How to Invest Your Time Like Money

By Elizabeth Grace Saunders

How to Invest Your Time Like Money is a concise, practical guide to get you out of time debt. Unlike others, who create the false hope that if only you worked harder, faster, longer, and smarter, you could do everything you want and make everyone happy, time coach Elizabeth Grace Saunders introduces a process to better manage your limited time so you can focus on what’s important. Her method will help you avoid letting everyday pressures and demands get in the way. Using proven techniques and exercises based on the principles of personal finance, readers will learn to identify their time debt, create a balanced budget, build a base schedule, maximize their time ROI, and identify a process to get back on trackand stay there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781633690615

Book preview

Author

1. Take Control of Your Time and Your Life

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

—Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

There aren’t enough hours in the day.

You likely recognize this statement. You may have muttered it yourself, frustrated by your consistently packed schedule and competing demands. Day after day, both at work and in your personal life, you find yourself juggling too many projects at once and struggling to find the time to do the things you deem important, leaving you stressed and agitated. How can you manage your time more effectively, in ways that you’ll find both productive and gratifying?

Most time management methodologies fail to give you the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction you crave because they encourage you to stuff more into an already overflowing schedule. This creates the false hope that if you only worked harder, faster, longer, and smarter, you could do everything you want and make everyone happy. That’s more or less the equivalent of racking up credit card bills instead of learning to cut costs. When you’ve tried these strategies—and failed to do the impossible—you feel worse than before because you have not only not gotten everything done, but felt miserable in the process.

Fortunately, there’s a better way.

If you’re frustrated and tired of feeling as if you have no control of your time and all of your attempts to manage your time have failed, you need to learn the skills to invest your time like money. When you do, you’ll finally have enough time for what’s most important.

When you invest your time as if it were money, you look at the reality of how much time you have available and the truth of activities’ time cost. You then make decisions that allow you to get out of time debt. And with this balanced budget in hand, you can then set up the structure to consistently invest your time in what’s most important.

This book provides a detailed look at how to learn these skills. It explains exactly how to both put these concepts into action and overcome the resistance that is likely to come up in the process of change. In addition, once you’ve achieved a level of mastery of the process, you’ll learn to maximize the return on investment of your time and assess your big-picture growth.

As an expert on effective time investment, I’ve worked with training and coaching clients on six continents, contributed to a number of publications, including Forbes, Inc., and Time, and appeared on ABC, CBS, and NBC. My first book provided an overall look at how to achieve more success with less stress through effective time investment.[1] Through my work helping real people solve real problems, I’ve discovered that not having enough time for the important things is one of the biggest sources of stress. That’s why I’ve provided in this book an in-depth guide for allocating your time so that what’s most vital receives the appropriate amount of attention instead of getting pushed aside for other competing priorities.

Time, like money, must be invested to work for you now and support your ideal future. For some of you, coming to terms with your ideal time allocation and then moving from your current reality to your desired future state will require radical cuts, such as resigning from jobs, leaving graduate school programs, or ending relationships. Or it may include significant additions, such as starting positions, training for new skills, and adding more people to your life.

But for the vast majority of you, very little will need to shift in terms of your external circumstances; instead, what will need to change is you. Your mind-set, your decisions, and your routines determine whether you remain stuck or move forward and decide to intentionally live your best life.

At the outset, this will require some work, as you do when you take a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon to set up your retirement plan so you get 10 percent returns in mutual funds instead of 0.5 percent in your savings account (or just spend all the money). But taking the time now will set you far ahead of your peers and make you far more satisfied with your life. Strategically investing your time will lead you to have enough time to be your best self, do your best work, and fulfill your potential.

In the following chapters, I’m going to reveal the time investment strategies that have transformed thousands of people’s lives. But in order to see the kind of change in your life that we both want to witness, we first need to tackle three common subconscious barriers that can block your