Photo By Steven Hille - Courtesy of Unsplash
Time. It is finite and equal. I can always make another dollar, but I can’t make another minute. When each minute is gone, it can never be recovered. It can be re-allocated, but at the expense of other things.
Everyone has the same number of minutes in a day – 1440. We all get the same number every day. One could argue some people have more days than other people, but we can’t know how many days we have. We only know we have today and we all start today with the same number of minutes.
How a person uses those minutes determines achievement.
It may sound like I am hyper-focused on using my time efficiently. I would agree I focus on efficiency, but, more importantly, I focus on effectiveness.
Effectiveness is doing the right things. Efficiency is doing the right things well.
Effectiveness is what you spend your time on. Efficiency is how well you spend your time on those things.
Therefore, it is possible to waste minutes focusing on the wrong things. Spend your minutes on social media browsing your friends feeds all afternoon and you’ve likely wasted some of your time.
Spend your minutes on social media creating posts that attract people to your art or your business and you’ve likely created value with the minutes you used.
Spend your minutes watching reality TV all afternoon and you’ve probably got little to show for your time.
Spend your minutes talking to your spouse or children and you are focusing on relationships that support and fulfill your life.
If you are spending time on the things that make you more effective in all areas of your life, it is still possible to be inefficient with your minutes.
Spending time working out can be an effective use of your time which improves your overall fitness and feelings of well-being.
However, working out for more than an hour, is generally an inefficient use of time. The additional minutes spent have less impact on your fitness than the first 60 minutes and can actually lead to injury and decreased fitness.
It’s through this lens of thinking about what I spend time on and how well I use the time I spend that makes time the thing I most value.
People may think that I don’t value love or relationships as much. However, the way I spend my minutes on love and relationships demonstrates how much I value them. By making my family and my relationships a priority for my time, I am giving them their appropriate level of importance.
In addition, I believe that love is not a finite thing. I also believe that different people have different levels of love. I can have more love in my life. I can have more love in my life than someone else.
This is not the case with time, which is why it is the thing I most value.