Money is Infinite, Time is Not — Here’s How To Get More Value From Your Time

At various times in life, we use time to buy money, and money to buy time.

When we first started working, we had quite a lot of time to ourselves. We could go for networking events, meet friends and family, go partying.

As we grew older and better at what we do, we began to charge our employers and clients more for our time. We were given more responsibilities, and began to dedicate more time at work. Our bank accounts grew fuller but we began to have less time for ourselves and our families.

If we are considered successful by our peers, it is likely that we have more money than we have time to spend it.

Whether we realised it or not, we have started to spend time to buy money. We started to use finite currency to buy infinite dollars.

“How can you say money is infinite? I can count every dollar I have!”

When it comes to income, the sky’s the limit. Actually, YOU are the limit. You place the only real limit on your income. You earn only as much as you allow yourself to.

What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
— Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich

When it comes to time, each of us has a finite, limited amount of time each day. We can buy time — and I will show you how — but we are limited to 86,400 seconds every day. Every second is precious.

In this next series of articles, we’re going to look at planning your time and spending it wisely. We will start from the basics before moving on to more advanced applications.

You will learn:

1. How to find out where your time goes, and to save precious minutes from every hour
2. How to use those minutes to save precious hours every day
3. How to use those hours to carve out blocks of free days
4. How to use those days to buy months and years

Let’s get started. Time’s a wasting.

How To Discover Where Your Time Goes

Time is finite. We have a limited amount of time each day. How do you spend your time?

What gets measured, gets improved.
— Peter Drucker

I often hear people say at the end of the day, “Where did all the time go?” That’s a sign of bad time management. If you don’t know where your time is being spent, how will you know where to cut down?

If you find yourself in this situation on a regular basis, I’m proposing that you do a Time Audit and a Time Log.

(These are taken from Alec Mackenzie’s book “The Time Trap: The Classic Book on Time Management”. I highly recommend this book. You can get it on Amazon.)

The Time Audit is a questionnaire that you use to determine what are your biggest time wasters. It is a qualitative quiz and the results are based on the answers you give.

The Time Log is a 3-day quantitative time tracking exercise where you record down all your activities, the start and end time, and the number of minutes the activity took.

This is THE exercise that will help you find out exactly where all your time goes. It’s a little tedious at first. Stick through it and you will gain much awareness of how you spend your time.

Carve Precious Minutes From Your Day

At the end of your 3-day Time Log, analyse the data you’ve collected alongside your Time Audit. You should be able to gain some valuable insights as to how you’ve spent your time, where the bulk of it goes, and how to improve. Select your top 3 Time Wasters and commit to working on them for the next 3 months.

At the end of 3 months, do another Time Audit and Time Log and check your progress.

How To Plan Your Day

The first thing I do at the start of every week is to spend a few minutes planning my week ahead. At the start of every day, I take 10 minutes to review this plan, and make adjustments. These few precious minutes spent in planning saves a lot of time in the course of the day and the week.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to plan your day in the same way that I do. What I’m saying is that this system has worked for me for the past 4 years and maybe it will work for you too, if you don’t already have one that works for you.

The IXU System of Task Management

I represents Importance. U represents Urgency.

If you’re interested in productivity, you’ve probably heard of something called the Eisenhower Matrix. This matrix breaks down tasks into four types:

1. Important and Urgent
2. Important and Not Urgent
3. Not Important and Urgent
4. Not Important and Not Urgent

The flaw in the Eisenhower Matrix is that when you have 101 things to do, it can become difficult to categorise which ones are important and not important, which ones are urgent or not urgent.

That’s where the IXU System comes in. Let’s tackle this one step at a time.

What Do You Need To Get Done?

Take a piece of paper, or open a blank spreadsheet. If you want a free ready-made sample on Google Sheets, just email me and ask for it.

Write down all the tasks that need to get done. Each task should be written on a separate line. Just take everything out from that mind of yours and pour it onto the list.

Here’s a sample:

When you’re done, move on to the next step.

Importance

Draw a vertical line to the right of your list of tasks. If you’re using a spreadsheet, move to the next column.

Due to the nature of our work, each of us has different ideas of what’s important to us. For example, a business development manager may emphasize meeting with clients as of utmost importance, while a personal assistant may emphasize processing of documents as most important.

Whatever the case might be, you are the only one (or maybe it’s your boss) who can decide what is the order of importance of your tasks.

Here’s a sample:

Doing this first makes it easier to place a value of importance to the task you’re going to organise. Once you have done this, you can refer to this and assign a corresponding value to each of the tasks.

When you do this, keep in mind to rank it solely according to how important it is, not when it is due.

This can sometimes be difficult to gauge, so ask yourself this question:

If you could get only one thing done today,
what would create for you the greatest value?

So what you will have now is something like this:

You can ignore the colours for now. I added them as a way to track my Tower of Achievements, which is an advanced feature of the IXU system.

Urgency

Here’s where you apply the deadlines for each task. Draw another vertical line to the right of the Importance column. Again, if you’re using a spreadsheet, move to the next column on the right.

Based on your urgency ranking (you can use mine if you like), assign a value to your tasks based solely on when the task needs to be completed.

Here’s a sample:

Again, the same principle applies. If something is more urgent, the number is smaller. My measure of urgency has clear lines drawn out as above.

Although this is easier, it can still be difficult to do if you have lots of things that need to be done quickly. So ask yourself this question:

If all the tasks had the same level of importance,
and you could do only one of them, which would it be?

So by now, you’d have something that looks like this:

Weight

The name of the IXU System is derived from this next step. For each task, multiply the Importance value with the Urgency value. The result is the Weight.

Do that for each of your tasks, and you’d get something like this:

Prioritisation

Now that you have the Weight of each task, you need to sort them in Ascending order. This is easy to do on a spreadsheet. You should get something like this:

(The reason I use a spreadsheet instead of a piece of paper is because I can use formulae to determine the Urgency value, and the Weight. Also because it’s really easy to sort the Weight values in this stage.)

If you’re using a piece of paper, draw another line to the right of the Weight column. Find the smallest Weight number and write the number 1 next to it. That’s your first priority task. Write number 2 next to the second smallest task and so on until you’ve numbered them all.

On occasion you will come across, as above, two or more items with the same Weight. Then you simply make a judgement call which of these two you should work on first. I normally choose the task that can be done fastest.

By now, the system has told you which of your tasks need to be done first according to both its Importance and Urgency. So you can see that there are some tasks that are not so important but urgent, such as respond to email. There are also some tasks that are important but not urgent, such as planning for 2015 business goals.

Getting Things Done

With this prioritised list, it’s time to get down to action. Put this somewhere that you can easily refer to. I keep mine on a Google Sheet that is always open whenever I’m at my computer.

Then get started on the first item. When you’ve completed it, come back and check your list then move on to the next item.

On a typically productive day, you should be able to get at least six items done.

When Something More Urgent Comes By

At times during the day — and it will happen — something very urgent comes along. Maybe it’s a client that wants something done right now. Maybe it’s your boss that demands something get done today.

Immediately add it to your IXU System. If you’re using a spreadsheet, you can immediately calculate its Weight and measure it against your other tasks. Then you will have enough information to make a judgement call as to which task should get done first.

If you have the temptation to work on this more urgent task first even if it’s less important, go right ahead. But be aware that you’re making this conscious choice to put this lower ranking task ahead of a higher ranking task.

If it’s something your boss wants done, show him your list and ask him to decide which task should get done first. You’re accountable to your boss, so doing this absolves you of the responsibility if you’re unable to finish both items despite doing your best. You also have a Time Log that you can use to account for the time you spend at work.

Work Is Unending

An important thing to note is that this IXU System is not about finishing everything on your t0-do list. Work never ends, and not all work needs to be done today. The purpose of the IXU System is to help you prioritise the most important tasks which need to be done now.

Do not feel guilty about having undone tasks. And do not attempt to do everything. If you’ve gotten through the day having done the top six items on the list, you’ve already had a productive day.

Even if you’ve done only 1–2 tasks, you have already accomplished the most important and urgent items that needed to be addressed. That is a good thing and should be celebrated. Everything else can wait, because you had something more important and urgent to do first. You can prove it with the IXU System… assuming you didn’t delete the item, of course. That’s what my Tower of Achievements is for.

Putting It All Together

By now you have a Time Audit to do, a Time Log to track, and an IXU System to plan your day. Here’s how to use them together.

First, do your Time Audit. It should take just a few minutes to do that. It will give you an indication of your biggest time wasters. Click on the links to see the causes and solutions of those time wasters.

Next, plan your day using the IXU System. The most important thing that this system does for you is that it tells you what you’re supposed to be working on now. Finish that before moving on to the next.

Lastly, do your Time Log. Every time you’re distracted by something, record it down. Every time you forget what you were supposed to be doing, refer to your IXU System.

If you’ve done all this, you can be quite sure that by the end of the third day, you’ll be keenly aware of:

1. Where all your time goes
2. What wastes most of your time
3. How to resolve these issues and free up more time

To end off, I want to impart this little tidbit:

If you manage to save just 5 minutes every hour, by the end of half a day,
you will have carved out for yourself a whole hour of time.

Imagine what you could do with 5-7 more hours every week. Give this a go and next week, we’ll look at how to use those minutes you save every day to save you hours.

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