It is no secret that famous people invest more hours in a day in a highly productive state.
- Elon Musk, the Tesla Guru, pulls out 120 hours per week for work.
- Former chief executing officer of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, worked 130 hours a day per week during her time.
- The Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, used to work 12 hours a day a week during his initial days at work.
- Indra Nooyi, the former executing officer of PepsiCo., was known for waking up at 4 AM every morning to focus on her work.
These are all famous people, working on upgrading and expanding their business operations. But we as commoners tend to increase our work hours either for survival or to put aside some money to complete our materialistic quest. This is because working 80-hours a week leaves very little room to spend on unwanted stuff.
As opposed to this, there is a mass, who is broke even after being at work for these many hours a week. The reason being our psychology.
Understanding the Underlying Psychology of Compensation
Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you decide to lose weight and start going to the gym. After a successful first week at the gym with no intake of junk food and proper training, you feel good about the discipline that you have been following.
The nightmare begins now.
You decide to ‘treat’ your body for the efforts it had put for the entire week with the popular concept of ‘cheat day’. Once you start falling for cheat days, there’s no going back. You see that day as an escape to your daily routine and exploit the opportunity.
Result?
You know it better 😊.
The same thing happens when you decide to work hard for an entire week. You feel the need to spend recklessly when you have signed off from your work. You spend on stuff that you don’t need and end up spending more than you would if you were to work only for 40-45 hours a week. This is because you are in the pursuit of the ‘feel-good’ factor when you are at work.
Another aspect of being broke despite these many working hours is an unsupervised schedule. If we fragment an 80-hours of the workweek, it is typically 11-12 hours a day at work. These many hours leave very little room for working out, cooking on your own, doing your laundry, and taking public transportation. As a result, food-ordering apps become your go-to meal way, taxis become your default rides to places even other than work, and you tend to invest more towards clothing and accessories, as you spend most of your day at work and want to induce a good feeling.
Of course, you don’t keep track of your expenses, because you are running short of ‘time’.
How do you Start Saving and Stop Spending?
Stick to a schedule—that’s all you need to do. Plan your week during weekends, get your groceries, do your laundry, and try to rise early to cut on your travel expenses.
Besides cutting on your expenses, opt for an investment plan and schedule the debit for your investment on the next day after you receive your salary. This will help you keep something aside for winter days. Also, spare some time for meditation or physical activity of your choice to keep yourself in good health in the long run.
The bottom line is to have a strong will power against impulsive buying behavior by learning to distinguish between a want and a need sanely.
Happy saving 🙂