LIVING LIFE : Time is Money

The days of ‘no hurry in Africa’ are gone. Employers want employees who can ‘sell’ their personal time to work for them, to offer a service for them. They need people who understand that time is money. So how do you use your effective time to advance yourself? Many people who pride themselves in having jobs go around a day in clockwise manner without realizing how much time they waste in a day. No wonder they do not understand when their employers complain about their lack of effectiveness, because after all, they work from 8a.m to 5p.m everyday. Such people enter their offices at least ten minutes after eight, spend the next half an hour in useless chit chat, moving here and there, looking for the office cup of tea and coffee or fidgeting with their computers. An hour later, they begin to ‘work’ but will lurch from one thing to the other and eventually reach lunchtime when they have been working but have effectively failed to accomplish even one task. They will take a long lunch break and waste the first one hour in the afternoon, trying to acclimatize to work because they were so busy in the morning, playing with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and by four o’clock they are already in the mood for home. Furthermore, if you are the type who spends a lot of time attending time consuming meetings and workshops with no definite action points, hanging out with the boys every evening, partying every weekend or even spending hours watching movies, note that you are losing money. One of the ways of making better use of your time is prioritizing your daily schedule so that early in the morning you handle the most important tasks and finish them off while as you tire you handle the more mundane, less priority tasks. This improves your effectiveness because you do best what is more important. If you waste two hours everyday (8am to 5pm) on an activity that pays much less than what you are worth, you will waste a total of about 462 hours in a year alone. To be able to achieve your financial goals, you have to reconsider what you are spending your time on. Focus on real money makers and let those whose income goal or ability is less than yours handle time wasters. Instead of working 8am to 5pm days consider focusing on two hours effectively everyday in order to get work done. However, the adage time is money also obtains new credence when you consider the Time Value of Money. According to Investopedia, the time value of money is the idea that money available at the present time is worth more than the same amount in the future due to its potential earning capacity. This core principle of finance holds that, provided money can earn interest, any amount of money is worth more the sooner it is received. kelviod@yahoo.com