Respecting your time

Understanding the value of time

Time is a limited resource. How you manage the limited time you have depends on how you value it. Most of us exchange our time for monetary gain, as well as for personal relationships, health and wellness, hobbies, interests, and other engagements. These exchanges set the baseline for establishing the value of our time. We establish an order of hierarchy, determining which of these engagements is more important than the others, and then we decide how much time should be dedicated to it. This dedication of time represents the value we place on time.

The value of time doesn’t necessarily represent the level of love or care we have for a specific engagement. Still, it does provide some insight as a point of reflection to help us understand how to better manage our time and commit more of it to the things we care about, ultimately working on establishing a better work-life balance.

Limiting your availability

As you navigate through everyday life, it becomes increasingly important to limit your availability.

Using the workplace as an example, for some of us, we may tend to instinctively respond and engage when a specific activity requires our attention. In some instances, these interruptions lead to context switching, where we are engaged or focused on a task, and then a request from a colleague takes us away from completing that task. In situations like these, simply acknowledging a request and following up in a timely manner enables us to continue working on the task at hand.

There are many instances of these interruptions, which can lead to a loss of time. The time lost is the time we could have spent dedicated and focused on the preferred engagement at the time.

In today's world, where the expectation is that every request requires an instant response, it becomes essential to limit our interactions in our relationships. Our acknowledgement and reply later strategy may not be pleasing to all. Still, it’s essential to establish these patterns of behaviour and limit our availability to respect the value we have placed on our time.

Opportunity costs

Let’s return to the idea of hierarchy and what we exchange our time for. If you’ve established this order of hierarchy, then it becomes clear to you what the value of your time looks like.

Each block of time should now represent an opportunity for dedicating that time to doing the things that are most important to you. Each interruption of this time represents an opportunity cost. In economics, opportunity cost refers to the potential benefit that is lost when one alternative is chosen over another; this lost benefit has a cost associated with it.

The question becomes clear: when a specific interruption to this block of time occurs, what are you willing to give up to handle this request, and how would you recoup or account for the time lost?

Not all relationships are transactional or monetary in nature, but understanding the opportunity cost helps us appreciate the time we have. By extension, those requesting our time should also respect it.

Conclusion

When the value of your time is not respected, it leads to wasted time that could have been better spent doing the things we care about. Establishing good patterns of behaviour and setting boundaries helps reduce time wastage.

For those of us who are creators, freelancers, solopreneurs. We are business owners and the opportunity cost of our time can represent a real monetary value or equivalent exchange. As the saying goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch. We should therefore not sell ourselves short by not respecting the value of our time or engaging with those who don’t respect it.