Time Wealth: How to Invest Your Finite Moments

When you use your time well, you say your time is well spent.

Time is an asset. It’s one of the currencies of life. Controlling your time is crucial for happiness and fulfilment.

Sahil goes further to call it Time wealth.

You can increase your Time Wealth by focusing on awareness, attention, and control. It’s no longer about focusing on money, i.e., financial wealth. You must also prioritise how you spend your limited time.

The Big Question: How Many Moments Do You Have Remaining?

Time is finite, especially when it concerns your relationships.

For instance, you have limited moments left with loved ones. Cherishing time spent with family, children, friends, and partners is important. We often take small moments for granted and only value them when they are gone.

Confront this reality and take action to invest your time in meaningful ways.

Choosing a partner to share life with is critical, as is finding meaningful work with energising coworkers. As people age, time spent alone increases, and it should be cherished rather than feared.

The Two Types of Time

There is a modern obsession with busyness, which is often equated with worth.

People are busier than ever but have less control over their time due to digital distractions and societal pressures. This perpetual busyness leads to scattered attention and a lack of fulfilment. To understand better, there are two ways to describe time.

There are Chronos and Kairos.

Chronos refers to sequential, quantitative time, while Kairos refers to qualitative time, where certain moments are more significant than others. Recognising and capitalising your kairos moments is crucial for achieving disproportionate growth and results.

The key is to identify moments of greatest time leverage and focus attention on them.

The Three Pillars of Time Wealth

There are three pillars for building Time Wealth:

1. Awareness: Understanding the finite nature of time as a precious asset.
2. Attention: The ability to focus on things that matter while ignoring distractions.
3. Control: The freedom to choose how to spend one’s time.

Awareness is Recognizing Time as Your Most Precious Asset

Awareness involves recognising the impermanence and value of time.

When young, you are a “time billionaire,” but this wealth diminishes with age.

Now, your goal is to value time before it becomes the only thing you value at the end of life.

Attention is Unlocking Results that are Bigger than your Efforts

Attention is the application of mental energy to create progress.

Focused attention is more powerful than scattered attention, leading to concentrated, extraordinary outcomes. Having focused attention involves dedicating yourself to high-leverage opportunities, projects, and people.

This requires careful selection and rejection of tasks.

Control is Your Ultimate Goal

Control allows you to choose what and when to do with your time.

With control, you own your time and make decisions about its allocation. Without control, your time is dictated by others. Combined with awareness and attention, you shift from being a “time taker” to a “time maker.”

Indeed, you can dictate your time and how it is spent.

The Time Wealth Guide: Systems for Success

There are twelve systems for building Time Wealth.

These systems address common anti-goals such as spending too much time on low-value activities, being too busy to prioritise loved ones and losing spontaneity in life.

1. The Time Wealth Hard Reset (Awareness)

This exercise involves calculating the number of remaining times one will see a loved one based on current frequency and age.

By confronting this numerical reality, you are inspired to create more time with those you care about.

2. The Energy Calendar (Awareness and Attention)

This system involves tracking daily activities and categorising them as energy-creating (green), neutral (yellow), or energy-draining (red).

Based on this, you can prioritise, delegate, or adjust activities to optimise your energy levels. Energy-creating activities should be amplified, neutral activities maintained or delegated, and energy-draining activities minimised or adjusted.

The goal is to improve your green-to-red ratio, enhancing overall energy and focus.

3. The Two-List Exercise (Awareness and Attention)

This exercise helps identify and focus on your top professional and personal priorities.

Create a comprehensive list of professional and personal priorities and narrow each list to three to five items. Separate the circled priorities from the rest, labelling them as “Priorities” and “Avoid at All Costs.”

This creates a clear distinction between what to focus on and what to delegate or delete.

4. The Eisenhower Matrix (Awareness and Attention)

This matrix categorises tasks based on urgency and importance:

• Important and Urgent: Do now! These tasks require immediate attention and contribute to long-term goals.
• Important and Not Urgent: Plan. Focus on these tasks to build long-term value.
• Not Important and Urgent: Delegate. These tasks drain time and energy without contributing to long-term goals.
• Not Important and Not Urgent: Delete. Eliminate these time-wasting activities.

5. The Index Card To-Do System (Attention)

This simple system involves preparing a 3×5 index card each night with a short list of 3-5 tasks for the next day.

The list should include important tasks that align with long-term goals. Its simplicity promotes focus and momentum. This allows you to accomplish more of what matters.

6. Parkinson’s Law (Attention)

Parkinson’s law states that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.

By establishing constraints and shorter time frames, you become more efficient and productive. You work like a lion. Short sprints of focused work followed by rest.

Repeat this pattern till task completion.

7. The Anti-Procrastination System (Attention)

This system involves three steps to overcome procrastination:

8. Deconstruction: Break down intimidating tasks into smaller, manageable steps.
9. Plan and Stake Creation: Develop a plan of attack with specific, time-bound micro-tasks. Create stakes, such as public declarations, social pressure, rewards, and penalties, to drive better outcomes.
10. Action: Start with the first action to create initial movement, using techniques such as planning a sync session, rewarding initial movement, or using the lion technique.

8. The Flow State Boot-Up Sequence (Attention)

This system focuses on creating a routine to enter a flow state, a state of deep, focused work.

Here, you build a personal boot-up sequence using the five senses:

• Touch: Engage in a specific movement or body action.
• Taste: Consume a specific drink, chewing gum, or snack.
• Sight: Focus on a specific visual element in the environment.
• Sound: Listen to a specific sound in the environment.
• Smell: Inhale a specific scent in the environment.

9. Effective Delegation (Attention and Control)

This system emphasises the importance of delegating tasks to create time leverage.

The three core principles of effective delegation are:

1. Appropriate Task Profiling: Delegate low-risk, high-reversibility tasks that require minimal oversight, and high-risk, low-reversibility tasks that need significant oversight.
2. Clear Expectations: Establish clear expectations for every task, including deliverables, timelines, feedback loops, and risk profile.
3. Infinite Feedback Loops: Establish continuous, iterative feedback loops to enable participants to learn and improve.

Delegation can be implemented at three levels: direct, semiautonomous, and autonomous, allowing for increasing independence and efficiency.

10. The Art of No (Control)

Learning to say no is crucial for taking control of your time.

Two shortcuts to do this are:

• The Right Now Test (Personal): When deciding whether to take on a personal commitment, ask, “Would I do this right now?” If the answer is no, decline the commitment.

 

• The New Opportunity Test (Professional): For professional commitments, first, reference the two lists from the earlier exercise. If it’s not aligned with professional priorities, then say no. Then ask, “Is this a ‘Hell yeah!’ opportunity?” If not, decline the opportunity. If it’s aligned, then consider it will take twice as long and be half as rewarding as expected. If the opportunity is not worth it, then decline it. This streamlines commitments and helps individuals focus on what truly matters.

11. How to Manage Your Time: Time-Blocking and the Four Types of Professional Time

Allocate specific time windows for distinct tasks, managing life through a calendar rather than a to-do list.

The four types of professional time are:

1. Management: Meetings, calls, presentations, and email processing.
2. Creation: Writing, coding, building, and preparing.
3. Consumption: Reading, listening, and studying.
4. Ideation: Brainstorming, journaling, walking, and self-reflecting.

Starting on a Monday, at the end of each weekday, colour-code the events from that day according to this key:

Red: Management, Green: Creation, Blue: Consumption & Yellow: Ideation to understand which elements are dominating.

An optimal balance is:

• Batching Management Time: Allocate discrete blocks for Management Time.
• Increasing Creation Time: Carve out distinct windows for Creation Time.
• Creating Space for Consumption and Ideation: Schedule dedicated blocks for reading, listening, learning, and thinking.

12. How to Fill Your Newly Created Time: The Energy Creators

The ultimate question after creating new time is how to fill it.

Choose activities, pursuits, and people that align with your goals and values. These additional energy creators give insights on pursuing what makes you happy.

Use Your “Time Wealth” to shift perspective.

By cultivating awareness, attention, and control, you reclaim your time and invest it in meaningful relationships, fulfilling work, and personal growth.

The systems provided offer practical strategies for building your time Wealth and achieving a more balanced and purposeful life.

That’s all for now. You can read the other forms of wealth here: Beyond Money: A Guide to the 5 Types of Wealth