Time: Ain’t nobody got time for that!

January 21st, 2021

Let’s kick this shindig the right way — I’m, most certainly, not a writer. I’ve been a medium reader for almost a year now and I’ve read articles that inspired me to be better and articles or authors that I quickly unfollowed due to a blatant disconnect, to my understanding, with reality. I follow some writers with which I either share a similarity of mind or wish to learn from in various ways. In general I have been pacing myself until such time as I’m ready to write my first piece. One and all, Rejoice, that time has come! (you can roll your eyes at the hubris of the affirmation) I thought a lot on what to write about, what message can I convey that’ll be useful to anyone investing the time to read the entirety of the article. I thought about writing about myself, but my life story isn’t really that inspiring, so, onto my hobbies, which are very run-of-the-mill-ish and finally I stopped at the congregation between my life and my work to see If I could provide some fundamental knowledge on how life and work can complete themselves. I am a time consultant! Actually I’m your very normal business consultant, I just translate everything into time rather than to € (yes, I’m european — portuguese in fact), my point in every business decision is that they’re almost always a trade-off between either money or time, the latter being the one you cannot make more of. Time is like the water you try to hold in your hands, of course you can hold it, but it’ll drain and eventually you’ll have nothing left, all you can do is find a use for that water before it runs out of your hands! While most people tend to look or work for more money — so putting time in and getting money out, I try to see when, where and how can my consultees (not sure if it is an actual word but follows the same rationale as employer and employee) employ their money to get out more time, that can be invested in other tasks or in themselves. I’ll give an example of this business rationale: Preamble I personally hate doing the dishes, don’t mind vacuuming (still souldraining!) but the dishes really break my spirit and so the business end of it is: How much do I value my time against what it’ll cost in someone else’s time? 1-My working hour generates less than it would cost to buy that hour from someone else: Sorry pal! Spend the time because you cannot afford to buy it from someone else, for instance, a housekeeper. 2- My working hour generates about the same as it would cost to buy an hour of said housekeeper: Break even scenario, if you simply wish to splurge some time-go for it champ, make it worth!- but keep in mind the trade off isn’t generating value by itself. 3- My working hour generates clearly more than it would cost to buy an hour of the housekeeper: Green territory ahead! My business advice is buy the housekeeper’s hour and use your own to do something else. This is clearly an oversimplification of what time consulting is, but it is actually very accurate and quite simply put. The point that I’m selling here is that people tend to think of money but with variables that affect time- therefore it would be more accurate to measure time over effect and using money as a tool. The business world is full of people selling eficiencies, simplification of processes, management practices to severly reduce burocracy or to simply end it and they all measure it in money. How much does it cost and how much are we saving. In reality the goal is to save time and the investment of that time generates one of two benefits — money or time-off. Lets go for a more business-like exemple now: Preamble A bakery salesperson has a Smart Fortwo to meet potencial customers and make deliveries, his area of work expands for 200km (roughly 125 miles in imperial units) and he drives, meets and delivers all day, stopping every morning in the factory. The Smart is great for business meetings because it is nimble in the city and parking is much easier- hence while the parking cost is the same in money for either car, it most certainly is much lower in time, so there is clear gain in employing this vehicle for business meetings. Well, but our salesperson also delivers, and for that…lets just say there is more space in my backpack than in a Smart car, and so this means our salesperson either reduces the deliveries to a minimum or it’ll pay a lot of time in back and forth trips to pickup orders. While the consumption of a Smart is much lower, so less money per unit of distance, the time spent delivering is much higher because there is no space to store a greater number of deliveries. Also in such a wide area a Smart is a relatively slow car for a highway, meaning a commercial vehicle would most likely proceed at greater speed reducing even more the time alloted per delivery/businees meeting. The business decision here is, buying more time in a bigger car that saves time in deliveries but costs more time in parking, also understanding that to buy this time I have to have the money to buy the bigger car. Corolaries 1- For the sake of this example, there is a speed limit in our roads, so our salesperson has a limit to how fast he can go, which means at some point in any business and life in general, no matter how eficient and time saving you are there is no optimization possible, you cannot trade to get more time available. 2- Time is not a renewable commodity, once you spent it you cannot get it back, so think very carefully before alloting it somewhere and knowing full well that either well alloted or not it is still inexorably being spent. Time is like the water you try to hold in your hands, of course you can hold it, but it’ll drain and eventually you’ll have nothing left, all you can do is find a use for that water before it runs out of your hands!(yeap, this is that trully inspirational bit of Medium gold) Because I have a really, really small company my customers generally come with a severe lack of money, meaning they have to manage and allot their time very well because they have no money to spare, the decision on where to allot time and when to buy someone else’s is a make or break condition to any startup. That is why I chose this as my first piece…and why you should invest the time to read it, hopefully you’ll gain something…or invest some more time trashing the author and the article in the comments. Link to Medium: https://medium.com/@fgosorio/time-aint-nobody-got-time-for-that-c85927d1516e