What can you achieve with this time by doing something you’re good at?

Time is money.

Ben Franklin, one of our country’s founding fathers, coined this term in one of his books from the mid seventeen hundreds.

The crux of his theory was, in order to earn money, one must act and therefore use their infinite time wisely, because they never get it back.

In essence, time is the ultimate form of currency. One that’s volatile and it fluctuates daily depending on a number of factors.

Have you ever thought about your own exchange rate in this way?

It can be an elegant organizing principle for productivity. Because once you understand the market value of your temporal currency, it changes your decision making process and focus.

Like the company founder who wastes two hours banging her head against his buggy laptop when she should be leading her team.

Or the salesperson who labors over the nuance of website copy when he could be meeting with prospects.

By spending their time on the wrong things, its value plummets. Whereas if these two team members had a better understanding of their own personal exchange rate, they could delegate the task faster and more frequently.

The executive could outsource the issue to the company tech guy who could solve the problem in fifteen minutes.

The salesperson could tap a copywriter on the shoulder to help him wordsmith the website into perfection.

Now do you see how the currency of time differs based on variables such as skillset and position?

That’s how exchange rates work. In finance, it’s the value of one country’s currency in relation to another currency. In this case, you just replace the word country for individual, and now you’ve got a thriving economy.

The question to get in habit of asking yourself is this:

What can you achieve with this time by doing something you’re good at?

Doesn’t mean you’ll always have the luxury of doing that thing. Everyone has to do stuff they don’t want to do.

But by understanding your own currency exchange rate, now you can accomplish more with less. What used to take your team four hours can be accomplished in two.

Because when your time is smart, precisely and intentionally used, then the amount of it that you need to spend on the project isn’t as much as you think.

Franklin’s theory about time being money becomes less of an entertaining platitude, and more of an economic reality.

Once you understand the market value of your temporal currency, what will become possible for you?