Placing a value on your time

- In my course on time management fundamentals I help people identify their two most valuable activities and to put a rough value of their time spent in these activities. I want to explore this with you in a simplified way. Simply take whatever money that you make per year from all your sources and divide it by 2080. Why 2080 because that's roughly how many hours there are in an average 40 hour work week over the course of the year.

It's just a way to standardize your value per hour. For instance, if I said I was making $50,000 per year and I divided that by 2080 that means that my time is worth $24 an hour. I know that in real life things don't always neatly align that way but it gives you and me a starting point. This number sets up a question we can ask ourselves for prioritizing tasks. The question is if I hired someone else to do this task for me would I make money from it? Here's an example that isn't perfect for everyone but it illustrates the point.

Imagine that you're in a sales position. You have an important meeting tomorrow and you know that for some reason when you show up they're going to see your car and right now your car looks dirty. It's important for you to make a good first impression. So you have two options for getting this car clean before you get to the meeting. Option one, you clean the car yourself. Option two, you put the car through a wash to have someone else clean it for you, what should you do? Let's say that you estimate it's going to take you a half an hour to clean this car.

We already determined your value per hour is $24. So in this example the time that you would have spent on cleaning your car is worth approximately $12. This also means that if it's going to cost me less than $12 to have someone clean the car for me it would be a better investment of my time and my money to have someone else clean it for me. Now this only works if I reinvest this time gained into something valuable.

So rather than getting out the bucket and the hose and soaping down the car, I pay someone else to do that and then use that new time to set up sales appointments or to do things that are high value. There are two exceptions to this rule. First, if cleaning the car didn't have a direct impact on my income, if I was just doing it at home and didn't reinvest the time, then it may just end up costing me money. Also, maybe I'm someone who gets enjoyment out of washing cars, then I might choose to do it myself.

From a time management perspective, what I'm suggesting is that you at least ask the question could I earn more money by having someone else do this particular task for me. This is the perspective that I've seen many successful and productive leaders use to not only get more time but to increase the value of their time as they progress through their careers.