Time Poverty of Modern America

It’s not just about having free time, but how we use the free time that matters.

The Pyramid of Luxuries

The Bespoke - $4,000 Vacation + $1,000 VISA eGift Card

The Ultra High End - Instant Pot RIO

The Superpremium - Ntounias Slow Food

The Premium Core - Power Bank x2

The Accessible Core - Time Poverty of Modern America

The Affordable Luxury - Podcast Guest?

The Everyday Luxury - Photo Contest Collages

The Bespoke

Last week for April submissions! If you know anyone that has been wanting to go on vacation, tell them about The Bespoke Photo Contest, maybe you can go together.

Click on the banner to enter The Bespoke Photo Contest. Click here for the Official Contest Rules.

• Prize: $4,000 Vacation Voucher + $1,000 in VISA eGift Cards [ARV $5,012]

• Odds: For every 660 Ducky Tran premium member by the time of judging, I will give out one (1) vacation bundle Prize

• Contest Period: April 3, 2024 at 10 AM CST to April 30, 2024 at 10 PM CST

See Issue 1 for more content about The Bespoke Prize.

The Ultra High End

Previous Contest Winner

The winner of issue 22’s Knife Set is HOA from Dallas, Texas! This is her submission for “a photo of something that is small but strong”:

Congratulations to HOA! You won $100 Knife Set! I hope to see all the fancy foods you’ll submit in the future.

I am changing the format of the contest article portion a little. Just so you can see some of the submissions that were sent to me, I’ll start putting a collage of them so you can see what was sent in from other members.

They were all great submissions, they were all “small but strong” in their own way.

This Week’s Contest

Click on the banner to enter The Ultra High End Photo Contest. Click here for the Official Contest Rules.

• Prize: Instant Pot RIO 6-Quart Multicooker [ARV $100]

• Odds: For every 70 Ducky Tran premium members by the time of judging, I will give out one (1) Instant Pot RIO

• Contest Period: April 24, 2024 at 10 AM CST to April 30, 2024 at 10 PM CST

This week’s prize is one of my favorite time-saving devices, the Instant Pot. I love to cook, but like most, I’m not a fan of washing 10 pots and bowls after every cooking frenzy. Sometimes, just watching a pot so it doesn’t boil over can waste a good 15 minutes!

The Instant Pot was an affordable and easy way to pressure cooking. I jumped on the hype nearly a decade ago and have been using it ever since. I make Pho in 30 minutes, I make chicken noodle soup in 12 minutes, I have made pulled pork and BBQ chicken in 40 minutes, and that’s not even the best part about the instant pot!

The best part is that everything is in a single pot so I only have to clean the cutting board, a knife and the pot the food cooks in at the end. There are so many other things you can cook with this wonderful device and it will save you time for nearly everything you make in it.

The Superpremium

This week’s Superpremium topic is a Ntounias Slow Food. This quaint restaurant is located on the island of Crete, Greece. Specifically, in the Chania prefecture on the outskirts of the village of Drakona.

This restaurant isn’t just about the food, it was an experience like no other. Just getting to the location was a journey, and it well worth the trek.

1. You normally have to know a guy that knows a guy that has been here, or you read the Ducky Tran newsletter.

2. You and your group will taxi or drive, 40 minutes through the slick olive oil-covered, winding roads of Crete.

3. You will see the beautiful, hilly farmlands of the Keramia region. Even though you’re driving, you will get lost in nature as the entire drive will be lush vegetation and goats on these farms.

4. The guy that knows a guy that you know called the tavern ahead of time to let them know the size of your party and when you’ll be arriving so that they have the “slow-cooked food” ready upon your arrival. Hint: Slow Food is part of the restaurant name placard.

5. (I did not take pictures as I was enjoying the experience too much to even remember I had a camera phone) You will arrive and they will seat you in the wonderful outdoor space overlooking the hilly farmlands. They will slowly cater to the stone pots that having been burning local tree branches since the morning.

6. They will then bring platters of food like shown below to your table. Let’s put this out there, I am NOT a salad person, but their Greek salads were amazingly fresh and vibrant. My favorite were the slow-cooked meat platters, from veal to lamb to goat. The meats were fragrant, flavorful and fall-off-the-bone tender.

Like I said earlier, the star isn’t the food. The experience of dining with your peers for hours in a fresh, inviting environment, being served authentic foods carefully prepared many hours before your arrival, and enjoying the company of the family that prepared this experience for you. You will enjoy this experience for 2-4 hours, depending on your party size.

When I went, it was about 10 of us and we ate, drank, and talked for 3-4 hours. It was such an amazing experience that slows down the rush and hustle of a city luncheon. It teaches us to appreciate each other’s company, the food we share, and the experiences that we may have only once in a lifetime.

The Premium Core

This week’s Premium Core topic is a Power Bank. Most of the time, saving time is not about finding a way to do something quicker now, but how to not be involve or lose time later. The power bank is a create way to not attach yourself to a wall when needing a charge, but also, if you have multiple you can really maximize your ability to not rely on wall chargers when on-the-go.

I travel with power banks all the time and generally, I carry more than one. My phone rarely needs to be charged with a wall cable because I always have a backup battery charged up. I don’t just use it for my phone, I have the portable battery for the portable fan, the recorder, or even a friend’s phone.

The convenience and time-saving that power banks provide really allows you to be more mobile, especially with some phones lasting just hours on a full charge.

Deal #1: I’m offering a $20 Portable 10000 mAh Power Bank Set for just $10 at shop.duckytran.com. That’s right, it comes with 2 power banks so you have a backup to your backup. There will only be 10 available.

The Accessible Core

Time Poverty of Modern America

The focus of this week is time wealth. In previous time wealth issues, I’ve focused on ways to save, generate or invest time; however, I haven’t gone into detail about the issues of time poverty so that you can best use the skills I’ve taught in previous issues. But what is time poverty?

Time poverty is generally defined as not having enough time to do what you need or want to do. But I want to introduce terms that I’m coining today, time robber and time robbery. Like the terms imply, time robbers are events or activities that take precious time from you, normally unknowingly, resulting in time poverty. Time robbery is the action, by you or another entity, of taking time that you could be using for what you need or want to do.

In modern America, there are many things that are seen as normal and essential to an American lifestyle, such as, 40-hour work weeks, 8-hour sleep schedules, 1-hour lunch breaks, 30-minute sitcoms, 5-minute tardy bell, and even a 10-second rule for food dropped on the floor.

Did you notice something? In modern America, we focus on exact timing so much that we even have a rule for how long food can be dropped before it becomes unsafe (just an example and don’t use this rule). Because we define every moment of our lives with a definite time, we put a limit to things that we need and we make it impossible to do many things that we want.

We all say we need good health, shelter, love and freedom. We want to travel, be happy, make friendships and have world peace; however, we tend to do things that are antithesis to everything we say we need and want. Let’s dive in:

1. We need good health but we are unwilling to give up 10-30 minutes of our favorite show to go on a walk with the family. You may say well I’m happy with the TV though. This is where the concept of time robbery comes in, we take something we say we want and rob from what we need. In the long-term, your health is more important and pertinent to your happiness, but we focus short-term and do not prioritize our needs and wants. Because we didn’t spend time on our health today, we end up spending twice as much time trying to catch up in the future. By prioritizing our needs before our wants, we will have less time robbery and time poverty in the future is less likely to be an issue.

2. We need shelter but we are unwilling to give up the latest model iPhone, newest car, or even extra snack during lunch time. Instead, we spend small amounts of money that would have added up to something grand as a home or RV or even rent for an apartment. Once again, prioritizing will save you time later when you need to hustle 80 hours a week to save up for rent.

3. We need love, but we are unwilling to take some of our free time to visit our family and friends. Instead, we send a text and assume the “Happy Birthday” text is going to make their day. Like my issue on “Time Generator”, if we don’t put time into the things we care about, we will not make more time with the things we care about and love and want.

4. We want to travel, but traveling to the next city is too small. We will wait until we can afford Tokyo or Paris. The mistake is that will put a value on distance rather than experience. Take a weekend off to explore the cities near you, you may find that there are more adventures to see nearby than the tourist-traps that costs thousands of dollars to fall for. But what if we never make it to Tokyo or Paris, the time robbery is robbing the experience of being on a journey rather than being at a destination.

5. We want to be happy, yet when given the time to embrace family and friends, we sit behind a computer, a phone or a TV. Most people get enjoyment from a TV show, but forget the TV show itself does little to bring long-term happiness to your life. Invest in people around you instead of things, and you have a time generator rather than a time robber.

6. This is the last one. We want world peace but we cannot help but compare. We compare the things, we compare children, we compare ideals, we compare wealth, we compare intellect, and we even compare about how little we compare. I’m not saying not to compare, but we need to be content that other people have different viewpoints of the world; therefore, wanting different things and believing different things. This issue is when we compare and become angered, frustrated, or annoyed by the opposition, we create war between the ideals not the people. This is what creates war and chaos. We then rob our time, thinking, gossiping, and attacking the people with ideals that don’t match our own. We end up giving up our happiness, our peace, and our time.

I hope this deeper dive into time poverty and time robbery have spark something in you to make a change. Prioritize your needs and wants, don’t let time be taken away from you. Don’t forget, time is the most precious currency we have, don’t be the culprit of your time poverty.

The Affordable Luxury

Issue 22 Community Poll Results

Here are the results:

1. The majority of members take between 1-20 minutes on the Ducky Tran newsletter. Obviously, those that didn’t vote do not get to this portion, so likely less than 1 minute. That means 95% of members use less than 20 minutes to go through the Ducky Tran newsletter, I think we are in a good spot-on timing.

2. This one is much more interesting, 60% of members finish their longest meal in under 30 minutes. With the other 40% finishing under an hour. I think this is ingrained into the American culture to eat faster and not have the time to enjoy the food and company as European countries.

3. Nearly everyone is content with the length of the Ducky Tran content, but there was one member that voted a different option. If you are that person, please provide feedback so I can see if it’s something I can do to improve it, at [email protected].

This Week’s Community Poll

Here are this week’s poll questions:

The Everyday Luxury

(The referral program is only viewable on the email version of the newsletter.)

Since I am starting to post the photo contest collages, I’m going to catch up with a few issues in this section for a few weeks. Enjoy!

I’ve had the honor to see your lives through the lens of these photos. I truly enjoy seeing your world and lifestyles, I hope I am showing enough of mine through the various sections of the Ducky Tran newsletter. More to come next week!

Visit shop.duckytran.com with the weekly password: instant