How to place a value on your time

Another key success factor to having a great career is placing a value on your time. Most material things in life can be replaced. For example, many people that become millionaires have been bankrupt at some point in their lives. I provide that example to illustrate that you can make money back, but you cannot make your time back. People that are often the most successful stick to a schedule and don’t make exceptions. When people create their own hours, they often end up overworking. In your job if you don’t place value on your time, you might spend a lot more time at work than you originally planned. As much as you work for your career, you need to make sure that it ends up working to your benefit as well. Is your career allowing you to spend time with your family, accomplish fitness goals and go on vacations? If not, then you are likely spending too much time at work. If this is the case, you need to start scheduling hard stops for yourself. For example, start saying that if you don’t accomplish all your goals by 5 pm each day, then it will need to wait for the next day(obviously make sure you job allows you to leave at 5 pm if you choose to implement this). By scheduling hard stops for yourself you will become more efficient and begin to expect more out of yourself in shorter windows of time. You’ll get used to generating great output in small amounts of time. You also need to get used to saying no to certain projects. When I first started my career, I thought saying yes to every project would allow me to succeed. Accepting more work all the time just dissipated my focus. It will dissipate yours too if you let it. If you aren’t able to focus on your work, then you are likely just completing a lot of tasks with mediocre effort versus giving one task maximum effort and producing maximum output. Producing maximum output is what will differentiate you from your peers. Providing mediocre output will establish your brand as a mediocre task master.

I will provide an example to help you understand how to place a value on your time. Lets say you currently prepare your own time-sheet while an administrative assistant could prepare your time sheet for you. That admin earns $15 per hour while you earn $30 an hour. By switching to preparing that time-sheet yourself, you’ve dropped the value of your time to $15 an hour. Additionally, let’s say you spend 10 hours a week on shopping and preparing meals for yourself just to avoid spending money on going out to eat. For purposes of this discussion let’s say your grocery bill was $100 and provided you with 10 meals for the week. That means you average $10 a meal. Alternatively you would have spent $15 a meal if you went out for those meals. You only saved $5 a meal or $50 in total. Meanwhile you spent 10 hours of your own time at a rate of $30 an hour. That means you wasted $300 of value to save $50. Do this analytic in all aspects of you life to see where you are losing the most value.

As you develop your ability to assign a value to your time, you will then be able to understand what needs to be delegated to other people. At work you can do this value assessment by understanding what work can be completed by an administrative assistant or a staff person. For example, if your administrative tasks like preparing time-sheets or preparing invoices can be completed by someone else, then have them complete it. By choosing to do these yourself, you are placing minimal value to your time. If your job does not currently have someone to delegate these tasks to, then you most likely need to communicate this to your boss. Prepare an analytic for your boss showing them how much of your time you spend on low value items. At my former job, I became overwhelmed with low level administrative tasks such as billing, engagement set up, and time-sheet preparation. I brought this up to my superiors and they assigned me the resources to have this administrative work completed. They did this because I made it apparent that when I was stuck performing low level work, I was not able to work on client work that would have been billed out at high rates. Email me if you have questions on assessing a value to your time.

Also, check out my employee goals and objectives template at this link.