There is always some work that we do not want to do – cleaning, standing in the queue, travelling to work. Work that you do because your boss will fire you if you don’t. We complain about these chores that seem to be unavoidable in our lives.

There are people who manage to avoid this kind of work altogether – yogis, rockstars, people who just refuse to be reasonable and do what they want to do, millionaires or famous artists rich enough to hire people to relieve them from most of such chores. They are few in number, they always will be few in number. Most of us will never be a rockstar or the guy who lives on the street because he doesn’t do what he does not want to do.

There are others who are clever and insightful and find out ways to reduce the chores, or manage them well. Some even introduce automatic systems so that they are left with a lot of time to do things that they really want to do – like Tim Ferriss and Ramit Sethi.

Here comes the tricky part. Why would you work when there is no compulsion to work? How do you decide what to do when you have no one telling you what to do? It is way easier to pretend you have no time to do what you want to do because you are forced to take a course of action by forces of nature, or because you have to do what others are telling you to do, or because you are too busy ‘managing your time’.

Reverse the cycle. No matter whether you have time in hand or not, first identify what you would do if time was not scarce, and no one was telling you what to do. Then figure out how you can get time to do what you want to do.