There’s a concept that’s provided me with a great deal of success in both my personal and my business life but I don’t hear it discussed much. So, I thought I’d share it here in hopes that it will assist you like it has me.

It’s about the interconnectedness of money and time. Or, in the case of our personal lives, the interconnectedness of VALUE and time.

Many people don’t even think about money in relation to time, but once you get this, it will completely change the way you look at every area of your life.

Let me make a quick side-bar before I explain it. Nowadays, many people are enamored with the idea of a “deal”. Their primary way of making decisions is to first look at “what does it cost?”

We want it free. Or, at the least, we want it cheap.

But what people often don’t realize is that free and cheap usually still come with a price and it’s often a HIGHER price than you should want to pay.

Here are some examples:

Your vehicle holds 20 gallons of gas and you drive across town to save $.10 per gallon. This takes you 30 minutes. You saved $2. But, if someone were to call you up and offer to pay you $4 an hour for your time, you’d be insulted. And yet, that’s what you just demonstrated your time is worth.

If you’ve ever spent 10 minutes on hold with a bank or credit card company to dispute a $2 charge you don’t recognize, then your time is worth $12 an hour. If you spent an afternoon searching around online to save $30 on airfare then you’re saying your time is worth about $10 an hour.

But, as if that’s not bad enough, that’s not the worst of it. While you’re devaluing your time in this way, you’re also experiencing what we call “opportunity cost”.

This is the worst kind of expense you can imagine. And plugging this hole is what allowed me to triple my income in less than a year.

Here’s what “Opportunity Cost” is: while you’re in the middle of engaging in activities that devalue your time….those activities are also preventing you from being involved in other HIGH-profit activities that you COULD be doing.

So, it’s not bad enough that someone wastes 20 minutes on hold with a credit card company to dispute a $5 charge…..but that’s also 20 minutes that they CANNOT do something that gives them huge value.

Here’s a personal example that might clarify:

I don’t mow my yard. If you do, that’s great. Nothing wrong with it. Some people like to do that. I’m not one of them.

The REASON I don’t mow my lawn is because, by the time I pick up the pinecones, mow and do the trim work…it would take me about 2 hours. Not only is that 2 hours spent doing something I don’t enjoy…..

…but that’s also 2 hours that I could spend on my business. And spending 2 hours on my business can (and often does) put more than $1,000-2,000 in my pocket.

So…”opportunity cost” says that it’s MUCH smarter for me to hire someone to mow my yard for $100….and then I have two hours that I can spend on something that is “higher value” to me. (Whether that’s time spent on my business or just playing with my kids.)

So, there’s two points to consider here. Whenever you look at your activities, ask yourself:

A. If I engaged in this activity for one hour, what does that say about the value of my time?

B. What other things can I be doing during this time that would be of higher value to me?

When I started asking myself these questions, I found TONS of ways that I could start increasing my profits, cutting out time-wasting activities and start delegating low-profit activities to someone else who would be HAPPY to do it and would be thankful to get paid for it.

So….in closing, here’s some food for thought:

1. What is it COSTING you to go to a job every week? (Time away from kids, a lower income than you deserve, etc.)

2. What does it cost you to clean your own house or mow your own lawn? Do you see a way that you could earn MORE during that time than it would cost to delegate that task to someone else? (example: paying a cleaning service $100 so you have time to earn $500 in your business, etc.)

3. How much stress would you release from your life if you learned the power of delegation? How much more relaxed would you be if you knew that things were getting done whether you personally had to show up to do them or not?

4. What are 3 things that you can delegate in your life THIS WEEK to give you time/energy to engage in more high-value/high-profit activities?

Trust me. This is a simple principle but it’s powerful. Explore it for yourself and you’ll be amazed at how quickly things can shift for you!

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