Following is a sequel to my previous post on Do you know your real hourly wage.
A lot of people grunts at the idea of the notion of lack of time, which at times sounds like a little flimsy excuse to being either unproductive or just simply the case where you are being overloaded. So you often hear complaints that go like this:
"I wish there would be 35 hours in a day"
or
"Why do time pass so fast? I have not completed any of my assignment yet"
or
"I don't have time for all of this"
The fact is in our everyday life, we measure everything directly or indirectly through time. Take the previous post for example, we used wages / hours to measure our real wages on a hourly basis. Or maybe productivity - where we were indirectly given a fixed amount of hours (for example 8 hours a day in the office) to complete the assignment or projects we were assigned.
The truth is maybe these grunts are not warranted after all. All we probably need is not more time, but more pair of hands to get things done. Take my recent case for instance, I was tied up with my audit project at work, final assignment at school, daddy role at home, a husband care for my wife (who is currently unwell) and a writer role for this blog. All of this happening at the same time with a required tight deadline to complete. These episodes get me thinking. I certainly do not need more time (which can help) but rather a pair of more helping hands in order to complete the tasks.
Financial bloggers (including myself) often preach that we aim for financial independence because time is finite and we want to utilize those times to do what we enjoy rather than what we were "forced" to do. The idea for this is certainly not because we want to have 35 hours a day or prolong our life expectancy to beyond 100 years of age so that we can have "more time" to finish our bucket lists in this world. More time in that sense would mean that we have to eat more than 3 times a day, budget more than what is required, and project a more conservative withdrawal rate to account for the prolong life value. We don't want all of that.
The goal is to ultimately free up our pair of hands on things we can assign other people to complete and use our pair of hands to do the things we really love to complete.
The goal is to ultimately free up our pair of hands on things we can assign other people to complete and use our pair of hands to do the things we really love to complete.
Time is a subjective matter. Some people would love to have more time while others would love to fast forward them. The idea with time is that you have to do things that matters and create values for what you want to achieve in your life. It's not a matter of quantity but a matter of quality.
The next time you see someone grumbling and complaining about lacking of time, you know the answer: "Do they really need more time"?
