I could increase my wealth after learning a simple principle. It took me a while to find it, yet in retrospect it seems trivial. Let me teach you in this brief text what took me years to uncover.

It’s a principle about time and leisure. I call it effective recreation. It’s the art of finding the most wealth creating activities that you like to do in your free time. And then spend as much time as your health and happiness allow on these activities.

Let's face it. The time of the day most of us spend money is during leisure hours. But instead of drawing the conclusion that less leisure will lead to less expenses, let’s instead explore a shift of activities.

What if you can have more leisure time while also spending less or even earning a net positive. This will take some initial effort from your side. But once you’ve done the initial time investment you will start seeing payoffs. Exponential payoffs.

Analyse Your Leisure Activities

Start by getting a pen and paper. Write a list of activities that you enjoy doing. Try to be exhaustive. You will probably find a mix of activities here. On my list there’s everything from Skiing to reading to walking to listening to podcasts.

When you feel that your list is complete, take a close look at what you’ve written. Now it’s time to run these activities through a filter.

The filter is simple. For each item on the list ask the two questions below. If you answer no to both, strike it from your list. Be honest with yourself and take time to reflect.

Health and happiness: Will doing more of this activity make me healthier and/or happier? 

Wealth creation: Does the activity have the potential outcome that I create something of value to other people?

When you have run your list of activities through this filter, you’ll be left with the best activities to spend your time on. This list is individual to you.

Notice that I didn’t ask you how much the activities cost you. And still the probability is high that your curated list will contain items that are on average more wealth creating than the original list. By wealth creation here I mean the net of expense vs value created for yourself and others. For example going to the movies is probably more of a net negative wealth wise than reading a book.

Takeaways

I think this speaks to something fundamental to people. We can either be in a mindset of always chasing the next best thing. Never getting enough. Or we can stop and think about which activities truly make us healthy and happy. And which activities let us create value for others, which is how wealth is created.

Once you start looking at your life and your activities this way you’ll see improvements not only to your health and happiness, but also in your bank account. Stick at it and you’ll notice exponential growth.

A few words of caution. As with any advice, don’t take it at face value. Try this and adapt it to your own situation. Take the pieces that make you better and throw the rest away. Ultimately your goals may be different than the ones outlined above.

The change for me has been that I do less passive activities like watching TV or mindlessly scrolling on my phone. This was neither good from a health, happiness nor wealth perspective. I’ve shifted towards creation like writing and exploring ideas, and active entertainment and knowledge building like reading. This is a health, happiness and wealth shift for the better.

For the leisures that cost money, I’ve realized that I enjoy simpler activities, like being in nature or having a picnic in a park with someone I love, more than going to a restaurant or spending time in the city in stores and cafes. It makes me happier and it also has a better net wealth outcome.

What are your reflections? Did you find anything that you would like to change about how you spend your time?