Time is the ultimate non-renewable resource. Everyone has a limited supply.

You will trade every hour of your time for something.

Just like money, time can be:

• wasted (traded for something of no value),
• consumed (traded for something that must lose its value in order to provide a benefit),
• or invested (traded for something that generates additional value over time).

Wasting time is foolish, but not easy to avoid. I think most serious time waste comes from deeper issues like fear and addiction. It also comes from a lack of awareness of opportunities to invest time in something greater.

Consuming time is unavoidable. We have to spend a lot of time sleeping, for example. Almost all of us must also spend a lot of time to earn money to have a roof to sleep under. This trading time for survival and a paycheck may be a fair deal, but it doesn’t come close to realizing the potential of a lifetime. Still, there’s no need to chafe about consumption. To even have the opportunity to invest time in things of lasting value, you must meet your survival needs first. The goal here is to be efficient, diligent, and strategic enough to do more than survive, to have some time left over for investment after the necessary consumption is covered.

Time can be invested. It can be traded for things that generate additional value over time. By investing your time effectively you can accomplish far more than you could ever do in a lifetime of trading your time for consumables.

Some Ways to Invest Time

• Invest time to plan with deliberate ends in mind. A few minutes or hours of wise planning can save days or years of wasted time.
• Invest time to build and improve systems for automating tasks when possible and delegating them when they can’t be effectively automated.
• Invest time to build relationships with people. Not only do most things get done through relationships, but we need them to survive, to be healthy, and to be effective.
• Invest time to change yourself. Grow your character abilities, like courage and human connectedness. Improve your skills, like communication, organization, or specialized job skills. Go to school. Go to therapy. Hours spent developing yourself can multiply your effectiveness for the rest of your life, adding decades worth of valuable accomplishments to your life.
• Invest time to change other people. Especially people who are young and/or in a position to influence multiple other people. (But be cautioned that changing others directly isn’t possible, you can only provide resources to those who are already in a position to use them.)
• Invest time to create things that didn’t exist before. Invent something, like a tool or a system or a concept or a work of art that somewhere between dozens and billions of people can use. A cure for a major disease, a book that changes how we think about life, or a better way to make paper clips. Improvements count too. There is power in creating.
• Invest time to lead other people. Leadership is possibly the most powerful way of all to leverage your time. If you lead an initiative that causes each person in the US to spend an average of 1 minute on your cause, those minutes will amount to about 8 of your entire life’s worth of minutes. That is leverage, and that kind of leadership happens all the time.

This is one of my favorite business school concepts. In a factory, if the goal is to produce as many units per day as possible, there will always be one machine, or step in the process, that is the slowest link in the chain. If the welding department can do 30 units an hour, but the painting department can only do 20 units an hour, then increasing the output of the welding department will not increase the output of the overall factory, because the painting department will constrain the output to 20 units an hour. The constrained resources is the bottleneck.

To increase overall output, you must increase the constrained resource, or change how you are using it. Increasing non-constrained resources may appear productive, but it won’t increase overall output.

This applies to everything, not just factories.

• In business, if the constrained resource is capital, you must increase capital or change how you are using it.
• In farming, if the constrained resource is acres of land, you must increase acreage or change how you are using it.
• In leadership, if the constrained resource is your time for strategic and visionary planning, you must increase time spent on that, or change how you are using it.
• Personally, if the constrained resource is courage, your must increase your courage or change how you are using it.

Other personal constraints are initiative, hope, relationships, training, etc. This is about a lot more than machines and money.

With every goal you pursue, you must know what your constrained resource is and focus your management efforts to mitigate that constraint.

At an individual, personal level the ultimate constrained resource is time. We each get 24 hours per day with a maximum limit of about 100 years (on earth). This is mankind’s greatest limitation, and therefore our most valuable resource. There’s no way to add more, so to increase the output of your life, the only choice is to change how you use your time.

It’s worth being very deliberate about what you trade your time for. Just like money, it can be wasted, spent, or multiplied by investing it. More on this soon.

Recently I wrote about “The Dip” by Seth Godin. It’s a book about how every project goes through a dip, a time of being difficult and uncertain. We have to choose which projects to push through, and which to wisely abandon.

I am experiencing one of those dips up and close and personal right now. When I got my iPad I got pretty infatuated with it and I decided, that’s it, I gotta learn how to wrote apps for these things. So I bought a couple of books on learning the technology, and I spent the money to get a mac computer, required for the development process.

I dove into all the learning curves and had a fantastic, nerdy time figuring it all out. I decided to write a personal time tracking application as my learning project, with a belief that it would be useful and marketable as well. The coaching program I’m in assigns all new members to track everything they do with their time for a week and this app would make that task much easier. So I know at least a few people could use it.

I put the first test version of that app onto my own iPhone yesterday. Then the doubt set in. It’s cool. But is it really marketable? Will I ever sell enough copies to pay for the books I bought (let alone the mac I bought)? There are a few other apps on the app store that do similar things already. Can my approach to time analysis offer a significant advantage? Maybe I just got excited because I’m a nerd about technology stuff, and there’s no real payoff but fun and learning for me. Deep down, I’m probably most afraid of embarrassing myself by getting irrationally excited about something that doesn’t have any real potential.

There it is. The dip, with all its doubts. And the doubts may very well be right.

On the other hand, the app might be really useful to people who are looking to get a handle on their time. If people find it helpful, it might sell enough to make my nerdy learning project profitable, not just fun. I’ve felt the pressure of the dip on every endeavor I’ve tried before. Some of them failed, some of them succeeded in big ways. What to do, what to do.

My advice (to myself and anyone else feeling the agnst of the dip):

First, resist the fear of embarrassing failure as much as you can. It’s a strong instinct, but not actually dangerous.

Second:

• if there is any reasonable chance of a worthwhile result,
• and if the worst-case downside is an acceptable risk (i.e. it won’t bankrupt you if it fails)
• and if the project does not take you away from something else with clearly superior potential,
• then, pursue the project in the smallest-scale way that will get you to proof-of-concept.

I’ll let you know in a few weeks if I was brave enough (or maybe foolish enough) to follow my own advice.

Which would you rather have: 3 scoops of ice cream on Monday, 2 scoops on Tuesday, and 1 scoop on Wednesday, or the reverse, 1 scoop on Monday, 2 scoops on Tuesday, and 3 scoops on Wednesday?

Researchers who study intertemporal decision making (decisions involving a span of time) find that most people prefer the second case, with ascending rewards. Interestingly, this is not the purely rational choice. Receiving the extra ice cream earlier is slightly superior if the goal is maximum benefit, because there is some risk of interruption in the plan before Wednesday. For example, I could get hit by a bus, get sick, the ice cream supply could run out, etc.

One reason for our tendency to choose the ascending sequence is that we prefer to look forward to things getting better rather than dread things getting worse. (I know, dread is a strong word for ice cream, but I can’t think of a word that means mild dread. Word lovers, leave me a comment.)

But another reason for our irrational choice, one I didn’t guess, is that we tend to automatically and subconsciously extrapolate the trend into the future. We include in our mental calculation some assumption that we might get 4 scoops on Thursday in the ascending sequence, and 0 scoops on Thursday in the descending sequence.

I suppose this mental habit is often useful, since many trends do continue into the future. But this mental habit of making decisions based on the assumption that the observed trend will continue also leads to things like economy-destabilizing housing bubbles and bad business decisions. When data is available to rationally evaluate the probability that the trend will continue, be aware of the subconscious tendency to assume, and take a look at the data.

People, including potential customers, are more motivated to avoid loss than to pursue gain. Fear is stronger than greed.

We also tend to perceive taking action as more risky than not taking action.

These are probably good ways to stay alive if you are a creature trying to avoid being eaten by a predator. They are survival instincts.

So what if you are trying to motivate yourself or someone else to do more than survive, to take action with a potential loss involved?

One way might be to work with this natural fear of loss, by creating an awareness of the potential losses involved in not taking action (not leading, not starting, not purchasing).

Here’s the reality. Inactivity is more risky than activity for humans who aim to do more than survive. And we have more to gain than we have to lose, so in the grand scheme of things potential gain is greater than potential loss. (This is only true of anyone who currently possesses less than half of all the good things on earth.)

In living and in selling, it’s worth balancing these common illusions with some reality from the other side.