The good things in life..

Planing is not required.

How many times have you found yourself spending hours calling all your friends to organise a night out only to have it blow up in your face at the last moment? Grace's shoe's heel broke and the ground was too hot for her to walk bare feet on. Bob was partying too hard at work and decided you should come and meet him - he didn't tell you though. Shane was lying on the couch watching a documentary about worker bees thinking "why can't we be more like them"? Weeks of anticipation for the famed event, conversations about how good it's going to be, the hours picking out the right clothes (well - not for guys) all down the drain! The night gets cancelled and everyone, especially the planner, is dejected. The solution is brilliant and simple - NEVER PLAN!

How will things ever happen

A comon feeling is that without planning nothing would ever happen - as good as this would be it is not the case.

There will always be those friends of yours who want to schedule the next movie night three weeks in advance. The way to combat this is to give a non-commital answer when they ask you if you're coming. Some handy non commital answers you should know by heart in case of an unexpected invitation:

• I'm too relaxed right now to make a decision, I'll call you back.
• I don't know what my financial situation will be on
• I think I might have something on that night - this one will sit particularly well with the organiser as he will just assume that everyone plans everything months ahead and not think twice about it.

Then once you have successfully postponed your commitment, you can decide leasurly on the evening of the event whether or not you wish to attend. Annoying for the organiser - granted but oh so much easier for yourself.

Should you yourself actually wish to instigate an event lets say a Friday night outing, there is only one safe way. At approximately 6:45pm you should send an email, instant message or sms to all those that you want to attend. The content of this message should be no more then a vague outline hinting of something happening that evening. If there are any people that you *really* want to attend it is acceptable to call them, though the call should be short and to the point - you don't want to waste valuable do-nothing time blabbing on the phone. At 7pm, provided you have received at least 1 response in the positive you can head to your selected meeting place. Ideally this will be wherever you presently are - work, home etc or at worst somewhere near to you. Once you meet someone at the meeting place the evening is ready to take off. What you are doing can then be decided.

Benefits of not planing

By not planing we save in a few key areas.

If an evening does end up happening spontaniously, nobody is responsible for it. In the event of your car breaking down on a freezing night in the part of town known for its hatread of people, no one takes the blame. Your girlfriend can't pin this one on you for having 'one thing to do and screwing it up!'.

If you try to instigate an evening and it doesn't end up happening due to people deciding they don't really like you, no one is bothered and you can attempt another evening the following week, or never, either way is good.

No one has to spend any time organising the evening, this is probably the most important reason for not planing. By not spending that time organising the evening you can spend it watching TV, or eating chips.

Action to Planing ratio

There is a useful mathematical formula you can use to determine how well your skills of not planning an evening have developed. It is known as the action/planning ratio.

X = action time/planning time

Where planning time is the amount of time spent planing the event.
Action time is the amount of time spent doing things.

This ratio should be at least 12 for a properly planned and executed event. This translates into 15 minutes spent planning and 3 hours spent doing. If it starts dropping below 8 then its time to cut your losses and call off the event. It's also clear from this why we want to leave the planning to the absolute last minute, it doesn't leave any time for the planing to blow out. You really have to think of you event as a mini project, the amount of time planing is like the amount of money you're investing in the project. Experts of the no-plan method can get their ratios up over 50 while grand masters will routinely operate in the 100+ range.

The "everything works out" effect

Once you start using this method you will find that things magically start working out. Organising that night on the town will take 10 minutes and work out fantastically. If you are need to meet up with friends and don't know where they are meeting just start wandering around, you will find them. I no longer need to call anyone on my mobile in fact I don't have any credit. This even works when driving, all you need to know is the general area of your target and somehow you will reach there. This is not a one off thing either, it will happen every time - but only if you don't plan. If you try to plan by calling and asking, or looking up directions the effect vanishes and you run the risk of having a lousy time.

The Half Dinner

When you have an evening planned (or rather not planned) and you don't know what the dinner situation is you want to cover yourself either way. A half dinner is suitable when:

• You are visiting someone's place who can't cook yet says they are cooking dinner.
• You have no idea whether or not dinner will be provided/available
• You are vegetarian

Having a half dinner means you can comfortably sail through the night on entrees or nothing at all if required. You can get that warm contented look without having to eat someones bland tasteless food.

Why change a good thing?

When you are out having a good time it is always better to stay where you are rather then try to go somewhere else in the hope that the new place will be better. Newton discovered this originally, an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by a force. That force in this case is effort put in by you. As we have already seen no effort is better then some effort so it makes no sense to ever change locations once you are already somewhere. Changing locations also gives all the stragglers an opportunity to take off which you don't want. Arriving at your new location leaves you with a whole host of problems, finding seats, getting drinks, getting comfortable again etc. Why change a good thing?

Value of time

Free time is the most important commodity we have, and like any commodity the value of it goes up as the availability of it goes down. It is not a linear relationship either, probably closer to quadaratic or exponenntial. Lets look at this in more detail.
You have 3 hours of free time each night - lets say this 3 hours is worth 3 zorkmids
You decide to take on a second job delivering pizza (in the hope of scoring some free pizza) leaving you with 1 hour of free time each night
Your one hour of free time is 1/3 of your original amount of free time, however I would say the value of that 1 hour is now 9 or 27 times as much as your original 3 hours. This means you have to think 9 or 27 times as hard before you spend that final 1 hour

The Do Nothing

Many people are caught in the race to pack as much as possible into the weekend. We all know that by doing things in your time off you make time pass faster. Time passing faster dumps you back at work earlier then you would like. Thus the solution is simple, do as little as possible all the time. This has many benifits:

• Time passes slower thus maximizing your free time
• No motivation is required to get up and do something
• As the great Homer (Simpson) once said "You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try"
• You get time to think about the important things in life - "what's for dinner" and "what time you should take that afternoon nap"

In order to do nothing we must define what constitutes as doing nothing. Generally things that are not productive count as doing nothing. The following list is not exhaustive:

1. Sitting around and not thinking about anything
2. Sitting around and thinking about useless things
3. Sleeping
4. Listening to music
5. Watching TV
6. Eating
7. Reading - Useless websites (such as this one), tabloids and novels are ok. Credible newspapers and science journals are not
8. Emailing/Instant Messaging/SMSing people (provided you are not doing so in order to organise an event)
9. Computer games

The list is ordered from doing the least to doing the most. If you fill your time with only the top 5 items you have already mastered the Do Nothing. I will bow before the greatness of anyone capable of doing the 1st item, it is the ultimate goal. If you find yourself doing mostly the last 4 items or items not on the list, practise diligently every day to elevate yourself to this most high plane of existance. Any item not on the list above requires effort to do and before undertaking such an item it should be carefully considered. Calculate each bit of effort required to do you non-list item and see if you can replace your item with one of the items on the list. Some examples substitutions are given.

• Reading the financials - Reading a tabloid
• Emailing people to organise an event - emailing people for no reason at all
• Dinner and dacing outside - Eating and watching tv
• A night on the town with friends - sleeping

With a bit of thought almost any non list item can be substituted for a list item.

Combining items on the list also constitutes as doing nothing because as we all know from elementary mathematics nothing times nothing is still nothing. Combining list items with non-list items does NOT count as doing nothing, despite how illogical it is. Give these combinations a try:

• Listening to music while eating.
• Eating and reading - the more you spill on the reading material the better
• Sleeping and watching tv - this is actually possible, it just takes some practise. If a nobler persuit exists I'd like to hear it.

The Ideal Day

Once you get used to the Do Nothing you will wonder how you ever managed to fit anything into your day. Lets walk through a typical day:

Wake up fairly early, say 9-10am.
- 10-11am waking up this involves brushing teeth, taking shower, calls of nature, a little sitting around to fully wake up.
- 11-12 Breakfast
- 12-1 Read something useless
- 1-2 Watch some tv
- 2-3 Lunch
- 3-5 Afternoon nap
- 5-6 Waking up from afternoon nap
- 6-7 Thinking about dinner and watching tv
- 7-8 Dinner
- 8-12 Watching TV, surfing the net and reading useless stuff.
- 12pm- 10am sleep.

As you can see there's very little time in your average day for doing anything, let alone fitting in an 8 hour block of work. When I'm on holidays I often wonder how I manage to slip 8 hours of work in that jam packed day. From this it's clear that there is absolutely no time to do anything in the 4 hours or so after a day of work. No commitments should be planned during this time and in a perfect world you could spend all of it watching TV, though realistically things tend to interrupt leaving your TV quota for the day short.

The three day week

If somone asks you what your goals are and you tell them you want to reduce your work hours to 3 days a week several expressions will pass across their face:
Excitement - This is their subconcious mind bursting through crying "yes that's exactly what I want too!"
Confusion - This is their rational mind trying to comprehend what you are saying, perhaps struggling with the idea of doing nothing for a whole day.
Dissapointment - The culmination of their thought process, they will scorn and tell you that you should be motivated, inspired, driven to succeed in life!

If our goal however is idleness success is guaranteed and minimal effort is required, only the initial courage to demand your right to a 3 day week is required. Being idle during these three days will grant a person enough time to think about the important things in life and eventually to invent the next light bulb. If all of society were to become idle the flow of brilliant new ideas would be overwhelming, societies progress may actually be faster then in a 5 day a week society.

Three day weeks will also have a natural equalizing effect on society. Each person would be employed for less of the time therefore more people would need to be employed to complete the same amount of work. Unemployement would go down increasing the disposable income of the previously unemployed while the already well off may have to take a slight cut in their wages. The tradeoff of course is that everyone works only 3 days and has time for 2 days of golfing and cricket each week and a good two days to recover before the next week. The disparity between rich and poor will at last become smaller rather then bigger, white collar and blue collars will be playing poker together, CEO's will be smoking cigars with shoe shiners!

"Never put your eggs in one basket" is as true today, as when it was written. With a standard 5 day week lets say there are 3 people working on a project, each person is responsible and knows about their own little piece of work. One person decides to leave the company which means there is now no one left who knows about that persons work. The other 2 people run around yelling 'the sky is falling' then sit down, lose several handfuls of hair and work out what it was the other person was working on. If however the week was only 3 days, there would be 6 people in the company doing the same volume of work. Two people would know about each of the 3 areas. If any one person decided to leave the other 5 people would look around, comb their luxurious wavey heads of hair and continue as if nothing had happened.

When people are relaxed and happy they work better then when they are burnt out and miserable. People working only three days will naturally be happier then their counterparts working 5 days, and will therefore produce more then them. There is a good chance that anyone working three days a week regularly will produce as much if not more then a person working 5 days. The poor souls working 5 days a week will be miserable, unproductive and start wondering when it all started to fall apart.

Unfortunately the 3 day week can never happen while the 5 day week is in place. It is impossible for the two systems to run simultaniously because of the reluctance of a society as a whole to try something wild, untested and unproven in practise. This reluctance is completely illogical as the discourse on this page has proven theoretically that the 3 day week will work. As everybody knows, theory and practise always agree. If any person is so fortunate as to be living the dream, our hearts go with you, you carry the hopes and dreams of a generation - we will live on vicariously through you for eternity!

Best time to take holidays

Most people make the mistake of taking their main holidays during the holiday season The best time to take holidays about one month before the holiday season, generally about the October Novemeber mark. It will be possible to get a few weeks off in November to do your standard holiday items (see 'The Do Nothing') landing you back at work early December. This is just enough time to go back to work, catch up on the news and email then hang up your boots again for the Christmas/New Years period. It is quite easy to get the few days between Christmas and New Years off, everyone is doing it and people quickly forget that you have just been on a long holiday. Some people will marvel at your brilliance and perhaps learn this most valueable of lessons from you. Taking your holidays in November is truely a win win situation.