What’s the real value of your time?
Imagine this: every morning, you wake up with $1,440 credited to your bank account. You can spend it however you like, but there’s a catch – if you don’t use it all by the end of the day, it disappears. The next day, you start fresh with another $1,440. But one day, this will stop. No more daily deposits.
Knowing this, how would you spend that money? Would you plan each dollar carefully, making sure none of it goes to waste. After all, money is precious. Or, would you be carefree and not worry how you used it, as you hoped the day it stopped never came?
But you know what’s even more precious? Time. You can save money; you can put it in another account, so it is there for your future. But you can’t do that with Time. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
Every day, you get the gift of 1,440 minutes. How do you choose to spend those? Unlike money, most of us don’t meticulously plan our time. We might budget our finances but often let our time slip away.
Why is that? When we are younger, time stretches out in front of us, and we feel we have so much of it ahead of us, we don’t need to worry about it. Often at this stage of life we view our money the same. We have plenty of life ahead of us to build a career, saving for retirement is a distant thought as well. If I look back on my 20’s, I know I let quite a lot of time and money pass through my hands with very little thought.
As we mature, time seems to go faster, retirement is a more of a consideration and how we spend our time becomes more important as well. We only have so many summers left, lets make the most of them, we say to our friends and family. We also hope that we can pack in all that we want to do before either our body or mind gives up on us. We also want our money to last at least as long as we do.
Whether your work for someone else, or you have your own business, time is money. There is a perception that business owners get more money for their time. For some business owners this is true, but for many small business owners it isn’t.
The time you have available to spend working in and on your business is limited. After you allow for sleeping, eating, showering, and spending time with loved ones, there are only so many hours left in the day to focus on yourself or your business. Wasting time on unimportant tasks means less time for what you do best. This is where the art of delegation comes in. When it was just me in the business, I did everything from answering the phone, writing newsletters, social media, following up emails, the invoicing as well as meeting clients and doing the work that paid the bills. As much as I tried to work with Covey’s four Quadrants, (urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent, but not important and not urgent, not important), I seemed to spend most of my time chasing my tail as everything became urgent. It was exhausting!
So, you decide to take the next step, that may be an employee to help share the workload of meeting customers needs. It might be someone to help with the administration of the business. Often, it’s getting your partner to help with the admin (whether it’s their strength or not). You are now starting to leverage your time. What can happen at this stage is your income goes down as you are paying others to do the tasks that you used to do yourself. The trade-off is in theory you have gained a few more hours to have a life. But often the reality is that you haven’t. Other tasks pop up, and those precious hours disappear somewhere else.
As a business owner, I think we can set ourselves up with unrealistic expectations of what we can achieve in our 1440 minutes each day. I do an exercise with clients who want to start a business. It helps set some realistic expectations about just how many hours they have available to generate income in their business. After deducting, sleeping, eating, and the other necessities of life, we look at family time. What age are your children, how much support do you have, or are you going to have to do the school pickup and drop off? What about school holidays? If you are starting out as a one-man band and are doing everything, how many hours will the business admin and marketing take? What about quoting for work, which might mean visiting prospective customers, then following those quotes up. Our 1440 minutes are disappearing rapidly, and we haven’t even earnt $1.00 yet! We finally get to a realistic number of hours you can spend in your business generating income, and it is probably quite a lot less than you thought.
This is where we match the hours to the $. How much income do you need to generate in those hours to meet the needs of your life? And how quickly can the business you are wanting to start achieve that for you? It often comes down to how long are you prepared to sacrifice your personal needs (both time and money) to get to that point. Doing an exercise like this, can help validate the decision you are making to go into business for yourself, particularly if you are leaving working for someone else to do it.
It is also the starting point of setting some goals in your business in terms of the revenue you need to generate. Then you can set some milestones along the way so you don’t lose too much precious time chasing something that may never have been achievable in the first place.
If you are working for someone else, I would encourage you to do a time audit, you know what time you clock on, and clock off. But what are you doing with the rest of your 1440 minutes? Are you making the most of the time you have every day to do the things and spend the time with those who are important to you? Or are you ‘too busy’ (doing what) and you are putting it off until another day.
Valuing your time and your money will give you both quality and quantity of life and experiences to make your feel richer every day.