If you were asked what is more important, time or money, does an immediate answer pop in your mind?
I think most people would quickly say “time” and I would too without giving it much thought. But then I look at my actual choices in life and I’m not so sure. There is often a disconnect between what I say I prefer and what I actually do – economists call this our revealed preferences.
So this is how I end up taking jobs that pay more but require more hours even if the additional money doesn’t really change my life much. Or how I end up spending countless hours researching buying new stuff when I really know that even if I buy the new stuff it won’t make that big of a difference in my life – I might have been able to learn a new language in the amount of time I spent recently trying to buy and understand the differences in types of jeans (I deeply regret not just going with whatever was at Costco as the answer).
So I need reminders in my life on why focusing on time over money is actually more likely to lead to a more satisfying life, like a lot of reminders, but here are three that help me:
1. It is much harder to increase our time than our money
We all have a set total number of hours in a day that we can’t increase, but can only choose what we do with the time. So we can increase our time available in one area but we would have to give up time spent on something else – there is a trade-off. However, with money we can increase the amount we earn each day without necessarily increasing our time spent on working and trading-off our time for other things. For example, we can increase the hourly rate we earn money at through gaining experience or skills or education that increases our value to others. Or we can invest money that earns money for us passively without us spending additional time to do so.
So we value time over money because we are unable to increase time without giving something else up, which may not be the case with money.
2. Our amount of time we have in the future is uncertain
Jesus told a story about a man doing well financially that had plans to spend time enjoying his wealth for many years in the future after spending just a bit more time increasing his wealth to even larger amounts. It did not turn out well as his time was cut short and he didn’t get to enjoy his wealth (Luke 12:16-20).
This story highlights that we can make the choice to sacrifice our time to have more money, but there is also a risk with this choice that we may never benefit from this sacrifice. So putting off doing the things we think are the important part of our lives seems like a risky decision as we may never get to doing those things that are the most important to us.
So clearly we need money to survive, but let us be careful of striving for more money that is not really needed when it means sacrificing our time to do the things we believe are important.
3. We are more likely to regret how we use our time
Bronnie Ware wrote a book about her experience working in palliative care (Top Five Regrets of the Dying, summary here) and what she learned from people reflecting on their lives. The most commonly expressed regrets were:
a. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
b. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard
c. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
d. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
e. I wish that I had let myself be happier
Of these common regrets, how many do you think are more related to issues with time vs. issues with money?
How many of us work jobs primarily for the money even if we don’t really like the work or buy things because we’re influenced by others? Maybe some of us, and sounds a lot like the first regret.
How many of us work for more hours than we want to and feel like we don’t have enough time for relationships? Hmm, this is starting to feel like kind of a personal list, and sounds a lot like the second and fourth regrets.
So if we want to live a life of few regrets, we focus our efforts on having and spending time on what is most important to us, which is unlikely to be increased efforts to gain more money when doing so comes at the expense of the very time we need.
Takeaway
We aim to balance the time we spend on earning money to support our spending with the time we have to spend on the areas that are most important to us as we pursue meaningful lives. It is very easy to unintentionally spend more time than is needed on earning money to support our spending which then comes at the expense of the time we have available for what is important to us. So we have to remind ourselves of what is important to us and then design our lives and finances to support using our time on what really matters.
