Simplify Your Life

Life is short, spend your time on the finer things in life.

This post is not trying to promote taking up wine tasting, pottery making or taking up salsa dance classes. It focuses on the very basic hobbies that most people have – dining out, watching movies, reading books etc.

For many people these hobbies are just part of everyday life while some people take these simple hobbies very seriously. You may know of that one friend who posts food and restaurant pics on Instagrams or as in my case, a close friend who writes review of every movie he watches on IMDB. To each his own.

For those who don’t takes these basic hobbies seriously, I will recommend a slight elevation in your lifestyle by focussing on restaurants, movies, books of higher quality. Again, as life is short, you may not want to waste your time on the bad quality ones.

The simple approach i recommend is to only go for movies, restaurants, books etc. which are already rated above a cut-off by the “public” because it’s hard to argue with the wisdom of the masses. Then after the experience, rate it on your own. Rating an experience above a cut-off means you enjoyed it and you are ok to experience it again if you have time (eg. When you retire). Rating it above an even higher threshold means you want to experience it again sooner than later.

Below are my cut-off thresholds and the apps i use for each experience. It also includes my high thresholds.

• Books > 4 in Goodreads (no higher threshold as I don’t plan to read the same book again unless i have a lot of time)
• Movies / TV shoes > 7 in IMDB, higher threshold of 9
• Restaurants > 4.2 in Google Maps. As we can’t see our own rating in Google Maps, use “Save” to record the restaurants you visited & “Heart” to indicate higher threshold.
• Music -> Top rated in Apple Music, Add to library & Heart
• Podcasts -> Top rated on Apple Podcasts, Add to library

One final note… there is no way that you will always want to watch a highly rated movie or listen to a non-popular song. There are gonna be cheat days where a B grade movie gives you more comfort than the most highly rated movie or there will be times during the day where you just want to watch random videos on YouTube. No one is stopping you from doing that, but acknowledging the fact that you do are tying to spend your previous time more on high quality experience than lower quality ones should make you feel good about yourself. And that’s what this blog is all about 🙂