What’s the economic value of your time?

Strategic leaders learn how to discern which pursuits are worth their time.

THINK ON IT: What’s the economic value of your time?

It’s impossible to lead strategically on the fly. Being a strategic leader takes an intentional allocation of time for the highest value things in a business.

Far too often we develop a habit of reacting, prioritizing the fire-fight or someone else's agenda over the deeper, easier-to-ignore work of leading the business to new ground. 

Or we get trapped into dissecting and obsessing over the many metrics of our business. 

Or in optimizing our business, often spending more time on an improvement than it’s worth. 

Years ago, I was part of a senior management meeting of between ten to fifteen people where the topic that occupied an hour of discussion was whether the company should continue to pay for coffee for the employees. 

Strictly speaking, from a labor cost perspective, more was spent on that discussion than was probably spent on company coffee for the year. What’s worse, that was valuable time that could have been spent on more important work. 

We will never know what the strategic opportunity cost was of that misused hour of time.

As a leader, your time has value beyond your compensation. An hour of your time could be worth so much more. It should be worth so much more.

For example, is conducting an analysis of expenses that might save the company $20K truly worth your investment of time? 

Or is there a higher use of your time, something that might generate an even bigger return on your time that you could pursue?

The choice is yours.

What’s the economic value of your time? It’s likely much more than you think.

"Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.” — Jim Rohn

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