{"id":2056,"date":"2021-05-10T10:02:01","date_gmt":"2021-05-10T16:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:10043\/time-is-money-so-make-sure-you-are-spending-yours-wisely\/"},"modified":"2021-06-09T06:50:24","modified_gmt":"2021-06-09T12:50:24","slug":"time-is-money-so-make-sure-you-are-spending-yours-wisely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/time-is-money-so-make-sure-you-are-spending-yours-wisely\/","title":{"rendered":"Time is money, so make sure you are spending yours wisely"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Atiba Founder & CEO, JJ Rosen; This article originally appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The Tennessean<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been a big fan of self-help books.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t want what these books are offering.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that I\u2019ve always been suspicious of anything that sounds too good to be true.<\/p>\n

For those with strong career ambitions \u2014 entrepreneurs\u00a0and the like \u2014\u00a0the most popular self-help books are the ones that offer \u201cproductivity hacks.\u201d\u00a0 They coach readers on how to optimize their time, stay organized\u00a0and keep focused \u2014 an escape from the daily grind.<\/p>\n

Books with titles like \u201cThe 4-Hour Workweek\u201d and \u201cThe 7 Habits of Highly Effective People\u201d offer simple formulas for working less while generating more. \u00a0Less work, more money \u2014\u00a0who wouldn\u2019t want that?<\/p>\n

But narrowing down productivity hacks to just a few habits or a few hours of work per week has never felt practical to me.\u00a0 In fact, it\u2019s felt nearly impossible.<\/p>\n

So, years ago I figured out my own secret productivity hack that I\u2019ve stuck with ever since.<\/p>\n

In my day job as an IT consultant and software developer, most of the work I do is billed by the hour.\u00a0 Like lawyers and accountants, I only get paid for the actual hours I work. \u00a0No paid vacations, sick days, or even afternoons off.\u00a0 For better or worse, my income is completely tied to the hours I am productive.<\/p>\n

For those of us who work by the hour, time is literally money. This has its good and bad, but one thing\u2019s for certain \u2014 it forces you to think about what you spend it on. \u00a0Thinking of yourself as an hourly worker all the time is a hack that can help anyone be more productive.<\/p>\n

I discovered this productivity hack early on in my consulting career.\u00a0 When you’re paid by the hour, taking time off to do something that is not productive suddenly becomes very expensive.\u00a0 Activities like taking a long lunch break or leaving early for the day literally reduce your income. Every hour you’re not productive represents a tangible dollar amount lost \u2014\u00a0a loss that you can feel at the end of every day.<\/p>\n

So, for better or worse, this motivated me to at least be intentional about my time at work.\u00a0 It helped me prioritize when I was starting out as a one-person consulting firm, and it helps me now as a manager to perfect our company\u2019s use of time.<\/p>\n

Staff meetings.<\/strong>\u00a0We calculated that our weekly one-hour staff meetings could cost us at least $1,000 per meeting.\u00a0 These meetings were helpful but not worth $1,000 a week.\u00a0 We now just do monthly staff meetings and are much more efficient.<\/p>\n

Commuting time.\u00a0<\/strong>Decades before COVID-19, we realized that driving time to our office every day was expensive.\u00a0 Some of our employees were spending two hours a day commuting (not productive) when they were more than willing to be working on customer projects and meeting deadlines.\u00a0We decided to make our company \u201coffice optional\u201d and calculated that has saved us just over 4,000 hours a year of lost time and over $400,000 per year in real costs.<\/p>\n

Re-charging batteries.\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0Back in the dotcom boom, our small team was working day and night. This was productive \u2014 to a point.\u00a0 We eventually realized that taking time off was a good investment in productivity.\u00a0 Pacing as a company has given us longevity and helped with staff retention \u2014 a net gain.<\/p>\n

For those on salaries, figuring out what your time is worth per hour can help you use your time more wisely.\u00a0 Working smarter, not harder, does not necessarily mean working less.\u00a0It\u2019s about making every hour valuable.<\/p>\n

I am debating whether I should write my own self-help book. But given the agonies of writing and the uncertainties of publishing and my mixed feelings about self-help books, the question I really should be asking is, is it really worth my time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Atiba Founder & CEO, JJ Rosen; This article originally appeared in\u00a0The Tennessean I\u2019ve never been a big fan of self-help books. It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t want what these books are offering.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that I\u2019ve always been suspicious of anything that sounds too good to be true. For those with strong career ambitions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":1975,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atiba-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.atiba.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}