Tim preaches the “Pareto Principle,” otherwise known as the “80/20 rule”, which essentially states that 20% of our effort yields 80% of our results. The remaining 80% of our effort only yields 20% of our results—so it is all about reducing the innefective 80% and replicating the productive 20%.

The 80/20 rule suggests it is possible to accomplish the productivity of a typical work week in 4 hours rather than 40.

Now — here is the kicker — what can you do with your newly acquired 36 hours?

If you are building or improving a business, or perhaps trying to make and save as much money as possible, this time can be spent working.

Or, you can simply use your new time to enjoy more of your life!

Spend your time learning, teaching, training, traveling, or building.

Automate your routines to optimize efficiency. Automating as many of your tasks as possible breaks down productivity plateaus, and lets you choose what to do with your new-found time.

Saving this extra time and then using it to take a quiz on which Game of Thrones family you belong in or aimlessly perusing reddit (it’s another kitten gif, surprise!) is NOT what productivity is all about.

It probably doesn’t make sense to read productivity blogs for 30 minutes per day, implement things you learn to save 5 minutes per day, and then watch 4 hours of mindless TV in the evening and 45 minutes of kitten videos before bed. That’s not the 80/20 principle, that’s just deciding to do 20% of the work, and remaining stagnant in life

Before you read one more productivity blog I challenge you to…

Figure out how you are going to use your saved time to better your life, or someone else’s life.

Go on, I’ll wait.

Now that your mind is spinning with opportunities, here is a shameless plug.

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That’s why we are building an app that allows you to see what is happening at the places you care about before you leave your house.

This means no more waiting in long lines at the delicious taco joint, never going to the park with your basketball hoping for a game just to find an empty court, and no more showing up at your favorite surf spot to find that conditions are more suitable for a remote control sailboat race. What do you want to see?

Now that you actually have some free time, you shouldn’t be throwing it away in some monotonous fashion, you should be venturing out and living life.

Check out what we’re up to and join our growing community here!