Do You Invest Your Time Wisely?

I’m sure you are careful when it comes to investing money. You research the opportunities, watch out for fraud, calculate the risk, estimate the ROI.

Why are you not so careful when investing your time?

People can spend hours watching meaningless TV shows, participating in meaningless conversations or reading meaningless stuff. Everyone knows time is money but almost no one really values time the same way as money.

Knowing the Value of Time

There are many ways to evaluate your time. You can use your hourly rate (simplest option). If you don’t get paid by the hour you may try to evaluate the opportunities your work creates in the future and their financial value. Entrepreneurs do this all the time, and although it’s not always accurate, it’s a way to know the value of your time. For example I often see entrepreneurs saying they are looking to create projects that in the long run will return $5,000 for each hour of their time.

$5,000 for one hour.

This would make a million per month if you were paid by the hour.

No matter whether you make $20 or $5,000 per hour, you should know the value of your time. And next time when you decide to research for a $20 cheaper phone, figure out the time you spend in this research. Don’t be surprised – very often it’s going to take a lot more than one hour.

Managing Your Time

I’m not saying that you should work all the time. Not at all. Taking rest, and sleep, and having fun is important for all of us. I’d say it’s far more important than all the money in the world. You shouldn’t reduce such activities because of greed for money.

But you should definitely watch out the time you spend not for fun, but misleading yourself that you are doing something important. Stuff like research for saving five cents, taking a stupid side project than will bring you $50, writing low quality content for the only sake to win $0.05 from Adsense… These are the things you should avoid.

You should learn prioritization and other time management techniques in order to invest your time in the best way.

Time is even more important than money because you can’t generate it – so why are you so much more focused and careful when investing money and so careless when investing your time?