Clarify Your Desire and Prepare for World Domination
By: Chad Prevost
Tags: Self Improvement, Inspiration, Life, Life Lessons, Psychology

Time Is Your Most Precious Resource

There are two costs in everything you do. The first is the actual cost in money of an item, activity, or event. The second is less tangible, but more critical, the effective cost of your time. You are constantly making choices which values the use of your time. Choosing to read this article, and how much you will engage with the processes it suggests, for instance.

Let’s do a quick breakdown: There are 168 hours in a week. If you sleep the normal amount needed for healthy functioning of eight hours a night, that’s 56 hours, or nearly one-third of your total time spent sleeping. If you work five days a week from 9–5 (40 hours), you are already up to nearly 100 of your total hours and you haven’t commuted, showered, eaten, or spent any time with anyone other than presumably your colleagues.

Not only are those 40 hours a lot of time in aggregate (and it’s unlikely those hours are all actually spent working purposefully), you are likely spending a majority of your premium time working at your job. Of course, this is great if you love your job, but if you don’t, and most people don’t, then you are selling your best hours for your salary or hourly wage. No wonder so many people are burning out.

According to Gallup’s annual survey of the American Workforce in 2017, 70 percent of employees in the United States are disengaged at work. This number has remained relatively unchanged since Gallup began systematically studying employee engagement in 2000. Most people are just getting by, resigning themselves to a job they don’t like, and spending the best hours of their years and lives doing obligatory work.

In Advice to a Young Tradesman, Benjamin Franklin wrote:

“Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, it ought not to be reckoned the only expense; he hath really spent or thrown away five shillings besides.”

Franklin is saying that if you earn 10 shillings per day, spending half the day doing something aside from work is basically throwing away five shillings. More important is that he’s quantifying the value of your time outside of work.

Every decision is the result of a mental calculus, of comparing the implicit costs, or “opportunity costs,” and the price tag. Whatever seems to have the most relative value generally wins. If you had greater clarity on your desire (which inevitably leads to more purpose), you would know how to direct your time and take advantage of your most important commodity.

Time gets more valuable as we get older because it has the appearance of moving faster, and we have less and less of it as each day passes. Time seems to move slower when we are experiencing new things. When we continually experience the same things through habitual patterns, we look back and wonder where all the time went.

In the corporate world, your compensation is based on how much experience you have and how valuable you are to the company, not how valuable your time is to you. You are paid based on your market value.

The market doesn’t care about you. If you don’t value your own time, no one else will.