Time As An Investment

Drawing a parallel between time and money is popular and almost cliche. We all know that time is a valuable resource and one that we can’t earn back, yet very few people actually act like they realize how precious and valuable their time is.

I am as guilty of this as anyone. When I look back at how I invest my time I see clear areas that I don’t feel great about. YouTube and Facebook being two of the big ones. I learn some new things and get some momentary enjoyment out of spending that time, but not nearly as much as I would if I read a good book instead.

Most people aren’t great at saving money, but it is still much more common for someone to have a well laid out budget and a system in place for saving $$’s than it is to hear someone who has a strict budget for their time.

In our work, most of us don’t take an active approach to trying to save time. We don’t check in with an account balance at the end of each month to see how we spent our time that past month. But if you have work expenses, you almost certainly keep very precise track of those.

Part of this is because keeping track of time is harder than checking out your bank statement, but a big part of it is simply taking time for granted. Time is passing whether we like it or not, so it is easier to pay less attention to it. You can stop spending so much money and feel the excitement of a growing savings account, but with time you can’t change the fact that you are spending it every day, you can only get better at spending it in ways that create more fulfillment.

Something that has been a big help to me in improving the way I invest my time is the app RescueTime which tracks my computer activity during the day and sends me a report at the end of each week showing how I spent my time. It is not as precise as a bank statement, but it is a great reminder of how I am investing my time and a cue to spend it better in the upcoming week.

Another self-help cliche is to use some reminder of your incoming death to make you appreciate your time more. We’ve all have heard the advice to appreciate our limited time over and over again, and we all appreciate it intellectually, but still struggle to act in accordance with the knowledge of our mortality. As cliche as it sounds, keeping some reminder of the limits of your time on earth is a great way to focus your attention on how you are spending your time and get better returns on your spending as a result.