How do you make a tradeoff between your Time and Money?

Always trade the time for something valuable, be it money, or some new learning

Every week, I write an article to share my learning or discovery during my startup journey. Here is the link to my reasons for penning these articles for myself and for many others like me.

“Time is money.” It is an adage that you might have been hearing since your childhood.

As we embark on the entrepreneurship journey, this phrase makes even more sense than your childhood days. We need to be frugal and try to save every penny in our business. But we should always compare money spent with the time saved OR the money saved with the time spent as we make the vital business decisions. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done. Many people, including myself, fail to make a wise judgment about deciding between time and money.

Generally, we tend to save money, and, in this process, we let go of our precious time. That is why “Automations” are such a popular topic these days. You might have seen several products that help automate your daily tasks so that you can spend your time on other, more critical things in your business.

One beneficial automation tool for entrepreneurs is email automation software. Some of the things that it can help with are:

• Send bulk emails using personalized greetings
• Follow-up emails for people who have opened your email or clicked on a link
• Task reminders etc.

“Time is money and money is only for the time being”

I feel this is not a straightforward binary decision to choose between time and money. It is also context-dependent as well as person-dependent. In the initial stages of our startup, we have a lot of time on our hands. Also, we are hypersensitive to saving money. We can only see money going out but not coming in for days, months, or years. But we also need to check on ourselves, as it is very easy to become addicted to this habit of saving money. We can easily overlook the enormous amount of time we waste due to our small savings. In these cases, our actual gain might come to negatives on our saving meter.

I would share three instances where I compared the time and money savings. There is no right or wrong way to judge these decisions, as I said earlier. These depend on the person and their situation.

• Yesterday, I booked international flight tickets (yayyy travel diaries resume post-covid). I had an option to book long flights (really long), but it saved 20K. After deliberating to save money or time, I booked a direct flight. I decided to save my time and spend the money. I could use this extra time for more sightseeing in a new city.
• I am creating video content for one of my projects. I am a newbie to video editing software. But I do like to learn new things. Hence, I started learning about video editing from YouTube videos. I am editing my videos with the help of these online tutorials. My friend advised me to hire an agency to create these videos. I decided to save money and spend my time learning a new thing in this case. In my opinion, this is an investment and not an expense of time.
• I would like to share an instance about my previous employer. He hired a team, but he often used to pick up the team’s tasks and do them himself. By doing this, he was spending both his Time and Money. His team was getting paid for the work that the employer ended up doing. He was spending his time on operational stuff rather than building his business.

By the way, this is a trait prevalent among entrepreneurs. They need to learn to let go of their control. When you delegate a task to a team member that you had been doing earlier, you also need to transfer ownership and complete control of the task to that team member. You chose to spend your money on this team member as you want to save your time for other critical tasks in your business. Sadly, entrepreneurs find it very hard to detach from their earlier tasks, as they feel no one else would be able to do the job as perfectly as themselves.

There are no right or wrong decisions here. Every person has their reasons in life to choose between Time and Money. My inclination will be — Always trade the time for something valuable, be it money, or some new learning. Do not spend both your time and money massaging your control freak ego. Every entrepreneur should be vigilant of this danger.

Wishing everyone a great week and hope you trade your time and money wisely