“Time is money”
Everyone has heard this phrase in their life, and yes there is some truth to it. If you’re running a business and you’re paying people by the hour—time is quite literally money for you. The more units of productivity your people can produce per unit of time can mean a lot to your bottom line when you add it all up.
If you are like most people and have to work for a living you are trading your time and effort for money. This is especially true for hourly workers but also true for salaried employees. You and your employer have an agreement where they will pay you so much per hour or per year to complete your duties.
Time = Money
But there are a lot of ways where the time is money idea breaks down. While both are scarce resources, they differ in that you can always make more money, you can’t make any more time.
You want more money? You can work hard, get promoted, change jobs, work an extra job or get a side hustle. You can sell things you don’t need anymore; you can cut down on unnecessary expenses. You can even get your money to go out and make more money for you. There are lots of ways that you can make more money.
Time is different. Sure, you can try to “save time” in the sense that you can do some things more efficiently and get them done in less time meaning you have more time for something else. But you can’t save that time and use it sometime in the future when you really need it.
You can “make time” for something important in that you choose to spend your time on one thing and not another. But you aren’t really making time, you’re just using your time differently. Everyone has the same twenty-four hours in every day to spend how we choose. The trouble is, you have no guaranteed number of days.That makes time the ultimate limited resource for everyone, yet we often behave as if we will always have more time in the future.
There are a couple of songs that come to mind when I think about time. One comes from the song “Next Year” by Donovan Woods. The basic premise of this song is how we can all have plans to do things we want to do but maybe don’t have the time right now, and we tell ourselves: we’ll do it next year. But “next year” never seems to come.
The other comes from the song “What Sarah Said” by Death Cab for Cutie. The opening line from that song says:
“And it came to me then
That every plan
Is a tiny prayer to Father Time.”*
And that’s just it isn’t it? We all make plans for the future without actually knowing that we will ever have the time to get to them.
Time isn’t money. Time is so much more valuable than money. We all need both, but one we can theoretically make more than we will ever need (easier said than done I know) and the other we only get so much, and no more. And none of us know how much we will be granted.
Spend it wisely.
* “What Sarah Said” – Lyrics by Benjamin Gibbard. Performed by Death Cab for Cutie. Album “Plans” ©2005 Atlantic Records
