Firstly, apologies. I have been away for so long you must be wondering if I have abandoned Girl At Work. The truth is so far from that.
Sometimes, months can be overwhelming, the words buried under deliverables and to-dos, milestones and processes.
It’s that kind of a month, but no matter. I have waded through the swamp of my every day being and found a bunch of my lost words, those thoughts scattered across myriad ends of my brain.
And here’s my post for this week.
Some of us studied time value of money back in coursework. A sum of money today is more valuable than the same sum of money on a future date. Which is why we earn returns on money that is deposited in a bank. To compensate for the time we are away from it.
Time value of money lends itself to some flipping around. Money value of time. What each moment of our time means to us in money terms.
How often do you think, “Argh. Why do I need someone else to do this job? I can do it on my own”, and discard an opportunity to delegate or outsource a task.
How often do you pause to wonder, “Does this job even need to be done?” And stop doing something because your time is too precious to waste on that non-value adding task.
Let me use some questions that might be familiar to all of us.
Do I really need to be in that meeting?When I was younger and more impressionable, I had a boss who would very proudly show me his calendar every morning. “See this. My calendar is chock-a-block today. Back to back meetings. I am really busy.” I would nod back sagely, a hundred questions running through my mind, ‘When will you get work done?’ being foremost amongst them. I was very tactical like that, but it was also a question that got me returns with time. I got a bit discerning about walking into meetings and often times started my years with the resolution that I wouldn’t fill up my days with accepting invites that didn’t explicitly fit in with my agenda and / or have me meaningfully contribute to the discussion.
Does this task really need me? Does it get significantly elevated because I am doing it? This one has been hard for me, I confess. Delegation is not a natural port of call for many of us. It will be faster if I do it rather than hand it to someone else, is the greatest fallacy of all times. The key is to think about all the time we will be saving in the future by teaching someone to do it now, it isn’t about this one time at all. And all that cumulative time saved. Oh my gosh.
Does this work need to be created from scratch after all? Some of us like doing it all, end to end. I will grow my own wheat, tomato, cucumber, and then make my own bread with that wheat, and fill it with my own tomato and cucumber while spreading some cheese I cured at home from milk I got from milking my cow. You know what I mean don’t you. Some work needn’t be recreated. It exists somewhere in the system. That native knowledge exists with someone in the organization already. It’s a smarter use of time to find that person or that work and repurpose it rather than reinvent that proverbial wheel.
So.. what do we do with all that time we save, you wonder.
We might come up with new ideas, do some stretch goals within the organization, experiment with a pet project that would have otherwise not seen light of day, read an interesting long form article that might help us future proof our own career, have a brainstorming discussion with a colleague we wouldn’t have had time to do otherwise.
Or simply pack up and go home to read a book and curl in bed or Netflix and chill.
The possibilities are limitless, if only we realised that every second is a currency of its own, perhaps in terms of money, but often times in terms of sanity.
P. S. Views strictly personal. None of the events mentioned in this post refer to the organisation that I am currently associated with.