Show me the Time!

Are you Spending or Investing your time?

“Imagine there is a bank which credits your account each week with $10,080, carries over no balance from week to week, allows you to keep no cash balance at the end of the week and cancels whatever part of the amount you had failed to use during the week.” Every week we begin with a credit of 10,080 minutes and every week we write-off as lost whatever amount has not been invested to good purpose.

In a previous article (Wealthy Beyond Measure) I introduced the concept of investing time with the acronym Time Invested Money Earned. The best returns are gained from investing time in Relationships, Opportunities, Innovation and Capacity.

So how do you know if you are spending or investing time? Stephen Covey introduced the Time Matrix concept as illustrated and adapted below.

In any given day, adjusting for 8 hours of sleep, you have 16 productive hours in a day or 112 hours in a week. When you spend the bulk of your time in quadrants 1, 3 and 4 the result is often high stress, blood pressure and a perpetual feeling of being in a downward reactive spiral.

In contrast the returns from investing time in Quadrant 2- (Self leadership) is greater fulfilment, empowerment, with higher levels of control and productivity. The 80/20 principle applies- by investing 20% of your time in this quadrant you will achieve 80% of the goals you commit to achieve. The outcome is greater effectiveness and creating of new possibilities to move you forward towards achieving your goals- an upward creative spiral.

20% of productive time in a week is equivalent to a minimum investment of 20 hours per week. Considering the standard work week is 40 hours the goal should be to invest a minimum of 20 hours taking charge of your destiny in the Creative (self-leadership) quadrant.

One of the best tools I have come across to track where you are spending or investing your time is a free software application called Toggl available at www.toggl.com . Toggl is developed for business use to track billable time on projects but can be adapted for personal time tracking by setting up customized project categories that you can track. Below is a link with the types of reports you can run using Toggl.

Are you investing enough of your time?

Show me the Time….and I will show you the money!

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What other tips can you share? I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments below.

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