This has to be the single most important topic that is rarely discussed and the topic that people are most confused about. Do they want more time or money? What do you want more of?

A lot of people will answer money, but the reasons for picking money are somewhat mislead. They believe that more money will allow them to do whatever they want, but unless somebody is offering you a giant lump sum of cash, you will need to work for the that money. And working for that money is going to take up time, time that you could spend relaxing, vacationing or just getting to know your family better. If I were to offer you $10,000,000 if you worked for me at 20 hours a day for the next 15 years could you do it? Of course not, it is very unlikely you would last a year.

So people really just want the money to give themselves more time, so why not go after time to begin with? A lot of people know how to get more money, they can get another job, start up a business or start pinching pennies. What a lot of people don’t know how to do is to get more time.

This graph shows how your income hits a cap if don’t put effort into creating more time

Here are a couple ways to get more time:

• Outsource your work. If you value your time at $30/hour and you could pay somebody to do an hour of your work for $15 would you do it? I hope so! By outsourcing your work you are not only freeing up time, but you are giving yourself the opportunity to pursue different sources of income (if your convinced you still just want money)
• Find income that isn’t directly tied to your time. Maybe you have a website that doesn’t require a lot of monitoring or maybe you buy a website like that. Now your generating income without having to physically work for it.

The idea of allocating more time to yourself can also be applied to businesses. Except in the world of business it is called scalability. If your business has a bottleneck (something restricting its output) such as how much time you can put into it, the business is not very scalable. But if you can outsource some of your work, you’ve reduced the bottleneck and increased the potential of your business.

This is featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance which is hosted by The Financial Blogger

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Filed under: Articles, Personal Development