It’s an ancient observation that while time is clearly the most valuable resource we have by far, much more valuable than money, we don’t tend to treat it that way, and we tend to throw it away much more easily than we would ever throw away our money.
So I imagine, what would it be like if we were to really treat time with the kind of intense focus, deep study, and commitment, and tracking, and technology, really, that we apply to money? So the first part seems to be quite clear, that clearly time is more valuable than money, because it is so finite.
There’s no way to get it back once it’s gone, and the end of time means the end of life.
So clearly, it doesn’t matter how much money we have; if we’re out of time in life, the money is useless.
It’s so much more valuable.
Like to compare being young and poor versus being old and rich: the value of being young and poor is so much higher than the value of being old and rich.
Because being young, having that wealth of time available, is of greater value than anything wealth can buy.
We need that time in order to even enjoy wealth.
So time is our most valuable resource of all.
And yet, the second part of the observation, that we spend it so frivolously, so easily, in ways we would never spend our money: that also seems to be clear.
How easily can we spend an hour doing things that we later consider to be a waste of time? And maybe an hour is just the beginning.
We can easily waste away many hours, and we can just spend time doing things that are of no consequence.
And we do it kind of easily.
Like maybe somebody’s talking to us, and we can spend an hour arguing about something that is really kind of pointless.
We’ve spent an hour of our lives doing that.
And we wouldn’t spend- I mean, what’s the value? It’s hard to make a dollar equivalent.
But would we spend $50 on something that’s a complete waste? Would we spend a hundred dollars to have a boring conversation with somebody about nothing that leads nowhere? We wouldn’t spend our money the same way we spend our time.
So imagine applying that same kind of precision of dealing with money to time.
Like the financial industry, the art of finance: imagine applying that to time.
You could be a time banker, someone who appreciates the details of how time works and how to use it to the same level of sophistication that a banker understands the technology of money and how to use it.
You can be an investor with your time.
You can think about different time products that you could have.
Just like there are financial products, like you have your options, your derivatives, your futures, and you have all these different kinds of packages of financial options.
And imagine applying that with time.
Imagine tracking your time on these charts and doing technical analysis on the trends of time.
Imagine budgeting your time, even, and just the simplest thing.
Just budgeting and tracking, just like an income an expense statement, just like a net worth statement, you can apply this to time.
So of course, it can’t translate exactly, because one of the biggest differences is that money can be traded, but time cannot.
So you can’t sell somebody time, or certainly you cannot buy time from anybody else, at least not in a direct way.
We have this time that we have, and that’s it.
So it’s not about trying to make more of it, trying to make time grow the way that we can make money grow.
But instead, it’s all about using that time.
How do we apply it? How do we choose to apply this time that we have towards what we want to achieve? And that’s where all this technology, this art and science of managing our time and using our time and leading with our time, how that can be applied.
And time is something that we all have.
We don’t know how much we have, and we don’t know how much we will have.
We don’t know when it will disappear.
But maybe that’s the same with money, too, because there is no guarantee that any money we have won’t disappear.
We have this time we have, and it’s up to us to choose what we do with it.
So why not approach it with the same kind of seriousness and in-depth focus, precision, and technology that we might apply to managing finances? So I’d be very curious to hear any ideas about how we might be able to go about doing this.
How can we bring that financial mindset to the use of our time?
#timebanking #timevsmoney #timemanagement