Work Life Balance

It may seem strange to write to do a business tip in a blog about home loans and buying real estate.

But here's my thinking.

When we buy a home it's not just about shelter. A piece of canvas strung between two trees will give us shelter. it's more about taking care of those that we love and providing a safe haven for our family to grow up in and our friends to visit.

You could say, it's really all about lifestyle.

Now more and more I hear people complain that their work life balance is too heavily geared to work or business. The other common complaint is about being time poor......

So what I thought I would do is add posts about simple things you can do that will help you tip the scales back the other way and at the same time be more productive, make more money and not work any harder or longer.

So let me know what you think.

Today's post is about working out your time value.

Time Value:

Question: What is your time worth? Most employees and business owners (regardless of size) don’t know the answer to this question.

If you don’t know you cannot value your time and no one else will value your time either. In fact it is impossible to be as successful as you could be if you don’t know what your time is worth.
What’s more you will not earn it because you haven’t told your mind that this is what it has to achieve.

Let’s work it out.
Say you want to earn $100K a year.
You have 4 weeks holiday a year and with public holidays and sick days you lose another two weeks.
So you work 46 weeks a year.
Say you work 5 days a week and an average 8 hour day less an hour for lunch and coffee breaks. So that’s now 7 hours a day.
So you work 46 x 5 x 7 = 1610 hours per year

Divide $100K by 1610 = $62.11 per hour or $434.55 per day. This is how much your time is worth in this example.

But hang on a second let’s just think about all the things that you do in a day. Are all of those activities high impact or high income producing activities? No way but here is where it gets really interesting:

Say you managed 2 hours per day on high impact and income producing activities. (Don't kid yourself even CEO's of fortune 500 companies find it hard to actually do 1 hour a day on high impact/income generating activity).

But for our example let's say you do manage 2 hours a day.

OK that being the case, you now only work 46 x 5 x 2= 460 hours per year. Which means that your hourly time value is now $217.39.

If you increase just 1 hour per week on the high impact / income producing activities you would earn an extra $10k per year that’s a 10% increase for 1 hour per week!

If you managed 1 extra hour per day on high impact / income producing activity that would equal an extra $50K per year or a 50% increase.

So how can you get an extra hour a day without working harder or longer? You can’t get it with time management. You cannot increase the minutes per day, BUT you can get it with event management and time blocking.

More on event management and time blocking later in the week.