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Rob Csernyik is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and a 2022 Michener-Deacon fellow.
Tightening financial reins is typical as New Year’s resolutions go, but between the holiday season and re-establishing my life in Canada, it’s a necessary evil. I have little choice but to self-impose budget challenges, like I’m the debtor of the week on a Gail Vaz-Oxlade show.
Some budget cuts are easier than others. When I got a cheap, data-heavy phone plan, I decided to see if I could manage without separate home internet. So far, so good, and I’ve saved about $125 over the past two months. I challenged myself to survive a week without visiting a grocery store and shop my kitchen instead. It was annoying at first, but I found satisfaction in seeing back stock from my cupboards turn into meals while my bank balance stayed still.
But when I gave myself a $10 budget for eating out one week and heavily restricted my number of coffee purchases, that was a different story. I came to realize those small comforts and conveniences had a deeper purpose – they made it easier for me to focus on my work. In their absence, I found my productivity waned as I spent more time cooking or ruminating about how much better I would focus working from a café instead of listening to the renovations upstairs or being distracted by the dishes in my sink.
My new way to save money: Cook dinner, then listen to music
Everyone has their own carrot on a stick that helps them work more productively. For me, it’s working in coffee shops a few afternoons a week and buying cheap takeout on days when time spent cooking is better spent meeting deadlines.
As a freelance writer, I get paid when I finish projects and often juggle several at once. Even a few hours spent spinning my wheels instead of making progress on my work can cause setbacks to my personal GDP.
We live in a society that prizes gross domestic product as a key measure of economic health, so if we’re willing to enact strategies to increase it provincially or nationally, we should all be comfortable doing the same for ourselves. Yet in this austerity era, we focus more on slashing our personal budgets rather than interrogating what line items might help.
It’s unsurprising this manner of holistic budgeting doesn’t come naturally. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada reports that just less than half of Canadians have budgets at all. Further, a lot of the money rules we are taught from youth onward are black and white, with little room for grey interpretations. Spending is fixed or variable, necessary or discretionary, wise or wasteful and can be for business or pleasure.
I was familiar with all this, but I never thought to link it to money-making activities, outside of the usual suspects such as office supplies, tech or my subscription to a transcription service.
That time in my life when lattes were an essential expense
As I’ve increased my earnings, I’ve become accustomed sometimes to rationalizing purchases such as taking a taxi to cut a transit commute in half or paying a little more for central lodging while travelling to save myself time and enjoy more sightseeing. Such utility is easy to rationalize by calculating how much time is gained and attaching a dollar value to it over the other option.
But there’s no one formula to calculate how much productivity I lose when I strip my budget of the tiny luxuries associated with my preferred way to work. I can’t and shouldn’t discount their value by considering the spending 100-per-cent variable like an impulse coffee when I’m out on a walk.
Much energy is spent in the business world trying to figure out how to maximize productivity. I’ve found that for me, productivity and, thus, earning power comes from creating optimal conditions, whether that’s working at certain times of day, limiting the number of tasks I expect from myself in a given time period or the little treats that help my productivity, and have the added bonus of bringing pleasure.
Giving myself the permission to do the first two, rather than chasing methods that didn’t work for me, was revelatory. In this economy, life’s tough enough: We all need to make room in our budgets for the latter, too, where we can.