Time is Money: Top Five Time Management Tips

Time. We all get it. We clock in every day when we wake up and we clock out when our heads hit the pillow again. Time is a resource, but unlike the wind or sun, it’s non-renewable. Minutes fly by—what we do with each one that passes is our great responsibility and gift.

It’s been said, the bad news is time flies. The good news is, in the immortal words of motivational speaker Michael Altshuler, you’re the pilot. Let’s plot how we fly the skies of time together as we discuss time management, including five tips you can use to manage your professional time.

Okay, fellow developing professionals. A strange anecdote to begin our episode today, but I’ll make it worth your while. We’re going back to 1945. Fruita, Colorado. Lloyd Olsen was making dinner for himself and his dear mother and decided a chicken would do quite nicely. He went out back to their chicken coop and selected a five and a half pound Wyandotte male named Mike. When he went to cut off Mike’s head, the axe didn’t do the job as neatly as he hoped. Mike was left without a head, but with most of his brain stem, his jugular vein, and part of his left ear still intact.

Now, I know, you’re wondering what Miracle Mike can bring to an episode discussing time management. But we’ve all heard people say, “You’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off!” This idiomatic expression, known in the USA from the 19^th century onward, generally meant that someone was engaged in frantic behavior, that there was frenzied action, but no real work done, and that, eventually, whether a few minutes after the fatal stroke or eighteen months down the line, someone attempting to do meaningful work without thinking—losing their head—would (like Miracle Mike) choke.

We’ve all been there. Running around, busily scurrying but really unable to get much of anything done. Feeling like, yes, we were busy today but when asked what we did, we can’t come up with much of an answer aside from, “Well, I…I…I’m just too busy to even remember, or talk about it! Ask me when I have more time!”

A prudent financial manager would tell you how to work with another finite and important resource in your life: money. He’d tell you to invest, to not spend unwisely, to consider carefully your purchases, and to save for a rainy day. But where’s a prudent time manager to tell us the same?

While I’m still on the lookout for such a person in today’s work force, and I’ll let you know if I find anyone, in the meantime, let’s talk together about wise time management decisions.

Time management decisions become tangled up in money management decisions in the workplace, whether we are managing a project or managing ourselves on the clock.

If we really believed that—like everyone says—time is money, then perhaps there are ways to talk about time management in terms of money management—so that we can turn a profit and make time work for us.

Time spending tip number one: Any financial manager worth their salt would tell you, when coming into a large lump sum of capital— “Invest!” I’d certainly call 86,400 seconds per day, multiplied by seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for an average 79.8 years a “lump sum” of capital. Time capital, that is. Even if we bring it down to the workplace, you developing professionals, you, you’re talking 144,000 seconds in a forty hour workweek, which comes out to a whopping 7,488,000 seconds every year spent on the job. So, how can we wisely invest our time? Money managers would say to put your money into that which has the greatest possible return on your investment.

In short, what you put in should be less than what you get out. When picking an activity at work to spend your time on, consider: what am I putting in (my amount of time invested) and what am I getting in return (the return on my time investment). If you spend thirty minutes drafting an email to a coworker about a project concern, are you getting more than thirty minutes of saved time and effort and energy in the answer they send back, the work the answer facilitates, or the solution the answer hopefully provides?

Put another way, structure your day the way you’d invest your money: put the most time down on the work that will give the most back and invest early. Don’t spend the first two hours of your day answering email and attending meetings. Give yourself the time at the beginning of the day to do your best work, to invest your time as wisely as possible. Look to the future.

What will the tasks you spend your time on today give you in a week? A month? A year? A career? What you spend your time on today gives you what you will have in the future: a new skill or a new relationship, should you spend it wisely, or frenzied attempts to pay back time that was wasted on that which didn’t matter most.

Time spending tip number two: Save for a rainy day. How does one save time? By recognizing what you want to spend time on or will need to spend time on in the future, and then planning accordingly. If you know you have a big bill due next month on your car or your home, you will probably save your pennies now and prepare the funds you will need to answer the looming monetary responsibility.

Similarly, if you know you have a big project due next week at work, you will need to save your time now for preparing the project—reallocating usual “spending” resources like free time—to answer the looming time responsibility. You can’t bottle time up and save it like you would coins in a piggy bank—time doesn’t work like that—but you can look ahead and “save” time for that which matters most, or what will matter most.

Time spending tip number three: Consider carefully your purchases before buying. You wouldn’t agree to buy a house until you had visited the house, looked into the neighborhood, researched market prices, and determined that this was the best way for you to spend your money at this time. In the same way, when considering how to spend your time—what you should allocate your time resources to—it’s best to research the opportunities presented to you.

If you’re committing to a new job that will take up forty hours of your week, know what you’ll be spending your time on. If you’re agreeing to a new project at work, ask around—this is code, my friends, for establishing clear expectations—about what the project will entail, what you’ll get out of it, and what you’ll have at the end of the project. Whether you’ll have a great return on your time investment, or a “time” money pit. And, hey—if you’re concerned about making a big time commitment now, you can do as my momma always said: “Sleep on it.”

Time spending tip number four: They say to talk over financial decisions with your significant other, whether that’s your life partner, your friends, or your potted plant—for me, it’s my potted plant. (#singlelife.) When figuring out how to spend your time, it’s great to consult trusted others. This is where you reach out to professional mentors, the people in your professional life that have been there before and have worked out for themselves how to spend their time such that they have ended up where you’d like to be. Ask them how they did it! Consult those that have spent before you, and use their advice to help you make wise time decisions.

Time spending tip number five: Procrastination is the time equivalent of burning money. Don’t do it. I know, I know, I have no real right to preach this, as I used to pride myself on my ability to procrastinate with grace and poise. The important deadline would be at 11:59 p.m., and here I am at 10:45 p.m., three pages into a twenty-page draft and fueled by the adrenaline rush that comes from flirting with the edge.

I’m not a cliff-diver or a BASE-jumper, but in those moments, I felt like I knew what they felt as they hurtled toward disaster only to pull out at the last moment and save their skins. So, yes, I get it. It’s the old, “Procrastinators unite! —tomorrow.” But time is money, and when we push off to tomorrow what we should have done today, you are going to be left tomorrow with not enough time in the bank to cover all your debts.

Instead, give yourself a prioritized to-do list every morning. Write it down. Put no more than two sections on the paper: “What NEEDS to Be Done,” and “What I WANT to Get Done.” Like money and spending on needs versus wants, put the tasks that need to be done in the first column. Then, place tasks that you want to get done, but aren’t as time sensitive, in the second column.

You may find that what you want to get done isn’t time sensitive but is still important, and that what you need to get done is time sensitive but isn’t as important. Now, schedule your day and plan to spend your time on what matters most always, then on what matters most right now. This may mean that you spend your workday morning doing some deep thinking and planning for an important project, and then your afternoon answering email and fielding questions from coworkers.

However you choose to spend your time, remember that we’re all getting better, little by little over time at how we spend our time productively. Don’t beat yourself up for slipping down the rabbit hole of the Internet and watching cute Corgi puppy videos for half an hour. Just pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try to be better the next time.