Part Seven: Making A Healthy Connection Between Work, Money And Life

By design, the last two installments of this series lead into today’s on organizing money and work around your life, not the other way around.

In part five on working less now so you can work less longer, we focused on health, well-being and longevity—

Putting in 40-plus hours a week, particularly if it’s intense and keeps you from living a full, well-rounded life, can wear you down, physically and mentally. It’s not only the work that wears you down, it’s the absence of abundant leisure and rest time.

By limiting work today (I’m in my late forties now), you can help yourself maintain the energy, vitality, enthusiasm and interest necessary to do work past traditional retirement age.

In part six on living more evenly across the lifespan, we focused more on personal finance and how the way you pace your work affects it now and going forward. We closed that installment with some of my favorite math—

Instead of packing more than 62,400 hours of work into 1,560 weeks, do it over 3,120 weeks. That’s the difference between working 40 and 20 hours a week over 30 years.

I’ll take the 3,120 week option any day of the week.

When you look at it and aim to execute it this way, you can finally start to organize money and work around your life, not the other way around.

However, no matter how much work you do in parts five and six, the seemingly small choices you make or a you gotta spend money to make money attitude can sabotage even the most righteous attempts to reorganize your connection between work, money and life.

Let’s take—on the surface—a logical money decision and compare it to an alternative mathematically to best illustrate how the culmination of these ideas looks on the ground and can look in your life.