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.