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I think miles and points are one area where you don’t have to spend hours per day to get great results like flying some of the world’s nicest First Class products or taking your family of four on vacation for pennies on the dollar.

You could probably cut the amount of time you spend on this hobby to 20% of your current input and still get 80% of the results. (Not that you’d necessarily want to do all of that because this is fun!)

Here’s are four ways I’d shave off huge amounts of time, while still getting most of the results.

1. Award Wallet

This one is a no-brainer. Stop tracking all your miles and points account separately, and track them all in one place, Award Wallet.

I use it to track balances, keep my passwords all in one place in case I do need to sign directly into a loyalty account, and track my expiration dates. I head to Award Wallet every time I decide to stay in a hotel, and I want to remind myself of my hotel point balances before I begin searching.

Full post on using Award Wallet.

2. Award Booking Service

If you plan to use the MileValue Award Booking Service, you don’t really need to read posts on redeeming miles except for the absolute basics, so you can direct us what you want.

• Basics of Redeeming American Airlines Miles
• Basics of Redeeming United Miles
• Basics of Redeeming Delta Miles
• Basics of Redeeming US Airways Miles
• Basics of Redeeming British Airways Avios
• Basics of Redeeming Alaska Airlines Miles
• Basics of Redeeming Southwest, JetBlue, Virgin America, and Frontier Miles
• Basics of Redeeming Singapore, Aeroplan, Flying Blue, ANA, Lufthansa, and Korean Miles

Not having to keep up with all the rules of every program and where to search all those airlines’ partners will be a huge time saving, and you’ll still get as good of an award (probably better.)

3. Twitter List

Instead of checking your favorite blogs every day, you can instead follow your favorite bloggers on Twitter, and put all of us on a Twitter List.

That way, you can scan all of our headlines for the day, and click on only the topics that interest you.

Here’s how to set up a Twitter list.

Click on all the links from @milevalue though because I am a terrible tweet writer, but a better post writer. 😉

4. Don’t Manufacture Spending

Don’t get sucked in unless you want to spend a lot of time driving, tracking receipts, recording the movement of your money, and keeping up to date with all the latest techniques on manufactured spending.

There are so many cards that have a 50,000 mile sign up bonus right now. Open a few of those, and you’ll see hundreds of thousands of miles from minimal effort.

I only manufacture a little bit of spending, I do it in the ways I find easiest, and I only do it to meet minimum spending requirements to get more sign up bonuses than I otherwise could. To me, this is the low hanging fruit of manufactured spending.

Your Take

What are some ways you greatly reduce the time you spend on this hobby without hurting your results much?