Time Is Precious, Money is Not
All my life I thought I would live to be at least 100. Mainly because my mother’s family was long-lived; her Aunt Jenny lived to be 103. Her mother, my grandmother, died at 98 and I was pretty sure she’d have lived longer, but someone brought Covid to her care facility.
My dad died relatively young (not quite 66) but that was because he was a heavy smoker. I had assumed his parents, who also died relatively young, were also smokers. (Though I found out they weren’t.)
Mom died a few years ago at age 77, which is about the average age for women in this country. And for the first time in my life, I thought, wait, what if I don’t make it to 100? What if I tap out in my late 70s like my mother? That means I’m not middle-aged (ha), I’m over the hill already!
Time to make some dents in the bucket list. (Which I have: Atacama desert in Chile, safari + writing/yoga in Kenya.)
As a former financial planner, I’ve seen people who waited until retirement to start doing things they really wanted to do in their lives. It works out for some, but not everyone. No amount of planning can compete with unexpected illness or accidents.
For many business owners, the issue is leaving their business for a week or two. Some feel like they’re drowning in tasks, others might feel they need more from their team. Surprisingly, one answer can solve both these issues: sustainable productivity.
Sustainable productivity accomplishes the things that need to be done
What is “sustainable” productivity? Not toxic productivity, and you know what that is: being told to get up at 4 in the morning, going through rituals with multiple steps whether or not they fit your household, feeling like if you become more efficient you’ll just get loaded down with more work, and so on.
Sustainable productivity not only allows you to have a life outside work, but actually encourages time away from the business.
Notice the part about accomplishment. Very often, when I’m giving a talk, I’ll ask the audience if within the past week, they had a day where they were busy all day and felt like they couldn’t catch their breath until later in the evening. Yet when they looked back over their day, they had actually not accomplished a single thing.
Practically every hand in the room goes up. Every single time I ask that question.
Being busy is not the same thing as being productive. In American culture, being busy is a badge of honor. But that doesn’t make your business grow, or improve your career, or help you accomplish anything.
Finally, it’s critical to look at things that need to be done. As you know, you can do a whole lot of things in eight hours, but they may have nothing to do with your company. Not all of them need to be done, like tweaking your webpage for the thirteenth time.
Or, they may be things that your company needs to do, but they don't necessarily have to be done by you, the business owner.
Do you need to answer every email that comes in? Do you need to answer your phone? Do you need to order the office supplies? Do you need to fix the computers? Do you need to make the copies? Do you need to send the payments to the vendors? (Even if you’re a solopreneur, a lot of these can be delegated and/or automated.)
Sustainable productivity isn’t necessarily efficient
A lot of people don’t like the word “productivity”, and I get it. Sometimes the word conjures up the toxic stuff, or people aren’t sure what it really means.
But does it mean being efficient? I don’t think those two words are synonymous. Efficient means that you get work done as quickly as possible, without detours or wasted effort or expense.
Efficiency works well in factories, or any task where you’ve got discrete steps that go in a certain order every time. You know how long each step takes, so you know how long the task takes.
But for knowledge workers, particularly anyone who’s in the financial and legal space, there’s too much thinking to do to really measure efficiency. This work takes the amount of time it takes.
When I was a financial planner, for some clients I could blast through the plan in half an hour or so. But others took hours, due to the complexities of the case.
And when you’re creating your own content (avoiding the use of AI), there are ways that you can make it a bit more efficient. For example, you could take a day to just batch content. I’ve done that and ended up with a quarter’s worth of articles and a few months of newsletters.
But you might need to go for a walk to really work out a complex thought, or maybe you have to read something to get inspired, or do something that isn’t particularly efficient in order to get it done.
Time management for sustainable productivity makes space for humanity
Back in the 80s and 90s, we had these weekly paper planners where every day was broken down into 15-minute blocks. My personal opinion is that trying to block time in 15-minute increments is insane. As soon as one task or one meeting goes over, your entire day is shot. Where do you make that time up?
That’s why batching tasks into one-hour increments (or more) makes more sense. Devote an hour in the afternoon for emails, for example. If your morning meeting runs too long, you don’t have to worry about that ruining your whole day.
You know what else we did in the 80s and 90s, though less of it as we got closer to the millennium? Go to lunch.
Some of the lunches were liquid, which I don't advocate bringing back. But colleagues would sometimes go out together, or the boss would bring everyone for a team lunch. And not just ordering pizza, though there was some of that. People would actually physically leave the office to do other things.
When I lived and worked in NYC in the late 90s/early 00s, I sometimes would go to the gym for boxing or kickboxing class at lunch. Or I’d hit up the Barnes & Noble (I still have one of the original Reader’s Advantage cards) and then go grab lunch nearby somewhere. Every month my boss would take us to a steakhouse for a team lunch together, on the company of course.
Not particularly efficient. But (unless there was too much liquid at lunch), that brain break made us more productive.
The human brain is not a computer. Anyone who tells you that it is knows nothing about computers and/or brains. In some ways the brain is far more powerful than a computer: it can figure out your position in the social hierarchy at the same time it’s regulating your breathing and heartbeat and guiding you down the sidewalk.
All a computer can do is obey computer code.
At any rate, we can’t crunch numbers as fast as a computer can (but we can sure as hell recognize when a supposed picture of a person has six fingers on each hand and an extra leg.)
Time is not money
Going back to the efficiency thing: if your discrete tasks take a certain amount of time, you can easily compute an hourly rate. If you earn $500 a day and work eight hours in widget production, then your hourly rate is $500/8 or $62.50 an hour. You’ll also know how many widgets you make per hour, so if you do ten widgets an hour then you earn $6.25 per widget. Simple, right?
When it comes to knowledge work, because there aren’t many tasks that take a discrete amount of time, calculating the time value of money is a lot harder to do.
For example, what’s the rate on financial plans, if some financial plans take half an hour, some take an hour, and others take multiples of hours?
What’s the rate on tax returns when you have to spend hours just getting the data from some of the clients, and some companies have ten subsidiaries and others have one or two?
There are so many toxic productivity so-called gurus who advise thinking about everything in terms of money earned per hour when you’re trying to prioritize. Well, how much money do you earn while sleeping, eating, and moving your body? Does that make them unnecessary?
Are all the things that the human brain needs to flourish – which includes socializing (introverts too), eating, sleeping, resting, daydreaming, doing whatever activity counts as fun for you – somehow less important because you can’t assign a monetary value to them?
What’s the rate of return on sleep? Only a very small percentage of the population can get away with less than seven or eight hours a night. Regularly getting less means you run the risk of neurodegenerative diseases later in life, not to mention your performance will be bad and so will some of your decisions. How do you factor in those externalities?
What’s your ROI on eating? You can’t do focused work while you’re eating, though maybe you can scroll through your emails or whatever. But you do have to eat, especially since your brain requires nutrition to function.
How much are your friendships worth? What’s the ROI of your family?
Time on this planet is scarce, but money is abundant.
These “nonproductive” activities are absolutely necessary for humans to function. Ignore them at your peril.
Recap (tl;dr)
Sustainable productivity is not toxic. It allows you to accomplish the necessary things while still having a life outside your business. Not all time is money.
I work with business owners to help them get $hit done so they can have a life they love outside the business they love. Schedule your free consult here to see if we’re a good fit to work together.