Does Time Equal Money?

My daughter is the wealthiest member of our household.

It isn’t  because she has a small amount saved away for a future college  education, or business venture, or first home, or whatever she might  deem to be the best use of funds as a young adult.

It isn’t  because she devours books two or three at a time, soaks up knowledge in  school and out, and asks so many questions that I run out of brainpower  when attempting to answer them all.

It isn’t because she has best  friends galore, or two actively involved parents who love her,  grandparents who are ever-present, and a community of wonderful people  who come out to support her philanthropic fundraisers.

Actually,  it’s all of these things, and she is very fortunate to have all of these  benefits and this support in her life. But none of this is the primary  source of her wealth.

My daughter is the wealthiest member of our  household because she’s 9 years old and has decades upon decades of time  at her disposal. And time is our greatest commodity.

I say this  knowing that time is precious, and like money, it can disappear, at  best, gradually, at worst, all at once. I say this knowing that my  daughter will live a long, healthy life, as I refuse to accept the  alternative.

Day by day that surplus of time will diminish. It  will be spent on frivolous things, like watching TV or dwelling on  events not worth an additional second of her time. It will also be  invested in experiences, in growth, in the people around her. She’ll be  rewarded by many of those investments, even if some of them don’t  provide the returns or pay the dividends she’d hoped. Maybe a few of  these investments will provide the return of a longer life. But the best  days will always be limited. Time will always be finite.

Graham  Duncan is an investor and philanthropist who coined the term “Time  Billionaire,” which I first heard explained in an interview with  lifelong perfector Tim Ferriss. The concept is that if the average human  lifespan is 78 years, then each person has at least 2 billion seconds  to live. By age 31 you’ve spent your first billion seconds. By the time  most of us reach retirement financial independence, we’ll have spent  more than 2 billion of however many seconds we ever had.

I might  still be a Time Billionaire. You might still be too. But someday we  won’t be, and there is just no changing that eventuality.

So what do we do about it? How do we budget and balance the spend-down of our most precious resource?

Sleep  is a requirement, but also an investment. A great deal of time has to  go there in order to make the rest of our time more profitable. If we’re  going to do it, we might as well do it right.​

For most of us,  work is an equal or greater expenditure. There are many rules, written  and unwritten, about how much time we’re supposed to spend working. 100  years ago the work week was six days. The number of hours worked by the  average factory employee ranged between 10-16 hours PER DAY.

The  industrial revolution changed that, largely due to Henry Ford’s  recognition of its potential to create more productivity, not just on  the factory floors, but in our lives. When human beings were working  50-100 hours a week, they were incredibly inefficient, at work and at  home. Injuries were commonplace. Family time was virtually nonexistent.  Rest was only for the Sabbath.

Ford innovated the workdays and  experimented with shortening hours and limiting the days. He landed on  the 5-day, 40-hour work week we all know. He aligned his workforce  around this thinking in 1926, and by 1940 the standard 40-hour work week  was incorporated in the Fair Labor Standards Act. Quality of life  improved through a combination of innovation and creativity.

We  had a similar opportunity with the technological revolution but went the  wrong way. The technology accessible at our fingertips 24/7 also made  work accessible 24/7.

Somehow a combination of innovation and  recession lead to fewer work hours 100 years ago, yet 15 years ago the  same combo led to MORE work hours for salaried employees.

Now here  we are with a similar opportunity to review. Corporate America is  rethinking the workplace, incorporating remote work and hybrid  workforces. There’s a push-pull playing out, with strong opinions on  either side of the “should you be in the office” controversy. Maybe the  issue isn’t where you physically spend your work hours, but instead how  many hours you actually work.

Artificial intelligence represents a  great combination of risks and opportunities, but its ability to  increase efficiency is unassailable. It’s the ultimate “work smarter,  not harder” hack.

What if corporate America were able to increase  productivity (and profitability) with fewer work hours? What if instead  of cutting jobs or pay, they kept those numbers the same? Henry Ford  INCREASED jobs AND pay, which created greater productivity and quality  of life, and greatly reduced turnover. Who wouldn’t want to make the  same amount of money in less time? How could the competition possibly  compete for that talent?

And what could we do with all that excess  time? Spend it with our children? Volunteer in our community? Exercise  more? Have time to cook more nutritious meals? Learn new things,  challenge ourselves in different ways? The American education system is  built around the concept of a broad education creating a well-rounded  individual. Why should that stop when school stops?

And wouldn’t  this all make us better at our jobs? Wouldn’t this all lead to greater  productivity, and greater efficiency, when there’s more time in our  lives for everything else?

This is why we offload  responsibilities, to spend less of our time. This is why I hired someone  to mow my lawn. I really like mowing my lawn, but I like spending my  time with my daughter more.

For our younger clients, this is one  of the best value adds we can provide. We build plans and watch over  their finances so they don’t have to spend excess time in their busy  lives worrying about it. That’s a logical, easily understandable concept  to grasp.

But what about our older clients? What if I told you  that service was even more valuable to them? If time is our most  valuable resource, and our older clients have even less of it, how they  spend that time becomes even more important. They have less time to  waste, and certainly, less time to waste worrying about money.

Most  of us, if we’re lucky, are born as time billionaires. How we spend our  time impacts our ability to maintain our wealth and our health. Ever  heard the phrase “worked to death?” Ever explored how much stress erodes  your health? It’s also a costly expenditure of your time wealth.

We  all have different spending habits, in finance and in life. Maybe we  should focus more on how we spend our wealth of time to get the most out  of the latter.