Recently, I’ve been astonished by the amount of time and effort some people spend doing things that could be done equally well by spending a little money. A simple example having someone cut your lawn rather than spending time cutting it yourself. Traditionally, my dad cut our lawn, so when I moved into my first house I did the same. Even though I hated doing it. I’d leave it until the grass had grown long at it took me three hours to wade through it.

That’s when I worked out how much money my time was worth. But, more importantly, that’s when I started trying to devise optimum solutions to situations I found myself in. Optimum solutions tend to save time and lead to a better quality of life.

This is why all my music is on iTunes, and I no longer rely on using CDs as a basis of listening. With the size of collection of my music, I had too many CDs, in spontaneous disorganised gatherings. It often took me a long time to find the music I wanted to hear, thus losing the inspiration or ‘moment’. With iTunes, I found an easy way of automatically organising and recalling my music. With the Mac mini and some extra hard disks, I found the perfect listening solution. And I’ve now built on this set-up to provide some other cool ways to enjoy my music.

The problem that lies within my opening observation is that many people are incapable of analysing and formulating workable solutions to a situation. As soon as one potential hurdle is found, the whole solution fails. Few can think outside of their self-imposed constraints, or have the courage to ask for advice.