There are only 1,440 minutes in every day and, once each one has passed, you can never get it back.
So the secret of success and happiness lies in what you do with every one of your minutes.
And there are really only four things you can do with each one:
- Enjoy it, for example, through hobbies or spending time with friends and family.
- Sell it by making sales of products or working with clients.
- Invest it by creating products, marketing or personal development.
- Waste it in doing things that are not in one of these categories.
If you manage time effectively, you feel more in control of your life. It helps you feel more relaxed, maintains your energy levels and improves your work performance.
You will be able to spend less of your time working but more of your hours making money.
The first step in getting control over your time is knowing how much it’s worth. Knowing that makes it easier to make other decisions.
There are various ways to do this, but let’s keep it simple.
- Write down your annual earnings. (Either earnings for previous 12 months or most recent three months multiplied by four.)
- Write down the number of hours you work in a year.
- Divide your annual earning by the number of hours you work in a year to give you your hourly rate.
For example, if someone earns $100,000 a year and works five days a week, seven hours a day for 48 weeks, that’s $100,000 divided by 1,680 hours. It’s about $60 an hour.
But, in reality, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Here are two ways you can make the calculation work even more effectively for you.
- Think about how much you’d like to earn and put that number on the top line, rather than how much you’re currently earning. Assuming your desired earnings are higher, the hourly rate will increase.
- Consider how many of the hours you work are really productive. Research shows that the average CEO has between 30 and 40 productive minutes a day. Few people have seven productive hours a day – we’re lucky to have two or three. So, if you use a figure of three hours a day worked instead of seven, your hourly rate is going to be very different.
If you divide what you’d like to earn by the number of truly productive hours, your hourly rate is going to be much higher.
You need to choose what hourly amount you want to use for the value of your time. Then keep that value in mind when you decide how you want to spend your time.
Once you decide to give your time its true value, you might discover that you start to earn its true value!