It's late on a Friday afternoon and you're still doing the invoices. Or the cleaning, or the social media, or chasing a supplier. It's taken most of the day. It always does.
Everyone gets the same 168 hours a week. That never changes. What you do with them can.
So how much is one of your hours actually worth? There's more than one way to work it out.
The money sum
If you're employed, it's easy. Take what you earned last month and divide it by the hours you worked. Earn £3,000 over 160 hours and each hour is worth £18.75.
If you run your own business, ask a different question. How much do you make in an hour when you're doing the work only you can do? Selling, serving your best clients, the stuff that brings the money in.
Then ask how much you're losing by not paying someone else for the basic jobs. If an hour on the phone to customers earns you more than an hour of help costs, your time is in the wrong place.
The life sum
The second way has no neat calculation. It's about how many of those 168 hours you spend on things you love, and how many on things you'd rather not do.
Bronnie Ware was a palliative care nurse who wrote down what her patients regretted most. None of them wished they'd made more money. The most common regret was not having the courage to live a life true to themselves, rather than the life others expected. The next was working so hard.
How much is an extra hour with the people you love worth to you? What about an hour doing the thing that makes you feel most like you?
Doing the sums now
When I first wrote this I was mostly doing the money sum. These days the life sum is the one I come back to. I'm a proud dad, and an evening at home is worth more to me than anything I could earn in it.
The money sum still matters. It's what frees up the time for the other one. I protect that time the same way I protect focus time, with a diary and a timer, and there's more on that in Put yourself in the diary and How to stay focused in a distracted world.
Grab a pen and list everything you did last week that someone else could have done. Next to each one, write what you'd rather have done with that hour, then pick one to hand over this month.
First published May 2018.
