We live in the golden age of AI productivity advice. Somewhere out there, someone is telling you to take 3-minute showers, listen to audiobooks at 2x speed while commuting, automate your grocery shopping with subscriptions, let AI answer emails, and the tips are endless.

The problem I see is that most time management (and wealthy management) advice treats time as equally valuable. It assumes that saving 4 minutes here and 7 minutes there will somehow add up to a life that feels meaningful. It will not. Because efficiency, on its own, is not the point.

Spend Time (and Money) On What You Love. Cut It From the Things You Don't.

Personal finance expert Ramit Sethi famously advises people to "spend lavishly on the things they love and cut costs mercilessly on the things they do not." It is a powerful idea, and it applies just as well to time as it does to money.

Rather than trying to be hyper-efficient about every minute of the day, try this: protect generous time for the activities that genuinely restore or energize you, and find the fastest, leanest version of doing everything else.

If you love exercise, block out a full hour and protect it. If you do not love it but know it matters, a well-designed 25-minute HIIT session gets the job done. If long dinners with close friends restore you, the n enjoy them. If you don't care too much about them, then let yourself eat at your desk and minimize them.

The Step Everyone Skips

Before investing in a new Notion template, color-coded calendar blocks, or a Pomodoro timer, ask yourself: do you actually know what you value most? No app can answer that question for you.

Most people skip this foundational step. They optimize how they spend time before figuring out why they are spending it. The result is a perfectly organized schedule filled with the wrong things. And if most of your free hours are going to thumb-scrolling, that is a signal worth paying attention to.

Even high-performing professionals, including executives, clinicians, and entrepreneurs, benefit from working with a psychologist to identify their core values and rebuild their routines around them. This is exactly the kind of work done at my practice (Rick-Smith.com), where evidence-based executive coaching and psychology services in Hong Kong help people move from busy and efficient to purposeful and energized.

You do not need another productivity hack. You need clarity.