The Importance of Time

Prologue

The topic I'm about to cover here has always been important to me. After reading "Wanting" by Luke Burgis I realized just how important time was. "Wanting" forced me to sit down and think about my goals, why was I trying to achieve financial freedom? Was it actually for the money? What did I really want? It hit me pretty fast, that money was not the reason behind my actions, it was time. I wanted more free time to be with my family, pursue what I love, go to the grocery store at 1pm because I dislike crowds. It wasn't financial freedom I wanted, it was temporal freedom.

Time as the Most Important Resource

A lot of people say time is money, but not only is it not true, its a dangerous thought trap to fall into. Time is more valuable than money and the most valuable of your main resources to accomplish goals. Let's break that down.

Three Main Resources

1. Time

2. Money

3. Energy

You generally need some combination of the three to accomplish a task and you will always need at least two. For example, if I want to make a PB&J sandwich, I need time (groceries, making the sandwich), money (buying the groceries, the silverware, plate), and energy (I need to be able to take the action necessary to accomplish the task). Sometimes, you can remove the money portion for you, but you can never remove time or energy. Even asking someone to do something for you requires asking, thinking, replying, receiving, and eating. All of which is time and energy. So if the cost of time and energy can never be reduced to zero, why is time more important than energy?

Resource Generation

In order to understand why time is the most important resource, we need to understand how you obtain each resource.

Time

You cannot obtain more time. You can mitigate the loss.

Money

You can obtain more money in a variety of ways like: renting out your time (labor), assets ownership, bonuses at work, etc.

Energy

You can obtain more energy by actions like: eating, drinking coffee, and sleeping.

You probably noticed only time is the one you cannot get back and to make matters more dire, obtaining energy and money cost time. So how do you make sure you are spending time wisely?

Focusing Your Time

This has been talked about a hundred different ways, but the one that stuck with me the most is comparing the time we have in life to filling up an empty jar. If you fill the jar up with golf balls, you would consider it full right? The golf balls here are representative of the big items you want to focus your resources on. Things like: family, contributing value, and experiences. The golf balls don't entirely fill the jar despite it being called full, you can still add pebbles to the jar and the jar won't overflow. These pebbles are somewhat important but not your main focus. Things like: house, car, and key points in your career. You might realize at this point you can keep adding more and more without causing it to overflow. Each time you add though, the addition has to be smaller. These are the small details that distract you from the important focuses in your life. While you still need to deal with some of the small problems like grocery shopping, or cable bill, you saving $5 dollars per month on a cable bill you spent 5 hours negotiating, is probably not worth the time and effort. Especially if you earn more than $12/hour, because that's how much you gained after spending time and energy there. So if you charge $50/hour or more you are almost at a loss just after an hour of negotiation, because you could be doing something more valuable.

I can dive into all these specifics and describe it in a hundred ways, but I think the best way is for you to see a visual for yourself. Here is the video that really stuck with me to focus on the golf balls, you may notice it matches the analogy I used because I don't think there is a better way to describe it.

Meir Kay with the great video and Stephen Covey for inspiring the video and me as well

Conclusion

I hope this helps explain why time is so important and gets you thinking about what changes you want to make in your life to stay focus on filling your jar up the way you want it to be filled.