What About Granny Einstein?

My little great nephew, Griffin Wilson, (is he a cute kid or what?) celebrated his first birthday this week. At a loss at what to send as a birthday gift for a one-year-old, I asked several people for suggestions. The idea I liked the best was a Baby Einstein DVD.

Although I hesitate to advocate using the TV as a babysitter, my friend Maureen assured me that the DVDs are great when you need to take a shower. I talked to my niece (Griffin’s mom) later and she told me that he loves his Baby Einstein videos. “He doesn’t normally pay any attention to the TV,” she said, “but when his Baby Einstein video comes on, he is immediately drawn to it.” His interest is so intense, in fact, that she wonders if there’s some kind of subliminal messages included, although she didn’t know what a subliminal message for a baby might be. Griffin is currently learning sign language from his signing video.

It led me to wonder where are the Granny Einstein products? If these are such good learning tools, why are they only made for tiny tots?

Maybe Video Professor is at the other end of the spectrum, although they focus exclusively on computer skills and there are plenty of other topics I’d like to learn. YouTube is filling in the gap. Want to learn about investing, time management or losing weight, chances are good that somebody out there has posted a video on that topic on YouTube. Here’s one of my favorites about the perils of PowerPoint.

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Gift of Time

Your gift this year is the secret to time management. It's elegant in its simplicity and so obvious that you'll wonder why you didn't think of it yourself. Interested? The secret to time management is this: Do less.

I know; you don't want to hear it. You want to know how you can continue doing everything you're currently doing and still have plenty of time left over to do MORE. Americans have succumbed to a cult of terminal busy-ness. This is the only country in the world with a national monument called Rushmore.

Part of this greed for time stems from our belief that time is money. It isn't. If time were money, you could put it in a savings account and use it whenever you chose. You could take out a time loan, then pay it back with interest. We would all carry time credit cards and live on borrowed time. Killing time, like destroying money, would be a federal offense.

Time has become our most precious commodity. If time were money, people would stand on street corners begging for spare time. You could buy extra time when you need it. For example, I could have bought an extra 24 hours to write this column -- and I could pay it back some day when I have the flu and time is really dragging.

If time were money, privileged people would have more than the rest of us. Instead, we all have the same 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You can't earn more, no matter how hard you work. In fact, the harder and longer you work, the less discretionary time you have available. Remember, work expands to fit the time available.

No matter how lucky you are, you can't win more time. There is no time lottery. You can't put a nickel's worth of time into a slot machine and win back 500 minutes. If you spend your time doing something that doesn't turn out the way you wanted, you can't return the activity and get your time back.

On the other hand, we do experience time inflation. As we get older, an hour simply doesn't go as far as it used to. Scientists say that soon we may reasonably expect to live 150 years. Unfortunately, those are 21^st century years and they'll only go as far as about 75 years in the 20^th century.

Time isn't money. Your time is your life, so don't squander it on nonessentials. The only way to have an abundance of time is to use it only for things that really matter. That's my wish for each of you this year--that you will get less done and enjoy it more.

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Money to Learn and Learning to Earn

The latest economic forecast for Colorado is in and—big surprise—it shows that we face a recession in 2009, just like the rest of the country. Three sectors will hold their own or even grow: government, health care, and education.

Education always thrives in hard times. As people lose their jobs to layoffs and plant closures, they turn to schools to reboot their careers. Most of my students tell me that they decided to enroll in college at a time when their lives are already full for three reasons:

1. To qualify for a better job.
2. To enhance their employability in case of a layoff.
3. To change careers.

Ironically, in an economic crisis, going to school usually means diving deeper into debt. At least one older student thinks she has found an answer to this problem. Since student loans only become due when the student’s education ends, she vows to continue going to school, earning one degree after another until she dies.

We all need to keep learning throughout our lives, so maybe she has a point. I’m looking forward to seeing what innovative methods the Obama administration comes up with to finance education.

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