In this podcast episode, I talk practical ways to restore margin in your life and, specifically, how to shave ten hours off your work week.

This is something I am personally having to re-apply to my own life. In this episode I share some of my current challenges.

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Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar. You hear the alarm clock go off in the morning. You just need a couple more minutes of sleep, so you hit the snooze button.

Ten minutes later, the alarm clock goes off, but you’re already sound asleep. Thirty minutes later, you wake up in a panic. You just overslept and are going to be late.

You rush out of bed, throw on whatever you can find and head to the bathroom. You look at your toothbrush and tell yourself there’s no time. You gargle, grab whatever is in the fridge for lunch and you’re off.

“The best thing about social media is that it’s free!” I heard this the other day, and cringed. While it’s true that we don’t need a credit card or PayPal account to use Facebook or Twitter, there is still a cost to social media. We pay daily with our time.

On an average day, I spend more than an hour engaging on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. Throw in a Tweetchat, a newsletter, a YouTube video, and four blog posts each week, and I spend twenty hours a week, using social media to build my platform.

That’s a part-time job! Multiply seventy to eighty hours per month by any hourly rate, and we’re talking serious money.

A few days ago, I watched a video demo of the “SI Tablet” (see video below), a new eBook device developed by Time, Inc. and The Wonderfactory. It demonstrates how a touch screen, portability, and the convergence of text, audio, and video can create unprecedented opportunities for content providers. Frankly, it is the most compelling media device I have seen yet.

Most of us don’t spend enough time thinking. We are so busy doing that we have, I fear, almost forgotten how to think. Yet it is our thinking, more than any other single activity, that influences our outcomes.