Time is Money

But you can’t get a refund

I’m typing a blog item right now, which means I’m not making a sales call, folding socks, strategizing with clients or playing Yahtzee. Despite all those rumors about multitasking, I can’t do two things at once.

Time, of course, is the ultimate scarce resource and the one we tend to measure least. We take a physical inventory at least once a year and we tally our cash daily. When a product ships, we track it and make all the necessary adjustments to the balance sheet.

Time, however, slips by uncounted and unallocated. We do have a tendency to spend it the way we were spending it yesterday and the day before and the day before. And, of course, we spend our time in the ways demanded of us much more than in the ways we plan. (It’s notable that we use the word spend when we’re talking about time. Since time can’t be stored, it can only be spent—in real time.

I have this conversation regularly with business owners who know their most valuable contribution to their companies is X, but they trap themselves into doing Y and Z. One friend concluded that he should be spending the majority of his time on business development but, unsurprisingly, he spent most of his days trapped in the office, putting out fires and managing minutia. Ultimately, he gave up and hired someone to fulfill his primary role as salesman in chief.

Lawyers and consultants, along with other professionals who sell their lives by the hour, will attest to the challenges of measuring their minutes. It would be simplistic to suggest that only billable time is “productive.” Certainly, staff training or other activities can be classified as investments designed to yield more productivity over the long term. Still, there is a hierarchy of values obtained from hours invested and it pays to assess those returns from time to time.

So how did you spend yesterday? How will you invest your time tomorrow? Will you be knee deep in your tenth meeting this year about a product that isn’t going anywhere or will you be working on plans to expand your top division? Will you be calling on sales prospects or having your third heart-to-heart discussion with a toxic employee who should have been let go three years ago?

If we measured our use of time the way we measure other resources, would we shift our “investment approach” for our most valuable asset? Most likely, we would.

Of course, that’s just my opinion. What do you think?

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