So today I spent entirely too long obsessing over a cool time tracking tool to tell you how much your time really costs. It’s called Spend Your Days, and it manages to magically combine my obsessions with productivity, time management, and easy math that even I can handle in such a way that I may not be able to do anything else today but stare at it and fiddle with the numbers and say, “Wow.”
Here’s how it works:
- First, watch the intro video from Michael Hyatt.
- Then enter your email and you’ll get the link sent straight to you for the tool.
- Now, follow the easy prompts (and check out the sample PDF) to help you figure out how much each of the activities in your professional life are “costing” you.
Heh?
Let’s unpack this. The first time I heard about the idea of putting a dollar value on your time was about a decade ago when I first read Your Money or Your Life, one of the hands-down classic books about managing your life and achieving financial freedom. The concept, as Dominguez and Robin explain it, is that understanding the value of your time is essential to making key steps to choosing what professional activities are worth your time, and what expenses are worth doing those professional activities in order to get.
So, if you figure out (they tell you how) that your real earning power after expenses and taxes and all the like is $20 an hour, say, then choosing to spend $20 on Uncorked, a reality show about sommeliers on itunes (just as one entirely random example that has nothing to do with me, of course), would cost you an hour of work. So how much do you want Uncorked? You get the picture.
The Spend Your Days tool is a bit similar, in that it’s pushing you to see what activities in your professional life are actually taking up all that time, and how much that is ultimately earning you.
I love it. And in the five minutes it took to try it out already had a huge “Aha!” moment about some stupid stuff I’m doing professionally that is taking way too long and not getting the returns I thought it was. And then I promptly spent another twenty minutes journaling about what this all meant.
Game changer, folks.
