There are many ways to leverage money to configure your life to protect your most finite and precious resource: time. As an extension, you want to maximize how you use limited your attention and decision-making capability, so that you can make the most of the limited time you have.
Every different decision you have to make or extra thing you have to dedicate attention to will deplete your energy long before you start to do the important stuff that you are uniquely good at: working at your job, being a good spouse, or parenting with love. You don’t need to be as extreme as an eccentric startup founder wearing the same outfit every day, but you can configure your life
Streamlined Sally vs. Befuddled Bob
Take two people, Bob and Sally, who wake up at the same time for work – 8:00AM – and must leave by 8:30AM.
- Sally hung up her outfit the night before, so picks it up and starts getting dressed.
- She has an organized bathroom drawer and finds everything she needs immediately.
- Sally, has a Keurig single-cup coffee maker, pops in a K-cup and has her coffee ready to go
- Sally has a smart lock on her front door. She leaves and forgets to lock it. Her phone pops up a notification 3 minutes later, and she locks it from there.
Bob, on the other hand
- Bob decides what outfit he is wearing (+2 minutes, +1 decision)
- Bob fumbles around in disorganized drawers to gather up everything he needs to prepare, struggling to find his comb. (+1 minute).
- Bob has a traditional coffee maker, so has to fetch the grounds, prepare the water, and wait . He also has to clean the pot after. (+3 minutes)
- Bob walks out his front door. He leaves and forgets to lock it. He gets to his car and wonders, “did I lock the front door?” He doubles back and checks, and locks it. (+2 minutes)
Sally had to invest time and money in organizing her bathroom drawer, buying a single-cup coffee maker, and installing a smart lock. But her morning time, when she is vulnerable and trying to build up momentum for the day, is completely streamlined. One habit that saved Sally some time was free—picking out her outfit the night before. She also managed to coax more time efficiency and better quality of life by being willing to invest in her household as a tool to facilitate her life.
By contrast, Bob hasn’t thought through how to optimize his morning routine. 8 minutes might not seem like a lot of time, but it would still have been a chance for Bob to relax, or maybe get to work a little earlier, or even clean up his kitchen before he leaves so it’s not a mess when he gets home. Just the mindset improvement alone—spending time on what matters to him, rather than rote labor like cleaning a coffee pot—pays dividends over the long run.
Streamlining reduces strain on your attention
Have you ever felt like you have a never ending list of things to do at home before you can even think about work, your side hustle, or your creative outlets? Having fun? Have you ever simply let your home and life fall into disorder while pursuing those things? At the end of it all, do you find yourself simply collapsing into watching TV or playing video games, and not feeling very fulfilled?
Unfortunately, we are rarely taught the life skill as children that we have finite energy that we need to manage. You cannot be simultaneously a full time worker, a parent, and a creative expressionist, while also being a manual laborer in your own home. Just like a dishwasher buys you out of the labor of hand washing your dishes, you need to continuously buy your way out of every obligation that sets you apart from reaching your highest potential.
Time efficiencies add up
My Smart Home setup is a great example of a place where efficiencies have added up—I estimated that just my combination of smart lights, locks, and other devices save me personally 2.1 hours a week, as well as saving similar time for my wife and a little bit of time for even my kids.
In that setup, we have a simple scene that we run every night: “Alexa, turn on lights out” which, naturally, turns most of the lights out in the house in a single voice command. It’s an example of something that allows me to take my attention off of yet one more thing at night. Instead of spending time flipping switches, it’s one more chance I have to bond with my kids or prepare myself for bed. Will automated lights turn around a struggling lifestyle on its own? No, that’s madness. But imagine if you could fix 100 things like that in your life. Even if those are worth only 1 minute a day each, that’s 100 minutes of your life you are buying back to make your own choices.
If you look around carefully enough, those improvements are there to be had.
P.S. to get started on Smart Home stuff, check out this article.
Make an improvement to your process every week
We have all these amazing things our ancestors never had—strong shelters with climate control, abundant food and water, and reliable healthcare. You have all of the big gains in human efficiency as a base part of living in a developed economy. If you don’t have those things, focus on getting them. After that, it becomes unclear that any single investment is going to be a game changer. But you can make lots of little investments that will add up to give you a huge edge.
Indeed, the purpose of this blog—Trading Money for Time—is exactly to give you a running list of these improvements to help streamline your weekly process. While a lot of time management books help you get through all the free ways to improve yourself, we found that few people have spent time dedicated purely to the art of how to buy back your time with money. I believe that any person, after a reasonable amount of investment in the right money-for-time trades, can find themselves with at least 5 extra hours a week to do more of what matters to them. It’s worth a try.
