What’s The Price of 1 Hour of Your Time?

 

A challenge for so many managers, entrepreneurs and leaders who I come in contact with is the following - what should I be spending my time on?

Truthfully, for those who are not asking that question, then they should be!!

A way to find an answer to that question is to ask myself - what price do I put on 1 hour of my time? There are different ways of discovering what that figure is.

If you are self-employed and charge out your time, then it is pretty easy - work out how many billable hours you have and divide that into the revenue you target to generate.

If you are an employed executive, then look at the total cost of your package - salary, bonus, pensions, company taxes, etc. and divide that by the number of hours you will be working. (Don’t forget to take out holidays, weekends etc. - otherwise you are cheating!)

Once you have got that figure, then your question when deciding how you are going to spend the next hour is - is that hour delivering a good return on my cost? If not, who else should be doing it.

By the way, I practise what I preach and do this exercise pretty regularly myself. Why do it on a regular basis? Well, I find that we drift into bad habits of doing things that, truthfully, should be done by someone else.

Some of those things are things I like doing - but should not be! Others are things that I think will take too long to explain to someone else – now there is short term thinking that costs money!

The exercise challenges me and that is what I suggest you do - challenge yourself to see how you are using your time.

If you cannot justify paying yourself that amount of money for doing that task, then stop doing it and find someone else to do it.

I challenge you to do it this week and let me know your results.