I’ve been in a time management class for the past two days, and I have to be honest, it’s not been the most useful experience. I think that I was hoping to get all this great information, but it turns out, I’m pretty educated on these things. Part of the problem was that the instructor kept talking about things that I think a lot of personal finance bloggers and blog readers have read about – GTD and Inbox Zero and 43 Folders and those sorts of things. I have implemented bits and pieces of all of those things, but having it brought up again makes me think that perhaps I should give them all a second look. But either way, I’m kind of disappointed in the experience. At least it was a few days out of the office!
One interesting point that was made was that time is money. Of course, the instructor made it in a way I didn’t like. She started out by asking us all to give her a business card and $20. The woman I was next to clued in just as I did – we were going to give up our money without asking why? We should also treat our time the same way. I’ve seen that done before, but with only one person. “Hey, Joe, give me $20. Okay, class, did you see what Joe did there? He gave me money without asking.” But she took our money and wouldn’t give it back for a few hours. I have to admit, I was distracted by that pile of cash sitting on her desk. We did, of course, get it back, but I can’t say I liked the stealing of my money, no matter how temporary.
But she gave us a chart that has a breakdown of your salary and what your time is worth per minute and per hour. This is based on a 40 hour work week and didn’t take into account benefits or anything like that, but it was an interesting point. We thought about it one time in the converse in college – I spent how much money on this class? Well, I had better not skip then.
It’s interesting to look at your time in this manner, especially in terms of your work. If I waste 20 minutes, how much money is that time worth? And since I don’t get overtime, it’s almost like throwing away the money every time I have to work over due to poor money management.
I think this could also be a good way to control spending. Okay, I really want this shiny new toy, but how many hours of my work week is it costing me? Is it really worth that? Or would I rather spend my time and money on something else.
It’s all about the tricks and what works for you, and so I’m always trying new tricks to find what works the best for me. What tips and tricks do you use in terms of time and money.
I’m always amazed that I can learn new things even if I’ve heard the same advice a million times. It sounds like it covered a lot of material that would be useful in personal lives as well as the paid job world. You are lucky that you were able to attend!
I think that using your salary as a measure for how much your time is worth can be misleading. Just because you earn the equivalent of $20/hour at work, doesn’t mean that you can work all day and still make that. Still, it is very important to spend our time wisely. And I agree, thinking in terms of how long you had to work to earn something can be really useful.
I have to ask, what are “GTD and Inbox Zero and 43 Folders and those sorts of things”? Maybe I don’t follow enough finance blogs to know what they are, but I’m not sure I’ve heard of them.
Kris, thank you for making me be more thorough!
GTD is Getting Things Done, a book and method for organizing your life and your tasks.
43 Folders is both a website and the idea that you use 43 folders to get organized. It’s also known as a Tickler File.
Inbox Zero is something I actually do with my e-mail. The general idea is that you try to have nothing in your inbox. For me, everything goes into an Action folder, meaning I have to do something with it, a Hold folder, meaning I’m waiting for something til I can deal with it, or it gets filed into another folder (or just deleted).