All Things Inspired

If time is money, we need to ask the question how are we spending it?

We all have dreams to chase, accomplishments to achieve, and desires to experience, and we'll get to them just as soon as we're ready. Hold on! Wait a minute! If we wait until we're ready or we think we're ready, we'll most likely be waiting the rest of our lives. Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin coined the term "Time is money". As simple as that phrase is, it is a powerful reminder that wasted time often translates into lost opportunities for not only financial gain, but personal gain within our lives as well. So, if time is money, we need to ask the question, "How are you spending it?"

Let's start this topic off by asking another question, which is more valuable, is it time or is it money? Common sense would say that you can get more money, therefore time is more valuable because you cannot replace it. Once time is spent you cannot get more of it. You might think you can borrow time from the future, but tomorrow is never guaranteed for us. If your life ended today, will you have used your time to its fullest value?

Focusing on the value of our time, we'll examine the follow practical takeaways from this article.

Avoiding toxic time wasters.
Simple steps to prioritizing and organizing your time.
Overview of well know techniques to master your time.

Toxic time wasters are habits or activities that fool us into thinking that we are productive with our time but ultimately just lead to deceptive procrastination. And you know what they say about procrastination, if it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done!

Toxic time wasters can appear as necessary tasks to us in either our work environment or personal time. Some key examples are...

It's not really a deadline is it? - We always think we have more time ahead of a deadline, so we allow other things to disrupt our thinking and push our completion out as far as possible until...surprise, it's due! English author and playwriter Douglas Adams once said, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they fly by!"
Let's have a meeting! - In the post-covid world of video meetings, it seems like we think we should have a meeting for every little thing. These often lead to unorganized, poor structured meetings with no definitive agenda. A concise and well structured email can often eliminate unnecessary meetings. That is unless you enjoy massive amounts of meetings. In that case you may want to schedule a meeting to discuss what additional meetings you should schedule!
Are you a master multitasker? - We used to label this as an effective and talented characteristic in someone. However, the more tasks that get added to this process actually results in reduced accuracy and ultimately cost more time to complete all items in total.
Scroll baby scroll! - How many hours do you spend on social media each day? I'm not criticizing this at all, because I spend my fair share on it as well. But if we really examine the time we devote to this, could we possibly trim some time from this activity to devote to other more useful activities, and still enjoy the benefits of social media?
Do you attend the water cooler chats? - If you work in an office environment, do you often find yourself heading for the coffee pot or water cooler dispenser in your breakroom? While this can be an opportunity to interact with co-workers and discuss creative ideas, more times than not it leads to a complaint session, engagement in office gossip, and depending on how much you drink, excessive tinkle time!

As you work to reduce or eliminate the toxic time wasters, let take a look at some simple steps to prioritizing and organizing your time management skills. Here's some points to consider...

Plan each day. Determine your priorities for the day and focus only on those priorities. What must be accomplished today? If you have time left, what addition things would you like to try to get done? Prioritize with the critical things at the top of the list. Do the difficult tasks first, while you have your greatest energy.
Whether you use a traditional portfolio planner with a calendar or a digital calendar on your email platform, try scheduling your task by day and hour. The more you develop this habit the more likely you will begin to value your time as you would any other important appointment. If there is an important task or project that requires your utmost concentration, schedule time on your calendar and let nothing disrupt that time!
Don't be reactive to incoming emails or unnecessary meeting invites. Schedule time to review emails and be selective on what meetings you devote your time to.
Consider prioritizing your schedule of tasks by their value. After all we are talking about "time is money". And until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything meaningful with it. How do you put value on your priorities? Assign a value, which could be time itself, money involved or at stake, energy, your effort both physically and mentally, and the discipline it will take on your part to complete it.

Understanding the toxic time wasters and understanding how to prioritize and organize are key to improving your efforts to value your time as money. To help you find a technique to help you navigate this process, we'll touch on some well known techniques that have helped many people master their time. I would encourage you to investigate these programs further on your own and find one that appeals to your style. We'll also, from time to time, provide more in-depth specifics about these type of techniques through our subscriber extras. If you're not yet a subscriber to All Things Inspired, consider enrolling in this benefit (you'll find the link in a window at the bottom of this screen). Here's a quick overview of some techniques available...

Eisenhower Matrix - this is a popular technique used by many. This helps you focus on what really matters most by urgency and importance. It seeks to prioritize by determining which of four quadrants your tasks falls into. The quadrants being Important and Urgent, Not Important but Urgent, Important but Not Urgent, and Not Important and Not Urgent.
Timeboxing - this helps eliminating "multi-tasking" and distractions. Basically this is planning your schedule through assigning times in your calendar, as we mentioned in the prior section.
The ABCDE Method - this ensures your focus is on high impact tasks. With "A" being the most important and "E" the least. Or also consider the "E" to stand for eliminate.
Eat the Frog - this guides you to tackle the hardest tasks first, while your energy is greatest. It's a momentum building type technique.
1-3-5 Rule - this simplifies your daily tasks management into determining what is the one most important task of the day. Then prioritize three more tasks into what is considered medium tasks, and finally five other things that can be done, time allowing.
MoSCoW Method - I must admit that prior to my research, I had not heard of this one. But it is quite simple and similar to the others. The letters capitalized in the title (M,S,C & W) represent four buckets that you categorize your tasks into. Those are Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Won't Have. It basically prioritizes by urgency and necessity.

Again, I encourage you to further examine these methods and find one that helps you become a master of time management. Apply the principles and develop the habits we've outlined in this article.

When we describe time as money, what we need to understand is that time is the only currency that we spend without ever knowing what our balance is. As we said earlier, we are not guaranteed tomorrow, meaning that money is infinite, but our time is not. So, with the time you have right now, spend it wisely! I'll leave you with a quote from Dale Carnegie in which he said, "Remember that today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday!"

Be inspired! Inspire others!