Why you should spend your time
like you spend your money
When you start thinking of your precious time in this way, it becomes just that. Precious.
There’s a popular saying that “time is money.” Most people take this to mean that if we charge our time out at an hourly rate, by wasting an hour we just blew $80.
While this may or may not be true, the meaning of the quote goes much deeper. Perhaps if we rephrase it as “spend your time like you spend your money” we begin to understand how important it is to spend time wisely.
Using this re-framing, it makes sense to track where our time goes. We can set up a weekly time budget, try not to waste it, treat time as something we own and control. By thinking of time like money, we begin to spend it on people we love — but don’t let them spend it for you — and of course we then put some time aside for emergencies and special occasions.
When you start thinking of your precious time in this way, it becomes just that. Precious.
The only thing you can’t do with time is bank it, but the good news is, you do get to spend it all over again every 24-hours.
Work to a budget
Even the most rudimentary money-management starts with a budget, and yet few people budget time in the same way. Budgeting time is easy, because we all have the same 24 hours to spend every day.
Whenever I sit down with my second-year design students to work out their time budgets, it never ceases to amaze me that few have ever opened their calendar app, or own a physical diary. Too many people hold all their appointments in their head and then wonder why they miss things or run out of time.
The simplest way to budget time is to lay out on the calendar any fixed and repeating appointments. Once they are on the schedule, you can block out time for eating, travel, sleep, exercise, family time and so on. Then the remaining empty blocks of time are yours to spend as you see fit.
You can take your budget to a more detailed level when you allocate time blocks at certain times of the day to maximize your energy levels and productivity. I always make sure to block out time in the morning for productive work. I only schedule e-mails and other reactionary tasks in the afternoon when I know I will have less creative energy.
Track where you spend it
Time, like money, is all too easy to spend. We often get to the end of the day and wonder where the time went.
When we spend money willy-nilly, there is usually a paper trail to help us track where it all went — either receipts or credit card statements. Time however, doesn’t leave a trail and endless hours can be frittered away playing games, watching television or checking our ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.
The answer then, is to consciously track your time. Rescue Time is a fantastic way to track your online and computer usage, or if you spend most of your time away from the computer, you can use an analog paper tracker.
It can be tedious to track your time, but well worth sticking at for a few days to see where you spend your time.
Until I tracked my time, I thought I spent more time designing than I did. Rescue Time showed me that social media occupied a third of my day and I only spent two hours in Photoshop. This shocked me and so I make a much more conscious effort to spend less time on social media now, and focus on being productive during the times I’ve allocated in my budget.
Facebook breaks are like those expensive coffees. When you track them and add them up, you might not like to discover how much they are costing you every week.
Spend it on things of value to you
If we bought every little thing that advertisers tried to sell us, we would end up with piles of stuff we don’t need and empty wallets.
I would like to think we humans have enough self-control to resist buying things we don’t need, because we understand the importance of keeping money for things we value.
As a result, it is possible to watch 20 or 30 advertisements during the course of a television watching session and not buy a single thing. How is it that we are unable to resist similar temptations to spend our time?
Instead of spending time on things of value, we allow outside events to distract us from the task at hand, or hijack it completely.
Don’t let others spend it for you
Money is harder to fritter away than time believe it or not, though credit cards, subscriptions and direct debit make it easier these days.
If someone took your money out of your wallet, dollar-by-dollar, you would most likely stop them, and get angry about it. Minute-by-minute, the television, chatty workmates, quick favors, notifications and games all conspire to steal your time in the same way, but we seem not to notice. Time, unlike money, is spent for you, without you realizing it.
People who call to spend 1–2 hours on the telephone. The boss who puts an urgent job on your desk after lunch. The child who needs taking to sport on the weekend. The friends who drop round unannounced with beer. The co-worker who stands at your door gossiping for 20 minutes. If any of these people reached into your wallet and took all the money they found in there, you would stop them.
If people don’t have your permission to spend your time, then they are stealing it. So why do we let them?
It can be quite confronting to think of your time in this way. If you are busy and your time is precious, people spending your time for you is the same as stealing money from people who don’t have any. That said, even people with plenty of money don’t take too kindly to people stealing from them either, so everyone should view time in this way. It is precious. Don’t let people spend it for you, take ownership and give it freely, but only on your terms.
Keep some in reserve
There are times when you will have to spend all weekend with a distressed friend, or spend the day in the emergency room when your child needs stitches for a skateboard mishap. There might also be times when your friend scores a free ticket to that thing you love and it is tomorrow night — the same night you planned to write that essay.
If there is no spare room in your time budget, these distressing or exciting moments become more stressful than they need to be.
There needs to be some room to manoeuvre in your time budget. Build in buffer zones and leave some room to move. If you don’t need to spend your time on other people, then you get to spend it on yourself.
Treating time the same way as you treat money can be life-changing. In some ways, time is even more precious than money because you can always get more money, but once time is spent, it is gone forever.
Even if you don’t make any changes to your time management strategy, I encourage you to spend the next week simply observing how you spend your time. Observe also where and how other people try and spend it for you.
