Time: Your Greatest Currency, the Scarcest Resource

With a Suggested Exercise to Audit Time, and Start Taking It Back

Jun 20, 2024

The Vacuum Epiphany

The other day, I was rolling my eyes at vacuuming, yet again. I’ve got a love-hate relationship with our vacuum. It’s small and powerful, but it’s also finnicky, stops randomly due to a sensor shorting out, and has given me a chronic ugly callous on my right thumb joint.

And then, the thought arrived: how would I feel about this chore today, if I knew the precise number of times I would vacuum in my lifetime, and today was crossing yet another one of those times off the list?

In that context, the 10 annoying minutes it takes to vacuum my home came into focus as utterly precious.

I had a visceral, vacuum-induced epiphany of time as one of my greatest riches.

But Time is Also Scarce

It’s become common practice when we talk about ‘currency’ as it relates to our work, to include not just money, but energy and time. (Among other currencies we hold and generate, which I’ve written about elsewhere.)

I don’t necessarily believe in ‘scarcity’ in any of those currencies. But for me—at this moment in life—time feels a little different than the other two.

It’s not that we can’t change our relationship to time: those of us who have meditative or mindfulness practices know that we can experience the stretching and compressing of time, i.e. that our relationship to time is not linear.

But in terms of a human life span in 3D: time is limited.

Money: one may not have much, but it is possible to make more, with training, systems, work, opportunities.

Energy: it varies, we can have more or less, depending on our habits and cycles.

But time: assuming a long, full mischievous life of 100 years, we could use some basic math to literally calculate how many days, minutes, seconds we have.

I don’t want to do that, because I don’t want to know that number. Still, whether I do the math or not—whatever 3D time I have, is all the time I have. I can’t make more—which is the very definition of a non-renewable or ‘scarce’ resource.

So many conditions of life in the modern western ‘weird’ world are thieves of our time: work paid by the hour, a task that overflows beyond the allotted schedule, commuting long hours to an office or shop, driving around for household provisions and kids’ activities because our communities are poorly planned, inefficient government bureaucracy, inadequately staffed & trained customer service that makes you sit on the phone. Fill in the blanks of your own most distressing time-suck.

Taking It Back: A Radical Act

One of the most radical acts we can commit is to take back our time.

And successful entrepreneurship is one way to do this. I’m not going to polly-anna it. In the first few years, it will take MORE Of your time, because you are still working another job, or you can’t afford help, or there’s just so much to do.

Or, what you immediately gain in time, you might lose in money. Plus, there are just a lot of other risks and challenges involved in entrepreneurship.

But done effectively, entrepreneurship gives your time back to the person it belongs to: you.

Taking back your time is a (r)evolutionary act. It gives you more choices in your life.

Hopefully, we are familiar with the concept of economic disparity—by which we usually mean ‘monetary’ disparity—of various groups in our society. But so much of social justice in the form ‘equality for ________ group’ also has to do with how much control we have over those precious 24 hours.

I’m a member of a group of people called ‘women’ who historically have been (and in many parts of the world still are) relegated to the relative lower end of the ‘owning my own resources’ scale.

Earning and leveraging my own money? Oh for sure, I’m here for it, I’m on it. As a GenX woman, I’ve had opportunities that my mother and the countless generations before her couldn’t even imagine.

But re-claiming my time has been every bit as emancipating, nourishing, and life-giving an act as earning more money.

Many of my women friends say the same. Or anyone, whatever gender, who has developed an income stream or business model that does not depend on the exchanging of set units of time for dollars (or pennies).

It Needs to Be Intentional

And this is the key. Taking back your time is a (r)evolutionary act. But it does not happen automatically, just because you are self-employed, or ‘escape the corporate world’.

The revolution takes planning. You need to create a supportive system for yourself that requires, at minimum, two crucial pieces:

-Fair Trade Pricing

-A Business Model/Income Stream that Does Not Depend solely on Exchanging Units of Time for Money

Of course, School of Kind Business can help you with both of these. ‘Cause otherwise, why would I be writing about it? And so can a lot of other good business supporters out there that I know of. But whether or not you seek additional support, here’s where I recommend that you start. . .

Start With A Practice

A simple practice to start with, that I have been doing for several years: audit your time.

i.e. Notice ALL the ways you spend your time resource (and I literally mean ‘spend,’ like it was money, like you would keep track of business receipts). Write every single task in your calendar. Time spent in the car commuting or giving rides, quick grocery store runs, laundry, extra meeting times, logging on to email or social media after hours . . . everything.

Then, after a week or two, review. I bet you’ll notice some things. I bet you’ll be at least a little bit motivated to shift or drop or make something just 15 minutes more spacious.

I’ll share more on Time + Entrepreneurship, very soon.

This is really, really important.

Taking back your time is a (r)evolutionary act.

Please share this with me in Comments, if you have a few minutes to offer (haha): How do you experience your time as a working mom, entrepreneur, busy human?