Time is Life
Beyond 'Time is Money': Recognizing the True Value of Your Hours
I started my career as a lawyer at a large Atlanta law firm. The firm billed my clients for each minute I spent working for them. The expectation was that each year I would spend a bare minimum of 2,000 hours working for my clients.Â
The message was crystal clear. Work hard, very hard. To bill 2,000 hours a year, I had to work a minimum of 55 hours a week. The firm’s philosophy was Time is Money.
It’s an insidious message that infected my brain. Every activity I did now had a price tag on it. Every hour with my kids, my wife, or friends was an hour I couldn’t bill clients. And the clock of required billable hours was always ticking. Tick tock, tick tock.
The problem is that the principle that time equals money is incomplete.Â
At some level, Time is Money. In our capitalistic economy, we work for money. We work for someone else, or we work for ourselves. In many cases, the more time we spend working, the more money we earn. Â
Money is valuable because it allows us to buy things and experiences. When we don’t have much money, we focus our expenditures on things we need such as food, shelter, clothing, health care, and transportation. If we are fortunate and our income grows, we purchase things and experiences we want such as vacations, restaurant dinners or gifts to show our family and friends how much we love them. If we are extremely fortunate, we purchase things we wish for such as designer clothes, front-row concert seats, or even a first-class plane ticket to Europe.
But the value of time extends far beyond what money can buy us. No matter how long we live, each of us exists for a relatively brief span of time. When life is over, our time is up.
Time is LIFE.
When we accept the premise that Time is Money, we often forget about the priceless things in life that money can’t buy: values, personal growth, friendships, meaning, purpose, faith, stillness, and most of all, love.Â
In the pursuit of more money, we may give up valuable opportunities to experience these intangibles—spending time with our children or grandchildren, celebrating a friend’s good fortune, volunteering to help others in a meaningful way, pursuing a hobby or even just reading a great book in the porch swing on a summer day.
What is our time worth? How do we figure out how hard to work and how much money to earn? There is no one-size-fits-all approach. The answers depend on our life circumstances. It is really important if you want a more meaningful life to spend time considering these worthy questions. Sit in stillness and ponder your answers and your priorities. Ask your loved ones and your trusted friends as well as your financial advisors. Think some more.
The challenge is that our money-centric culture favors the most lucrative path, telling us that more money is always better. That is simply not true. Sometimes the better path is to work harder and earn more money, and sometimes the right answer is to work less, earn less, and have more free time.Â
Contrary to conventional wisdom, success is not about who earns the most money—or dies with the most money. Money is simply a measure of your financial success. Truly successful people who lead exceptional lives are those who inevitably made difficult choices that enabled them to spend their limited time wisely.
Time really is Life.
Until our next conversation,
David
Small Steps & Worthy Questions
If you could magically create another 10 hours a week of free time, or increase your income by 20%, which would you choose? What would you do with the extra time or money?
What would you like to do to add more meaning, joy, or fun to your life? Would additional time or money be most helpful? How much time or money would you need to make progress?
What aspect of your life is not going as well as you’d like? Is this an area where additional time or money would be helpful? How much would you need to make meaningful progress?
I worked at the same law firm. Clearly, as David taught me, time is our most scarce resource as compared to money.
The trick, I believe, is to generate more time for non work activities by learning how to focus your career/work as narrowly as reasonable and to pursue that focused career/ work in a team allocated tasks structure so that you and you team members can perform as time efficiently as reasonably possible.
This approach does not create time, but allows you to allocate more time to non career/work matters and also enhances through put productivity and therefore revenue.
When I was 25 and working at that same large law firm, the amount of time left in my life seemed so great that I would've taken the 20% higher income in a minute. At 67, with "enough" money, and being all too aware of the reality of mortality, I'd choose the time. But I also tell my kids, "You're young and strong, so work long and hard to achieve the benefits you desire." The value of time may be relative. If so, because time is life, how we spend our life-time is relative to the time of our life.