“Abundance of Time” Is a Different Way to Think About Wealth
It makes sense that most of us focus on money when it comes to our happiness. Not being able to afford things like rent is stressful, and going into debt to support yourself only compounds those feelings of powerlessness. Whatever your financial situation, unless you’re tycoon-level rich, you’re likely to focus all your attention on making, saving, and spending as much money as possible.
But if you’re unhappy even though your bills are paid and your debt is manageable, it’s probably because you’re not thinking about money correctly . Instead of thinking about wealth in terms of money, you should think in terms of wealth over time .
What is abundance of time?
Time abundance—the feeling that you have enough time to accomplish everything you want—is a critical aspect of our happiness and sense of personal fulfillment. Time poverty is the opposite: that stressful feeling that occurs when there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done. Between the commute, time spent at work, and then chores , many of us barely have time to eat dinner and maybe watch a show before collapsing into bed—and starting the process all over again the next day.
Our weekends are then filled with housework, maintenance, and other responsibilities (or a second job, or working overtime). We keep telling ourselves that we will get back to hobbies, or make time to see friends, or get some sleep next week, or next month, or some unknown time in the future.
Lack of time has been shown to have adverse effects on both mental and physical health. A mistake many of us make is thinking that the answer to time pressure is to simply have more money, but the key to success is to use money to buy more time. If all you do is sell more of your time (to a second job or a more demanding position), then you are actually increasing your time poverty, even as your bank account grows. On the other hand, having more money means you can potentially buy yourself more time. The trick is to stop thinking solely about how you spend your money and more about how you spend your time.
How to become rich in time
Time is one of the few resources in our lives that we cannot create more of, no matter how creative, ambitious or hardworking we are. You have 24 hours in a day and that’s it, and once those hours are gone you can’t get them back. But what you can do to become more time-rich is to manage your time more effectively by treating it as a limited resource. You can achieve greater time abundance by doing four fundamental things:
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Organize and prioritize. Since your time is limited, stop treating it like an amorphous, endless resource of which you always have more. Make lists of things you need or want to do and prioritize them. Then use time blocking to break down each of these priorities into the fixed amount of time needed to complete them, or at least move them toward completion. This avoids the piling up of tasks that increases stress and the feeling of not being in control of your time, and it also gives you a clear picture of how your day will go. And having a clear end time for specific actions will increase your efficiency.
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Delegate. Always think about what you can delegate to someone else. For example, if you can afford to hire cleaners for your home, you can reclaim the time you would otherwise spend cleaning your home. Essentially, you are buying time from someone else.
But getting that time back doesn’t necessarily mean paying anyone. If there are tasks that someone else in your life can take on (such as household chores or work tasks that are not officially included in your job description), this will also take up some of your time.
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Automate. Are there aspects of your life that you can automate? Paying bills is a simple example: Instead of spending an hour each week paying bills individually, setting up automatic payments will give you that hour back. Think about any opportunities you have for automation: recipe refills, meal plans (if it’s in your budget), even grocery shopping can be automated these days with weekly subscription platforms.
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Single-tasking. Finally, be aware of what’s called ” time confetti “—the way we spend little time on a seemingly endless list of activities, most of which happen online. Moving from task to task may seem like multitasking, but it is not an efficient way to get a task done.
Instead, use monotasking , which means focusing on one task until it is completed. This is an extremely simple concept, but it requires discipline, such as sticking to a time blocking schedule you create, eliminating distractions, and forcing yourself to focus.
Having more money can certainly make some of these steps easier or even possible, but you can apply these four principles to your time management, regardless of your financial circumstances, and improve your time-abundance-to-poverty ratio at least a little.