If Time Is Money, Here Is How to Reclaim Some of Yours

What if time really was money? What if you had $50 placed into your checking account for every hour you were doing something productive on the job? You wouldn't even have to be successful. You would simply need to be doing something resembling work. For many people, $400 a day for an honest 8 hours worth of work would be a huge upgrade. Just think: All you have to do to earn it was to use your time doing your job. I suspect we would see a major uptick in production. People would be begging to come in early and stay late.

All that time spent around the water cooler would be a thing of the past. Those extended trips to the coffee maker would end without a supervisor saying a word. When you convert literal time to literal money, all kinds of productive possibilities present themselves. One of the first things you would do is hunt down the time-wasters in your day and eradicate them like an infestation of disgusting parasites. You would find the lost efficiencies and tighten the ship. If you are ready to convert more of your time to money, here are a few places to start:

Customer Data

Customer data is at the heart of your business. Managing all that data and trying to do something useful with it is more like a dagger to the heart of your business. If you want to convert more of your time to money, you are going to have to implement better CDP solutions. The right customer data platform can transform your operations into something that prints money instead of something that leaches money.

Even before your business scales to enterprise levels, you will discover inefficiencies in the way your company is handling customer data. At some point, you have so much data that you can't tell what is valuable and what is not. Once you have sorted the useful from the useless, you need a way to quickly retrieve the information you need at the time you need it. Obviously, this is not the kind of thing that can be done without a good computer system. But once you arrive at that reality, you have to also deal with the multi-headed dragon of data security. There goes all your time and money. Flip the script by bringing in the best CDP you can find.

Undercharging for Your Work

How much is an hour of your time worth when you are applying your expertise to a given task? If you are not charging what your time is worth, you are quite literally wasting your time. And wasted time is wasted money. If you charge $20 for an hour's work, then it will take you 4 hours to make $80. However, if you charge $40 for an hour's work, you can make the money you need in half the time.

The mistake many business owners make is that they undervalue their time by undercharging for their work. They are afraid to charge what they think they are worth. What an entrepreneur should do is build in price flexibility. They might start their business with an introductory offer. That said, it is easier to lower a price than it is to raise a price. So it is better to err on the high side. A higher price will attract a less price-sensitive and more quality focused clientele. So be bold with your pricing and stop wasting your valuable time. You are great at what you do and are worth the premium.

Not Taking Proper Breaks

It might seem counterintuitive. But you are less productive when you don't stop for breaks. Your brain reaches the point of diminishing returns when it is pushed too hard for too long. Taking several 5 to 10 minute breaks throughout the day will actually boost your productivity. One of the best uses of your time is to relax and recharge.

You are not going to magically make $50 for every hour you work. But you will make more than you do by eliminating lost time managing customer data, undercharging for your work, and sleeping at your desk when you should just take a proper break.