Time is money, they say, when talking about how much it costs for a very busy and important person to attend to a task. Have you considered that it is also very true for you personally at any level of your earnings? This concept might be confusing at first, but hopefully by the end of this article I will be able to convince you that your time is as valuable as anyone else's. I will also provide practical ways to benefit from proper allocation of your time to increase chances of your success.
Foundation
For the sake of a good example, let’s assume that we are born with zero knowledge of the world. There are of course some built-in skills and intuitions, but overall none of external knowledge has entered our brains just yet.
We then go through a lot of parental and formal schooling to get the foundation of our world view. Parents and our immediate tribe play a big role setting this up for ourselves. Schools also play an outsized role, but that education is a bit more structured and sometimes we get to select what we want to learn. Some combination of parental, tribal and schooling makes your world view of what it is today. Let’s see how we can grow and change from here using proper time allocation.
Now - is the best time to decide what to do with your time. Later is worse, because you will have less of it. You will get busy and those spare moments will become rarer. But enough with the pressure! What can we do about that?
We can consider our time as a resource that, if properly allocated, will yield dividends in many ways. Just like a financial portfolio with different asset classes and investment horizons yields returns, so you can get the same from allocating your time in interesting and productive ways. The main principal driving any successful investment portfolio is diversification. The idea that if you spread your resources over a greater number of opportunities the likelihood of success is higher and probability of the risk is lower. We can apply this thinking to our selection of career, classes, friends we make etc. Let’s go over what our Time Asset Classes could be and how to benefit from the allocation.
Time Asset Classes
Networking and Relationships - as you probably already know we are all different people, from various backgrounds and human potentials. It is hard to know ahead of time who will be a good friend and who will become an important decision-maker. Sometimes early signals can be indicative of an individual's future success, and sometimes they absolutely cannot. There are correlations and causations, but the intuition says that the greater and broader our network is, the better. In such a case, we are more likely to learn about opportunities from various spots of humanity and the more skillful we will become at communicating with different kinds of people. Network takes time to build, but the investment yields the highest dividends over time. It is your call to decide which relationships should go deeper and which should stay on the surface level. It is an art!
Skills - while skills are important money makers and we get a lot of schooling in relation to that, they tend to fade over time. We can take refresher classes to keep ourselves current, or luckily we keep up to date through regular practice. This is how we become in demand as professionals and what we get paid for. Over time you may also start moving away from the skills that you use for work and yearning for something new. To anticipate this situation, now is the best time to expose yourself to learning skills that you otherwise would not have considered. Something to think about is that it takes many decades to become perfect in a specific skill and in my experience only a few classes to reach 30-40% effectiveness. This way by the time and if you decide to switch your work, you will already have the foundation for what to try next. It is like insurance for your job satisfaction. Go as broad as you can and get at least one class in each industry or practice.
Experiences - as we get older, we get less and less time to spend on traveling and trying new experiences and then a point arrives when we are too old to travel at all. Experiences generate great memories and help us connect with others who have similar ones. Those memories become an important factor in our life satisfaction and the more diverse and plentiful we have the happier we get. So get yourself out there and try new things!
Languages and Culture - Languages and cultures are like bubbles of isolation, while truly self-sufficient for the immediate context, they don’t necessarily shed a great amount of light onto other cultures. If you already know another language, you know what I mean. You have a unique skill of evaluating the environment around you from two or more viewpoints. This skill generally leads to valuable insights and saves your opinion from prejudice. Learning other cultures can offer unique concepts and problem solving methods that do not exist in your own culture. Spending time to pierce the bubble will teach you valuable skills in many parts of life.
Broad/Deep - Most of the suggestions that I have shared had to do something with broadening and diversifying your time allocation. I will contradict myself slightly now and will challenge you to select some of the allocations to be deep time investments. It is important to understand how it feels to be fully immersed in a particular area. It is a diverse experience of its own sort compared to doing something only at the surface level. Tread lightly as this is probably the only time when you will have to make a good decision as the investment into deep skill building takes a good chunk of time. But don’t worry too much as the skills you learn will likely be suitable for transfer learning into any other deep practice you choose later.
Not doing anything - Doing nothing will add an important contrast for doing something. It sounds humorous, but when you strip all the responsibilities of the moment and plunge yourself into the void of relaxation, you tend to help yourself to prioritize what is valuable and what is not. These are generally effective times for reflection and deciding on what to do next.
Conclusion
After some time of practicing diligent time allocation you will start noticing changes. Through greater exposure and practice you will get new data. This will help you guide on whether you want to continue or to change your time investment philosophy. Managing time properly is an important aspect of your life and I hope that I have convinced you to use your time more wisely!