I wanted to tell you about a moment that happened this morning that I’m highly proud of. I’ve just gotten back to Hong Kong from LA where I spent a week attending an event hosted by Taki Moore, aimed at 7-figure-and-above online coach type people, which I guess I fall into the category of. Amazing experience including a hot-air balloon and tonnes of notes taken, I’ll share more at some point. But I got back yesterday, slept at a reasonable hour, but then woke up at 5am this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep.
So naturally, I reached for my phone, and opened up YouTube. And on my homepage, I came across this video where entrepreneur Steven Bartlett was being interviewed by entrepreneur Rachel Lim in Singapore. Fun fact – Izzy and I had breakfast with Rachel a couple months ago, lovely lady, super inspiring.
I flicked through the timestamps, listened to some stuff about the importance of hiring great team members, some stuff the importance of experimentation in business and life, AND THEN Steven talked about the way he thinks about time management in terms of Playing Roulette Chips.
It’s an analogy he wrote about in his first book Happy Sexy Millionaire – good book, the title’s supposed to be cringe don’t worry, the whole message is “when I was a kid I thought I wanted to be a happy sexy millionaire, and then I got there and realised that other than ‘happy’ those were the wrong things to aim for, sort of”.
The analogy is as follows: time is our most valuable non renewable resource. Once we’ve used up an hour, we can never get it back. So we can think of each hour of our time as a “chip” in a casino. We get 24 chips everyday, and each hour, we have to take one of our chips, and play it in a particular spot on the roulette table.
Each hour that passes in life, it’s like we’ve allocated one of our chips to a particular activity. 2 hours at the gym = 2 chips. 4 hours on Netflix and 3 on TikTok = 7 chips. You get the idea. 24 chips in a day, 168 chips in a week.
Every hour that passes, we’re making decisions about where we’ve placed that chip. We can make the decision intentionally, or unintentionally. And most of us make most of our chip-allocation decisions unintentionally. So, if we want to improve our lives, be happier, healthier, more fulfilled, more “successful” – a good starting point is to be more intentional about where we allocate those chips, ie: where we spend our time.
You can do this by asking yourself each hour: “What would I like to actually spend the next hour doing? How would I like to allocate this upcoming chip?”
That’s not to say that you need to be hyper efficient and always be working, obviously. Allocating a chip to spending time with your spouse, or your kid, or your work, or video gaming, or even scrolling Instagram Reels, is totally fine – as long as it’s intentional rather than unconscious.
So anyway, by the time I finish watching this YouTube video, it’s 5:30am, and I’m inspired. I think to myself: “Huh okay so I probably can’t go back to sleep given the jet lag, so how would I like to allocate this next hour of my life?”
And I decided: “You know what, it would be nice to go for a run”.
And so, I put on my running shorts, whacked on my trainers, put my headphones in, and headed out of the house to do the earliest run I’ve literally ever done in my life.
And it was great! I ran for 30 minutes, while listening to some “guided running meditation” thing, and felt awesome afterwards.
Then I continued the exercise of asking myself a few times throughout the day: “Huh okay so how do I want to allocate this next chip?” (Ie: the next hour of time) and each time, the fact that I paused to ask myself that question helped me make a better decision about it.
On weekdays, the decision about how to spend each hour is kinda decided by what’s on the calendar already (using one of the components of the Trident Method that I made a video about a few years ago). But especially in the mornings before work, on free evenings after work, and definitely on the weekends, I’d like to be a little more intentional with how I’m actually using my time, rather than defaulting to watching random stuff on my phone. The chip thing helps 🙂
Have a great week!
Ali xx
