Want to Be Rich? Plan For Time, Not Money

This moment represents the most time you will ever have left on this Earth.

If that cold hard fact doesn’t freak you out, then you might want to check your pulse. The honest truth is that time is always running out on us. We don’t know whether or not we are going to walk out on the street and get hit by a bus tomorrow. Very comforting. 

That is also very inconvenient for us as we need time to become successful, develop relationships, and ultimately end up where we want to be on this Earth. So why then is so much of our focus when it comes to success focused on money instead of time?

Money Makes the World Go Round

This cliché has been around for eons, and was even a song in the hit Broadway musical, “Cabaret”.  The fact of the matter is that it is easy to define success through money because it’s easy to measure how much of it that we have. We can also buy things with it that show our wealth status to our friends and family. When you see someone drive by in that fancy Lamborghini, assumptions are made. Never mind if that person is currently leasing it for $10,000 per month.

We also can’t deny that money is extremely important when it comes to becoming  successful. Money can’t buy happiness and it doesn’t define the entirety of being rich, but it can buy opportunities that many in this life will never be able to afford. Money has its role, and there is plenty written on how to get it. We are here today to talk about time.

Time Remaining is Unquantifiable. Sort of.

It’s not that time is unquantifiable. The watch industry worldwide in 2024 was valued at over $78 Billion. We can count the seconds, minutes, and hours just fine. The problem is that none of us ever knows how much time we have left. 

Some of us get unwanted clues. A devastating medical diagnosis might hone in on how much time we have left. As we age, we understand that if we are in our 90s, time is running short. But none of us knows exactly how much time we have. 

For this reason, we can’t measure it like we can a bank account. You can’t look at someone else and proclaim they are richer because they have more time remaining than someone else. The closest thing we have is the phrase “you are so young” when we look at someone who has a perceived long life ahead of them.

Percentages Can Help Us Quantify Our Time

The cool thing about probabilities and statistics is that we can use them to break things down in a way that linear math usually cannot. Think of all the advanced metrics we now have for everything from sports to finance. Wins Above Replacement? This is a baseball stat that tries to get a grip on how many wins a team will get from adding a certain above average player to their team. A stochastic to tell us when to buy or sell a stock? We can do a lot with numbers.

Luckily percentages are easy to understand and they can help us with this problem of not knowing how much time we have left. While percentages can’t help us define how much time we have left, they can provide a framework that is expandable through time whether that amount of time is a day or a decade.

Let’s take the average person working a 9-5 job five days a week. Let’s say they live in fantasy land and actually get 8 hours of sleep per night. 33% of their 168 hours per week is spent sleeping. Lucky bastards. About 24% is spent working. 43% is spent doing other things. Assuming most of us are not in a position to quit our jobs, then we have to find a way to manipulate that 43% to our advantage.

Defining Wealth Differently

One day I received a text from our board member Keith Sherburn, asking me if I had heard of the book “The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life” by Sahil Bloom. In the book, Bloom describes financial wealth, time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, and physical wealth. While I won’t describe all of these here, I do recommend the book for a deeper dive.

Bloom defines “time wealth” roughly as the freedom to control our schedules. Our jobs have a lot to do with this. If we work in a 9-5, that schedule might seem pretty set. However, some of us have been able to negotiate alternate work schedules or work from home agreements that can alter how we spend that work time. 

Some corporations operate under a results model where it doesn’t matter how much time you spend on a task as long as the result is satisfactory. Not being chained to a desk for 8 hours can really help alter that 24% of our time spent working. 

The truth is a lot of us designed our early lives around getting the job we wanted and then tried to construct a life around that. Maybe it was better to start with the life that we wanted and found the job to fit that. Regardless of the situation we are in now, we have to look at ways to take back the reigns on what we are doing with that time.

Bloom’s Profound Example

Over dinner with a friend one night, Bloom was talking with a friend who asked him how things were going. Bloom was working in California at the time and he gave the usual answer. Good. Busy. His friend wasn’t taking that for an answer and the conversation went deeper.

He started talking about how he wished he saw his parents more but they were living on the East Coast and said he only saw them about once a year. Based on the age of his parents his friend replied. “So you are telling me that you are only going to see them about 15 more times in your life.”

Ouch. 

That was the catalyst that Bloom needed to make some serious changes in his life. They picked up and moved to the east coast, closer to his parents and now that value of 15 more interactions is in the hundreds. 

This is an extreme example, but one of serious importance. By changing his actions, Bloom “created” more percentage of time spent doing the things he wanted to do. In this case, seeing his parents. 

A Three Step Plan to Re-Evaluate Our Time

Using Bloom’s Example as a guide, we can re-define how we allot our time to do more of the things that we want to become more fulfilled. We don’t necessarily need to move across the country but taking a page out of James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” if we can get 1% better each day with how we spend our time, then by default we are becoming richer.

In order to accomplish this we can implement a three step plan to looking at how we spend our time. 

1.) Evaluate how we currently spend our time and identify our time sinks

2.) Be honest with ourselves about what we want to be spending our time doing

3.) Take action to increase the percentage of time doing the things that are fulfilling 

Step 1: Evaluate Our Time

Start by mapping out your percentages of time spent doing various tasks. Understand that once this is out on paper it might be very depressing to look at but it’s important. This has to be the hard reality. No sugar coating it. This is the same process you would take when evaluating your financial budget. Parts of it are going to suck.

How detailed you want to get is up to you but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Your categories can be very high level, but if you are a detail oriented person you can take as deep of a dive as you want.

Step 2: Design Your Ideal Life

Now it’s time to dream. If no strings were attached, create a new budget for your time of what you would want to be doing. Go through a who, what, when, where, how and why of your ideal life. Remember you only have one life to live, so it’s time to get serious about how you would like to live it. 

Understand that the reality will lay somewhere in the middle but right now we are setting the two end points of the spectrum. Where you are now, and where you want to go. If you have followed me to this point you know that I preach that most things are on a spectrum. Very rarely are the end points a reality. In this case, you can absolutely make improvements from where you are now to get closer to where you want to be but you won’t be able to get to that end goal today.

Step 3: Apply the “Next Action” and “1%” Strategies on Repeat

Now that we have defined where we are and where we want to go we have to apply our old friend David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” next action strategy. If you are new to David Allen, I recommend the book, but the main takeaway is that to get closer to a long term goal we need to define in explicit detail the very next step we need to take to get there. Want to take a trip to Europe? The very next action might be pulling up the application for a passport.

In our case, we need to define what are the very next actions we need to take to change the percentages of time we spend to shift them towards the things we want to do. We often schedule our work tasks. Are we scheduling our tasks that we want to do for fulfillment. My free activity tracker and my article “Three Ways to Transform Your Habits to Increase Fulfillment” can help you define and keep track of these things we don’t often schedule. If we can get one percent better at doing this every day we are going to see a huge difference in how we are spending our time over the long haul. 

Building a New Identity

Another concept from James Clear is “voting” for your identity. Want to be a writer? Each time you spend writing is a vote for you becoming a writer. Want to be a runner? Each time you go out on the road, you are voting for that identity. 

Ultimately our happiness and fulfillment is defined by the things we choose to spend our time doing. It is not by how much money is in our bank account. Even those who have a ton of it have to decide on how they spend their finite amount of time on this Earth, just like the rest of us. 

Unfortunately we don’t have any more time left than is available to us in this moment, but by restructuring how we allocate that time, we can ultimately become richer and lead a more fulfilling life. 

And that, is worth your time.

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