Do You Measure The Time Also As a Currency?

Have you really thought about the value of your time, if time was a currency would it not have the highest exchange rate? In fact it is a currency that certainly cannot be exchanged for any monetary value in this lifetime.

Pondering over it, time is the all that we really have.  More importantly there in no such thing as free time.

You cannot just store time away. Store it for another time to be used up later, sure you have time that you will use at your leisure, but certainly is not spare time.

When that precious time is wasted in front of the PC or Laptop without a care just surfing the internet and then attempting to justify to yourself that you were actually using up your spare time – what actually happened is that valuable time of our life has been wasted.

It is not actual time that would be termed as leisure time.  Leisure time is when you are occupied with something above all other activities.  All other activities like going on holiday, or going swimming, spending the moments with your loved ones or family, spending it with your friends or engaged in hobbies.

The Pious Predecessors understood the value of time. The great scholar of the exegesis of the Qur’an Ibn Jarrir At-Tabiri whilst he was on his deathbed it was brought to his attention of a narration of the Prophet صلىالله عليه وسلم that he was unaware of.  Whilst he was in the final stages of his life, he requested for a pen and paper to be brought to him so that he could make a record of this narration.  The people that were surrounding him were astounded; they wanted to know from him why on the final moments of his life why he wanted to undertake this task?  He explained that people should not give up the search and pursuit of knowledge until death has actually overtaken them.  The pressure that these pious predecessors exerted on themselves was such that every moment of their life was precious and every second was valued.

The importance of financial and time management

The basis of modern science is on Calculus, Calculus is based on Algebra, and Algebra was developed on the basis of the complexities around inheritance that Islam had designated to the heirs.

One scholar has given a juristical opinion that upon marriage the husband and wife should actually label who owns what exactly, the wisdom to this is that if one or the other dies then the siblings will not be fighting against their parent over any property/item that  assume is owned by the deceased parent.

The point of the above is that you should endeavour to calculate and manage all of your expenses and keeping records of these, in the long-term this will be beneficially not only to your back pocket but nurture you intelligence; since you have to exert intelligence to achieve financial balance especially in an age of waste and excess.

I was once mentored by two brothers who were millionaires; part of that mentoring was to collect receipts for everything I purchased over the month; even if it was from a local bakery for a cheese and onion pie that cost 36p.

At the end of the month you would calculate the expense and examine whether it was necessary to spend that money or should you have saved that money or better still give it to charity.

Now I am not asking you to stop eating out and enjoying a few pleasures, however I am asking you to start reflecting on your finances and what changes can be made to improve the financial situation.

At least the initial stages it to be able to start reflecting on what we spend on and how necessary was that spend and whether you are becoming excessive in your spend.

Since this blog is about personal development and internet marketing, you got the spiel about the personal development and would want to know when internet business aspect kicks in and what it has to do with that.  Well I want to tell you that it has EVERYTHING to do with that!

The main reason that you are not making the kind of money you want to from your business or from the amount of hours that you work is because you have not made it a matter to continuously increase the value of your time.  Let me explain that in the layman’s terms.

All time has a value attached to it; the way you perceive or view time and think about it yourself is going to have an effect on everything within and outside of your business for the rest of your natural life and beyond.  Frankly you have to give value to your time before anyone else is going to value it as well.

In regards to financial terms, do you know the value of your time? Or even how you increase the value of that time? A fundamental question that needs to be asked here is, “what do you think that your time is worth?” and also, “Do you know what your actual time has to be worth in order for you to achieve the income goals you are aiming for?”

If you are unaware and do not know what is the value of your time and what that value needs to be, then you will be not be able to maximize and make those decisions that are effective on exactly what activities you should be working on and spending your time towards and what activities you should have others working on as well.

Here we can both look at this together and try and get an idea of the value of your time as finance is concerned and what that time should be worth.

Here is a slide show that I have taken from Rich Schefren Internet manifesto, which frankly I owe gratitude for his introduction to me of outsourcing the work online and that after the grace of Allah.   This process is going to be the basis of the calculation to the value of your time that we will attempt to assess together.

However we will not be covering it all in this one single post you will have to await an additional post that will cover on what is what the exact hourly rate of your time is worth! So let us look towards a short term goal that will be 10% of your long-term goal.

In the image to the right you have a box.  In the box you want to insert the ideal amount of money you want to achieve if you owned your own business.

Now in the box immediately below it you want put the amount you made over the previous 3 months.

In the box at the bottom will be the income over the previous 3 months x4 to get on track to what you currently want to achieve.

Now what you do is take-away what you are on track to achieve i.e. the current reality from that amount that you have always wanted to achieve.  You know have the magic number which is the amount you want to achieve and reach as the income target.

What you would do now is times x that magic number with 0.1, then add that to the amount you are actually earning to establish what the amount you need to increase to get your income target.

I can imagine how confusing this can get. So let us look at an example.

The target income to be achieved is $1,000,000 a year.   If the person is earning over the previous 3 months was $30,000 it would mean that that they are progressing towards 160,000 annually.  You would take-away the $160,000 from the $1,000,000 and you will assert that $840,000 is needed to achieve that goal.

What you do is now take 10% to get a result of $84,000.  If you add that amount to the $160,000 then you have a new short-term target which is $240,000.

So there you have it! You will have set yourself a target to achieve, now we need to look at how that can be achieved; how are you actually going to get there? You definitely have to make some changes if you truly want to achieve that.  And you definitely need to change the actual amount of money you are earning and the amount of money you make on an hourly basis.

Following on from this post expect to see the post what the exact hourly rate of your time is worth! Also a post about how you go about assessing the target rate you want to achieve as your income.

Tagged as: financial management, Personal Development, time management