How I Got My Time Back (Without Making More Money)
We talk about financial freedom as if it’s a destination number. In reality, it’s behavioural.
For a long time, I assumed more money would buy me more freedom.
Work harder. Invest well. Grow the portfolio.
Eventually, time would open up.
What surprised me was this.
I got my time back before I made significantly more money.
And it didn’t come from returns.
It came from structure.
Investing is often framed as a way to increase wealth. That’s obvious. But what rarely gets discussed is what wealth is supposed to produce.
If it doesn’t give you time, what exactly is it doing?
Morgan Housel writes in The Psychology of Money that the highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.” That line stayed with me. Not because it sounded romantic, but because it exposed something uncomfortable.
I wasn’t trying to buy cars or upgrades.
I was trying to buy space.
Space from urgency.
Space from needing every decision to work.
Space from watching markets constantly.
The shift didn’t happen when my account hit a certain number. It happened when I stopped structuring my life around reacting.
For years, I was mentally “on” all the time.
Checking charts.
Refreshing prices.
Scanning for the next opportunity.
Even when I wasn’t trading, I was thinking about trading. That isn’t discipline. That’s mental occupation.
And occupation consumes time, even if you’re not physically doing anything.
The turning point came when I simplified.
Higher timeframes instead of lower.
Fewer positions instead of more.
Defined risk instead of open-ended exposure.
Rules instead of reaction.
Nothing dramatic changed financially.
But mentally, everything did.
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks makes a brutal point. The average human life is roughly four thousand weeks long. Not infinite. Not expandable. Not renewable.
You don’t actually “find” time. You decide what matters enough to deserve it.
When I realised that, I started treating attention like capital.
If a portfolio requires constant monitoring, it’s expensive in ways that don’t show up on a statement.
If a strategy only works with perfect timing, it demands your presence constantly.
If your investing approach increases anxiety rather than reduces it, the return isn’t worth it.
Time is the real output.
The irony is that when I stopped trying to optimise everything, results improved.
I no longer needed to catch every move.
I didn’t need to be early.
I didn’t need constant confirmation.
By focusing on structure over stimulation, I reduced decisions. And fewer decisions meant fewer mistakes.
That alone gave me hours back each week.
Not because I was richer.
Because I was calmer.
This doesn’t mean disengagement. It means intentional engagement.
I still review.
I still analyse.
I still think deeply about cycles, risk, and allocation.
But it happens on my schedule.
Not the market’s.
That difference matters more than performance percentages most years.
When investing becomes background infrastructure rather than constant foreground activity, time opens up.
And once you experience that, you don’t want to go back.
There’s another layer to this.
If you need your portfolio to move immediately, you will check it constantly. If your lifestyle depends on short-term performance, you will think about it constantly.
The solution isn’t earning more. It’s lowering the dependency.
That’s why margin matters so much.
Margin buys time.
Time reduces urgency.
Reduced urgency improves decisions.
And improved decisions protect the very thing you were chasing in the first place.
Getting my time back didn’t require a windfall.
It required:
• A portfolio that could survive bad timing
• Position sizes I could ignore for days
• A plan that didn’t demand constant adjustment
• Acceptance that markets move on their own schedule
That structure turned investing from something I managed hourly into something I review deliberately.
That shift was worth more than any single good trade.
We talk about financial freedom as if it’s a destination number.
In reality, it’s behavioural.
If your investing approach still consumes your attention constantly, you haven’t bought freedom. You’ve bought another obligation.
The goal was never more money.
It was time.
And I got it back when I stopped structuring my portfolio around urgency and started structuring it around durability.
That’s the quiet return most people overlook.
Great perspective. I hadn’t heard of the 4,000 week concept. Making behavioral adjustment to make those weeks matter most is a powerful framework.