A friend asked me last week, “What’s the best piece of financial advice you ever received?”

Actually, no one has ever asked me that – and if you ever got a look at my finances, you’d understand why.

But according to a much-emailed advice column by Boston accountant James Downey, one of his friends did just that and he was ready with an answer.

“Without much thought,” Downey writes, “I responded, ‘invest your time, don’t spend it.’ “

It was a chestnut passed on to him by a successful entrepreneur, and Downey said he took it to mean that you should do things that will pay off in the future, not ones that give only a moment’s pleasure.

“After getting this piece of wisdom, I set out to eliminate the areas of my life where I was spending time. It is now shocking to me how much time I had wasted on activities that did not benefit my life.”

Here’s where he found he could cut some waste:

• Television: Downey does not cut out all viewing, but limits it to the end of the day when he is too tired for anything more investy.

He uses the DVR to improve his viewing efficiency (“I will now watch a Patriots game in one hour and 15 minutes,” he writes. “This simple act saves me two hours every game.”)

• Commuting: Getting to and from work provides little value, Downey says. But instead of moving closer to the office, he proposes “listening to audio books, thinking or praying” as ways to make the trip more worthwhile.

• Sleeping: “Most people can do fine with seven to eight hours a day,” he says. “Anything more is wasting time.” He informs us that his wife likes to sleep in on weekends, snoozing until 10 a.m. one recent Saturday, missing three hours of beautiful spring weather. “Time that will never come back,” he reports.

I don’t completely disagree with any of this, except it has a problem common to all advice that you didn’t ask for (unless you are Downey’s unnamed “friend”).

It means a lot more to the one who gives it than it does to the one who gets it.

Anyone disciplined enough to put this wisdom into action probably didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Apparently, it’s not helping Mrs. Downey.

I ran into the phenomenon of offering advice that only the giver could follow when I was trying to help my daughter pick a college.

“It’s like buying a house,” I told her. “Not like getting married.”

What I meant was that you should look at the schools analytically, weighing price against value. Don’t fall in love with the first one you see. When you get married, however, you do want to fall in love.

But before I got to explain all that, she said, “I’ve never done either of those things so I don’t know what you are talking about.”

The other day I got to dust my homespun wisdom off when an acquaintance, a native of India, asked for advice about his daughter’s college search.

“See, my daughter didn’t understand because she hadn’t bought a house or gotten married,” I said after unloading my aphorism. “But you’ve done both so it will make sense to you.”

“I had an arranged marriage,” he said, teaching me to keep my advice to myself.

There are very few of Downey’s time investments that would do me much good.

I don’t sleep more than seven hours a night as it is, and it never feels like enough. I have a habit of nodding off, once falling into a deep sleep in a dentist’s chair while I was getting a tooth drilled. Any less sleep would be dangerous.

And I don’t have a DVR, but I have been known to fall asleep watching a real-time football game, which is kind of multi-tasking. I don’t think I have a lot to gain by reducing.

There’s not much to be mined from my commute, either. It’s a five-minute bike ride, mostly downhill. I’d have to move to the office or get shot out of a cannon to make it much shorter.

But I decided to apply Downey’s rule to my own life and see what kind of wasted time I could reclaim.

These are the activities I pledge to wipe out:

• Walking around the house, muttering to myself. If I could put that time to good use learning a foreign language, my next job would be in the U.N.

• Telling the same stories again and again. A big time-waster. For instance, this is the second time I’ve used my daughter’s reaction to the house/marriage advice story in a column.

• Emailing advice columns. The World Wide Web may be vast, but it’s not nearly big enough for some of this stuff.

Greg Kesich is the editorial page editor. He can be contacted at 791-6481, or:

gkesich@pressherald.com