Thank you for your time

As a teenager I figured out that I liked making computers do things. After a while, I also learnt that other people would pay me to make computers do things for them.

In the beginning, I didn’t make a lot of money. But for a young person, the more valuable reward was the real world lessons I picked up from my clients. At least, that’s what I think looking back (at the time, I thought the money was pretty great too).

One of my first clients was an entrepreneur that had built and sold many businesses over the years. I learnt a lot from him, but the single biggest lesson is the one I want to share with you today: valuing the time of others.

Time is the only resource in this world that we all get an equal share of. Everyone gets the same 24 hours a day, and we all have an unknown number of days left. The only true measure of a person’s wealth is how much of their time they’re able to spend as they wish.

Do you have to spend hours walking to the well to fetch water for your family, or does it come out of the tap at your leisure? Be grateful of the time you don’t have to spend on the basics of staying alive, and mindful of how you spend it instead. Everything good in our society is the direct result of someone else spending their time so you didn’t have to.

It also means you should be mindful about any request you make of someone else’s time. Face-to-face this is easy to do, but when we bring technology into the mix things become more abstract.

Consider these simple ways we ask each other for their time today:

• An email that takes five minutes to read asks for five minutes, some time soon
• A 30-minute calendar invite asks for a specific half hour in the future
• A five minute phone call asks for five minutes, right this second

It turns out there are two parts to a request for someone else’s time: how much time they need to spend, and when they need to spend it. This is why most people these days prefer email over the phone for anything that is not urgent.

What is not as easy to remember is that there is a third variable to consider: how many people you are asking at once. It requires a little bit of math to see, but doesn’t change what you’re asking for:

• An email that takes five minutes to read sent to twelve people asks for a full hour, some time soon
• An 30-minute calendar invite to twelve people asks for a total of six hours, at a specific time in the future

As you can see, your requests for other people’s time scale with the number of people you are asking. But so far we have only talked about requests for other people’s time. Now consider what happens when you make people spend their time:

• If you are five minutes late to that twelve person meeting, you demand a collective hour of their time, right at this second
• If you hold up the subway door for 30 seconds, you demand that the ~240 other people on the train spend a collective two hours, right at this second

Of course, nobody is perfect and we all make demands on other people’s time for good or bad reasons. But if we all try to be a little bit more mindful of how we spend the time of others, we can all use more of our time the way we want to.

Thank you for your time.