Truth or Myth: Money is more Valuable than Time

byDadaz123

2K followers

2 years ago

What do you think? If you take it at face value, money appears to be more valuable than time just because you can use it to meet most of your immediate and long term needs. But, if I may ask, what resource do you use to make money? Time, of course. Even a menial worker computes his wages in the number of hours he has worked for the day.

But can you use money to buy yourself time? You can but not exactly in the same one-to-one way that you can use time to make money. You can calculate how much money you will make in a window of time especially if you are holding a paid position. You are not able to calculate accurately how much a length of your time will be worth.

Time is a Finite Resource

If you are terminally ill, would you ask for more time or more money? For instance, if you are on the verge of death and someone asks if you would have more money or more time on earth. What would you choose? We all know what the answer will be. You would ask for more time of course, not more money.

The biggest problem with time is the fact that it is a finite resource. Unlike money, you can not make more time. There are only 24 hours, about 1,440 minutes in a day and a total of 4,000 weeks in a lifetime.

Some of us have gone past the halfway mark and have far less than 2,000 weeks left in our tank. That is the reason why we need to spend our time wisely and engage in productive activities that will bring some reward and justify every second we spend on it.

Time is the more valuable Resource

I am of the opinion that time is more valuable than money not only because of the reasons I have given so far but because when your time is used up, it is gone. But if you strip a business man of all the money he has, he can still go out on the strength of his ideas and know- how to make even more money than he had made previously. It’s not so with time

The question is since time can not be replenished when it is gone, how do you extend your time and ensure you get everything you want to get done, accomplished? Sometimes, it’s just not possible to carry out all that’s on your plate in the 24-hour window. Remember you need some quality time to sleep and bond with family. So what do you do?

Be Productive with the Time you have

You will start with making sure you use your time wisely by cutting out every distraction. Learn to stay on your task until you get it accomplished no matter how long it takes. Curb that urge for dopamine rush that sends you scrolling aimlessly through Social Media. If after all this, you are still not able to accomplish your goals, then you will need to request for outside help or delegate those tasks you cannot accomplish on your own.

Delegation to the Rescue

Delegation is one way you can extend your time by employing other people’s time to achieve your goals. It may be in house or outside the confines of your business. As long as you are not a micro manager who wants to control every little aspect of your project, you can successfully delegate it to a subordinate who will use his time to complete the project. That way you can preserve your time and use it for higher productive work for your business.

Leon Ho of Lifehack defines delegation as, “ leveraging time from an outside source to give you opportunities to increase your quality time’” By an outside source, Leon simply means it is not your time you are spending on the project. Effective delegation allows you to get your work completed on other people’s time. Instead of one person working on a project, you have a team of people working on the same project. In some cases these people could be spread in a number of countries around the world.

A delegation that cuts across time zones allows you and your team even more flexibility of working on a project for 24 hours in 8 hours shifts in different time zones. While some people are working; others will be sleeping. In a way, you are duplicating yourself in every individual working on the project. Imagine you duplicating yourself in 5 or 10 people and the speed with which you will accomplish the project you are working on. When you delegate, you are multiplying your productivity by the number of the delegates at no additional time to you, the delegator.

What Tasks to Delegate

Three categories of tasks that would benefit from delegating readily come to mind. Where are those tasks you do not like doing? They could be mundane, repetitive tasks and it’s not as if you do not know how to do them. It’s just that you don’t enjoy doing them any longer. So they would be prime candidates for delegating to some outside source to handle.

As you grow your business, completing some tasks may no longer qualify as the best use of your time. In the past, you had enjoyed doing those tasks but right now it would not be considered a priority for you to do. You could easily delegate such a task to a subordinate who would accomplish it.

The last category of tasks you would want to delegate are the ones you lack the expertise to accomplish. They could be technical in nature and since you don’t have the technical know-how, it makes sense to delegate it to someone who has the know-how.

Final Thoughts

Finally, I hope I have succeeded in showing that time is limited but you can get around it by delegating your tasks. I feel time is more valuable than money even though it looks otherwise. A paradox we should try to avoid is a situation where we have all the money but little time to spend it or have all the free time but have little money to be able to do anything.

The way out is to strike a balance between the two resources of time and money.