Sunday 29 January 2012

The Most Valuable Resource

I start my new job on Wednesday.

It will most likely be a while before I get into a new routine. I'll be working longer hours as well as probably spending a bit more time getting to and from the office.

Which leads to one pretty big question as far as I'm concerned: How am I going to be able to make time for writing (not to mention blogging and twittering and the various other stuff we're supposedly meant to do to get the great public to consider buying our books) ?

This got me thinking (I know - it's a bad habit of mine) about the value of time. I really have come to think that it's the most valuable resource of all. Certainly more valuable than money - I'd gladly swap a bit of money for a bit more time.

So what can we do to try to bring more time into our lives. I think there needs to be a real "paradigm shift" in the way we look at things. Rather than focusing on how much money is involved, we need to focus on how much time. Maybe, instead of listing prices for things in shops, we should instead be listing times, eg:

  • the time it took to create something
  • the amount of time we'd be prepared to give up for something
  • the amount of time we're likely to use something before we've had enough of it
 
But why stop there. Maybe someone could invent a time bank, so we could invest our time wisely, rather than wasting it. Instead of exchanging shares in the stock market, we could be exchanging time. We could invest a small amount of time and then see how it grows over the years. Sacrifice a little bit of time now for a lot of time later.

I don't know how it would work. I don't know if it would work. I just know that I never seem to have the time to do all the things I want. And every day, time just seems to disappear, faster and faster.