Time Value

I often hear – and sometimes it’s coming from my own mouth – complaints about not having enough time. We make excuses for things not getting done because we just “don’t have the time.” And we assume if somehow we had more time, things would be a lot different for us.

I studied the lives of some very accomplished people and did some pretty strenuous calculations to come up with the following data: Elon Musk is given 86,400 seconds every day. Warren Buffet receives 1440 minutes every day. Bill Gates has been able to consistently obtain 10,080 minutes each week. Oprah has the benefit of utilizing about 720 hours in a typical month. And know what, you do too! With a net worth of $85 billion dollars, the only thing Warren Buffett doesn’t have any more of than you do is time (and maybe hair).

Time is an interesting commodity. Regardless of wealth, power or social standing, we are all gifted with the same amount each day. The richest person on the planet cannot purchase more time and the poorest, most destitute individual cannot sell his.

I am not saying I agree socially or politically with any or all of the folks I just listed but I think we can all agree: they are some very impressive, talented and exceptionally driven people. How come Elon Musk has time to send a car into space but you don’t have time for a quick run or to work on a household budget?

We all have the gift of 24 hours a day, which breaks down into 1440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. That’s it. No more, no less and there is nothing you can do to change it. The only variable we can control is the value produced in those seconds, minutes and hours. Unfortunately, we allow that value to be consistently sapped from our day with flawed priorities and poor time management.

Although he invented it, Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn’t spend a lot of time scrolling Facebook. I’d be surprised if Oprah spends much of her afternoon watching daytime television and Bill Gates likely doesn’t play a lot of computer games. But you and me, we allow so many distractions into our lives and the worth of our time suffers dramatically. What’s worse, we then blame “time” as the culprit when things fall apart.

It’s impossible to fix any situation without first identifying the problem. If Time isn’t the villain, who is? You see, the problem isn’t that you don’t have enough time in your day; the issue is you don’t have enough day in your time. There is too much being spent on the periphery and when it comes to the things that really matter, you come up short. And that falls on your watch. You are the villain. Time is fixed but value is not. Add more value to your time.