Time is money

How many times have you heard the phrase “Time is money?”  On the other hand, how many times have you whiled away the hours doing something unimportant?

Think of it this way; you’ll always have the opportunity to make more money, but once time has been spent, it’s gone forever. When you think of time as a commodity and all of your actions as investments, it changes the way you approach every day decisions.

If you study self-made billionaires and millionaires, you’ll see one common trait; they value their time and choose to use it effectively.

The rest of us though (or should I say most women) take our time at everything! At the shops, we take too long analysing the brands, looking at new products and comparing prices. Even though we have a shopping list, we spend 20 minutes or more on something that would ordinarily take a man half the time or even less!

We spend too much time getting ready each day and are almost always a few minutes late for functions. Sometimes, we visit our hairdresser more than once a week; spending not less than an hour at each visit, even if all we want is a simple wash and flat iron!

One other thing I have noted that once we have the time, most of us spend it doing things of no value. After the housework’s done and lunch is made, we will most likely head out to bridal showers, engagements, weddings, church meetings, a friend’s house for some hot gossip, window shopping or shopping.

We give ourselves too little time for introspect and strategising on how we can improve ourselves. Perhaps this translates into the office and renders us undependable or even ineffective. We take our time at everything, which is why sometimes we take too long to make it into the board room and we take too long to get rich!

It is against all the principles advocated by well-known self improvement books, such as Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People.

Habit number three; the principles of personal management, touches upon (surprise surprise) time management. Covey says we ought to divide our activities into four; urgent and important, urgent but not important, not urgent but important and not urgent, not important. Slot in all the activities you have to be effective, we have to learn to prioritise the important things in our lives first. Everything else should not enjoy too much of our time!

“Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”—Scott Peck