No matter what you do or what industry you are in there will always be someone out there that has more money, more education, and more resources. The only equal playing field is time. Yes that’s right time. We all start the day with 24 hours and cram as much stuff into as possible. How efficiently you work that time separates you from your competitors. This is the reason why I’ve become and efficiency junky. As the word implies, the more efficient you are the more you get done in the same amount of time. More work equals more money, which gives you the ability to chase bigger and better opportunities.

The first step in becoming more efficient is to figure out what your time is worth. For most of us that’s pretty easy. I take my daily earnings and break that down into the number of hours I devote to the project. Notice I said hours devoted to the project not worked. For instance I need to write a link bait article but first it takes an hour in research, then I spend an hour writing, and finally another half and hour clearing it with the client’s legal department etc… so I’ve spent 2 hours on a project of which only 1 hour was spent creating the final product. Even if you aren’t self employed the equation is just as simple. Say you get an hourly wage of $10 an hour or $80 a day. You spend two hours commuting back and forth plus you lose another hour for lunch so that 8 hour work day is in reality an 11 hour work day. So, you effectively make $8 an hour before taxes.

With this theory in mind lets make these numbers interesting. Say you generate $50 an hour as a programmer. Everything that you do that isn’t programming costs you money. For instance instead of programming you run to the bank and pick up some office supplies. This is the type of work that $10 an hour person could be doing. By running these errands you have effectively lost $40 running errands. If you had outsourced that labor you would have increased your companies revenue by $40 instead of running those errands which only added $10 in value.

Of course you can’t work all the time, and even a workaholic like me even needs some down time, but knowing what your time is worth is the first step to allocating resources. Yes this is a simplistic view and there are a whole bunch of factors like taxes, expenses, etc… but the idea is just to get you to start thinking about your time in relation to dollar value. Because if you don’t know how much your time is worth, how do you know if you are losing money on a project?