Why You Should Treat Your Time Like Currency

Noel from Fitness Philippines is fast becoming a regular poster on this site.  In the past, he’s written a couple of great posts on health and nutrition.  Today he’s going to discuss something that’s near and dear to my heart…the idea that your time is money.  If you’ve ever heard me rant about outsourcing then you know how crazy I get about time management.  So that’s why I urge you to pay close attention to what Noel is about to discuss…

We normally spend things like bills and coins as currency but have you ever thought of time as currency as well? After all, when we talk of using it, we often phrase it as “spending” our time, like we would our cash. What do you usually spend your time on? Exercising? Studying? Working? Playing? Think about that while reading the rest of this article.

Time is also directly related to our age. After all, as time passes, we also get older. Also, since our age is finite, this means that the time we also have a limited amount of time to spend. One day, all our time will run out. It’s like, on the immediate day of our birth, we were granted a full bank account that we would consistently spend every second of every day of our lives, whether we wanted to or not.

So how much is in it?

The current life expectancy is supposedly 67 years of age. Let’s take that figure and round it out to a figure that’s easier to work with. Let’s say that, based on that number, humans live to be around 50 – 100 years old. Let’s take the larger number and say that the amount of time in your account at the day of your birth is 100 years.

How would you spend it?

The first question in this article, “what do you usually spend your time on” can also be phrased as “how did you decide to spend much of the remaining time you have in your account?” Surely the balance left isn’t still 100 years? Or is it?

Do you go on spending sprees?

Ever go on a spending spree, say during the holidays, where you walk into a large shopping mall with all your bonus money, and walk out with a bunch of gift bags and barely any cash left? Our time can be spent in a very similar fashion, where we spend a ton of time from our account in only a few hours or minutes. How is this done? Well, there are a number of ways but the primary one involves smoking, drugs, alcohol, and so on. Consuming products related to these things and those like them considerably lower a person’s lifespan for one reason or another. They don’t really do anything other than completely suck up your account, and is why people advise each other to stay from them.

Daredevils often go on the absolute worst (or best, depending on your point of view) spending sprees of them all. Daredevils are entertainers who regularly risk their lives for a single stunt which could easily kill them. Say that a daredevil is 30 years old and that he does not engage in any of the above (smoking, drugs, alcohol), so that his account is still cleanly maintained. Thus, he still has 70 years more to spend. But, if the stunt doesn’t go exactly as planned, he could wind up spending all of those years in an instant. Now that’s a spending spree.

A bunch of other things lower our life expectancies over the years, but I think those two primary examples get my point across well enough.

Adding money to your savings account

On the opposite spectrum, we can also add more and more years to our account, thus increasing our life expectancies to well over 100. This isn’t anything new. We see and hear about elderly folks who live well above 110 or 120 all the time. Surely, they aren’t common, but they aren’t very rare either. This is achieved by what people generally term as strict “clean living”.

No junk food, no smoking, no alcohol forever. Just eat smart, avoid stress, and exercise regularly. Those are the general rules for maintaining your savings account. The more you adhere (read: the more strict you are with yourself) to these rules, the more years get added to your account.

To live fast and die young

Would you want that, though? Are you the type of person who wants to be totally strict for almost 100 years just to 10 or 30 more years doing the same thing? Or are you one of those individuals who wishes to live by the age old Hollywood stereotype of living fast and dying young? Do you want to spend all your time now and absolutely enjoy every second you did in your own personal way, or do you want spend time as slowly as possible, distributing your enjoyment over the seconds ever so subtly instead of having it all just wash over you like a splash on the face?

Which life are you living?

Now, again, go back to the first question in this article.

What do you usually spend your time on? Does that make you fall in the living fast or living longer category? Most of us are probably somewhere in the middle, but can feel a tug in one specific direction. If that’s the case, in which direction are you currently inclined, given how you spend that time? After reading this article, do you feel that it is the best use of your time? Or do you suddenly want to change all that so you can progress to the other direction? Why or why not?

As for me, I enjoyed every second writing this article and so feel that I have used my time wisely in this occasion. And if you, the reader, walk away with some new thoughts, whether positive or negative, brewing because of these ideas that I have shared, then the time that I have spent will all the more have been worth it.

Thank you very much for spending your time with me.

Steve’s Note: I think Noel did a great job of explaining the importance of valuing your time.  When you become aware of the time you spend it’s easy to get more out of each day.  Anyway…I highly recommend you take a look Noel’s Fitness Philippines blog where talks about fitness, nutrition, martial arts and health.  If you want to improve the quality of your life, be sure to stop on over at his site.

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