This is a guest-post by Janaki Rajagopalan, a Performance Management Consultant and Author.
“Time is money.”
You’ve heard it, I have too – and we’ve said this to a dozen people, I bet.
But here is the question on this cliché. What does it really mean or tell you? That you can make more money with time? That it’s OK to park the things we want to do, use the time saved in doing that to buy more money – and then complain that we don’t have the time to do what we want to really do?
It doesn’t make sense, does it?
But wait, what if we flipped the coin? Did just the opposite?
What if we used our money to buy time? Or forego that small delta opportunity to make money and barter it for a little more time? Time to do the things we had put off for the day after. Time to cement a relationship. To make that phone call and bring a smile to the voices on both ends of the line. To take an online course that may or may not be a career pusher – but certainly ups the happiness of learning. To sketch a portrait or landscape that caught your attention. To catch a new movie or one episode of a serial that you’ve been meaning to see. To spend that ‘me’ time in your happy bubble with a friend, book or music.
Gosh, the possibilities are endless!
Elementary…duh…, I heard Sherlock whisper as I felt myself get excited by this epiphany a few days back.
True, I reasoned, this isn’t such a big discovery. Our parents – and especially grandparents – managed this so effortlessly. And yet…they egged us with the ‘time is money’ maxim – and we have happily made an omelet of it! Happily commoditized time to place it in a ridiculous Catch-22 situation of making it so precious to make more money that we made it equally rare to find happiness!
So, here’s my resolution. I will raise the importance of money to the level of its maximum competence - I admit unashamedly that I need it. But equally, I will strive to avoid its slide to incompetence beyond that point. Which really means, I will try my damnedest at every point to give myself that little wiggle space to make choices pivoted on time more than money. Of course, to the extent I can afford to!
And what will that extent be? I guess I will soon find that – but for now, let me start on the voyage of its discovery!
How about you?
Very thought-provoking and need-of-the-hour thinking. Thank you for your thoughts, Janaki!
Janaki has elegantly pointed out The Alt perspective we often miss in our scramble for action.