Do you ever feel overwhelmed by how much stuff you own? Are you working crazy hours to afford belongings that you don’t even have time to enjoy? In this episode, we cover 10 milestones that will help you to optimize your personal possessions, saving you time and money, and ultimately helping you on the path towards a 4-Day Work Week.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by how much stuff you own? Are you working crazy hours to afford belongings that you don’t even have time to enjoy? In this episode, we cover 10 milestones that will help you to optimize your personal possessions, saving you time and money, and ultimately helping you on the path towards a 4-Day Work Week.

The four day work week apprentice stage of the four day work week journey is focused on maximizing your life outside of work without even needing to change jobs. So whether you're a worker, an employee, or an entrepreneur, do them, are a business owner, the apprentice stage is all about making sure you're able to make the most of your relationships, the time you have, the money you have, and the things you own. In each of these stages and each of the steps to there are certain milestones that let you know you're on the right track and you're really mastering that stage. Doesn't mean you'll stay there forever. I know I sometimes master certain parts and then I lose my footing on other parts. When I do these things, life is a whole lot better. These are the mastery milestones for optimizing your things. First is to have a house and a car. If you have a car, you can easily afford within your monthly cash flow and still live your desired lifestyle. Put simply, this is about not being house poor or not being car poor where you have this awesome house or awesome car, but you can barely afford it and you're working 70, 80 hours a week just to keep up with life.

With each of these ideas I'm going to give you, you can decide if you want to do them or not. Set a target date and maintain or monitor your status for that, and we have a worksheet you can download that goes with this. Second thing, again, this is a best practice of master milestone, keeping your vehicle 10 years or longer to minimize ownership costs. Or sometimes there are better arrangements due to tax breaks and being a small business owner, whatever that works. But in essence, keeping the ownership cost of your vehicles or the usage cost of them down in as little as possible. Third, having less than one hour per week, servicing or maintaining items that you own. Now, this excludes dishes and laundry because that's ongoing things. But for example, if you're spending your whole time mowing your lawn or fixing this, or taking care of this or vacuuming the house because the house is so darn huge and there's two of you in it, that might not be mastery. That might be you're just having too many things and can't really even enjoy them because you're too busy maintaining them and taking care of things.

Your items and clothing that you have not used in the last 12 months, you give them away. In fact, true mastery, at least in my humble opinion, is when you're in a good enough situation financially, you can just afford to give them away. You don't even have to have a garage sale because even that's maybe you would rather do something else unless you really love having garage sales, in which case, Mazal tov, enjoy. Number five, being able to wait two weeks before purchasing item that's new to you or that you haven't heard about so you're avoiding your impulse purchases. Number six, this is a big one. No storage units outside the home and having an accessible and usable garage. Some people go against this, but in the long run, if you're spending too much time managing your things and carrying your things and moving them back and forth and paying to store them somewhere, again, not mastery. Being able to patiently purchase the expensive items at ideal times. So things like Black Friday and holiday sales are the best times to buy things. If you know what you want, you can just wait. I wait every year.

Black Friday, I buy a couple of things online. I don't go into stores and fight up. I just wait for a couple of things, the bigger purchase, because that's when they're going to cost the least. Having all your photos and important computer data stored securely and automatically and backed up online, being able to evacuate your home in the case of the emergency with your precious items in five minutes or less. That's not because we're anticipating an emergency. That's about having it be so clear about what's most important to you and having things be light that you could do that if you had to. And then finally, minimizing your environmental waste, recycling weekly and decluttering every 90 days, keeping your life simple. A lot of these are simple things, but they're things we need to keep on top of. If you can master these things, you're going to be in a situation where you can enjoy your things without having them own you. If you have any questions in this, let me know.

As always, look forward to helping you make more money in less time doing what you do best. If you'd like to learn more about the show or the slide notes, you can go to 4day entrepreneur.com, and you can also look at how to become a 4-day workweek apprentice by going to 4day workweek.com apprentice. Learn about our training program where you can learn more of the details and study what we found for the best ways to help you make the most of your life outside of work before you even change jobs, or if you're already in a job as an entrepreneur or an employee, just making the most of your life outside of work so that the main reason why you're working, to have fun outside and enjoy family, friends, relationships, that those things are working the way you like. If you have any questions on this, just let me know. As always, thanks for listening.