Jobs: replaceable. Money: replaceable.
The ONLY thing you can’t replace is your time.
It is gone. Forever. You can never get it back. It cannot be regained or replenished.
Therefore, from a rational perspective, preserving and maximizing your time should be your highest priority.
This begs the question: How are you spending your time at work?
Sure, you’re getting paid for it. But there are many different – both worthwhile and horrifying – ways of getting paid for your time…
Are you spending your time doing the things that you want? Are you accomplishing YOUR goals and working toward YOUR dreams and enjoying the things you do? Is your work making you more valuable, more employable with each passing day and continuously increasing your pay grade?
Or are you simply trading time for money at an aggressively commodified, globalized market rate? Is your finite time spent chasing after emails, bosses and stakeholders… In perpetual attention to other people… Who are snapping their fingers at you to do things for them?
Or… Even worse… Is your time spent counting the hours, then the minutes, then the seconds until your shift ends?
Wherever you may be – it is important to take a sober look at how you’re spending your time. And I know, I know… Escaping the type of work that feels like “wage slavery” is easier said than done.
But it can be done. And many times, it’s easier than you think – or at least it appears that way after the fact.
First, however, before any escape is possible, you have to come into terms with your relationship with time.
The following practices have helped me, our members and our students gain control over our time at work.
These tools also bring with them the added benefit of helping you create more value in less time, which in turn leads to greater opportunities, faster promotions and bigger paychecks. It’s a virtuous cycle: the more you have, the more you are given!
Start with remembering this:
Time > Money
Time is insanely more important than money in your career, especially since 2008 – when governments started printing TRILLIONS of dollars every year depreciating the value of currency beyond the point of no return.
There is a LOT of money flying around in our system. As a result, business owners and leaders are willing to part with it at considerable more ease than before. Easier to get. Easier to spend…
All that easy money, of course, rapidly flies into the pockets of either connected cronies, or high-value professionals. The cronies destroy value. The high-value professionals create value. And despite the cronies, the value created by these professionals is sufficiently profitable. These profits lead to more investments, which keep the business growing, which lead to stock options or big bonuses; again, only for owners, cronies as well as high-value professionals – to keep them motivated in the game.
That’s our system. Money created out of thin air leads to business activity leads to profits leads to more money and more business activity. It’s a money maximizing system, where the ONLY fundamental limiting principle is one’s time.
Once you can see this, everything changes.
Once you see this, you quickly learn that every one of these owners, cronies, and high-value professionals care a lot less about the money they are getting than the way they are spending their time. They are exceedingly selective in where they put their time and energy, and they guard their time as if their life depended on it.
The question is, how can you do the same?
These three tools will help you:
1. Disdain Jobs, Focus on a Career Instead
A job is a contract where you are exchanging your time for money. The more time you spend doing a job, the better you get at it (hopefully!). But it doesn’t necessarily give you more career options or open new doors.
When you have a career, you not only have a job, but you also get paid to invest in yourself. Every day you spend in a career makes you more valuable and more employable.
Whatever work it is that you do, you have to ask yourself “could I get a better job than the one I have if I wanted to – today?”. If not, you don’t have a career, and you need to switch to one.
In fact, it is very important to do this as early on as possible, as staying in a job that’s not a career for too long can get you stuck in a dead end job as well as permanent underemployment.
Of course, you shouldn’t just quit your job in hopes of switching to a career. You should learn how to switch to a career first.
2. Master “Time First” Professional Communication
Have you ever started your work day by reading text messages, voicemails, emails, or attending meetings, or even “quick daily stand up meetings”?
If you have, you started your day reacting instead of acting.
This is not unusual. In fact, it’s the norm. Many people in corporate settings go into their offices and meetings every day, and they react to all the people around them and all the problems brought to them. They don’t take charge of their day, or drive these interactions. Instead, they are driven by them!
Of course, people do this not because they want to, but because they feel like they have to…
Most people assume that you have to be a manager, some boss, or at least a project lead to take charge and gain control of your time. But that’s not true!
Like we teach our students, you don’t need authority to take charge of an interaction as long as you communicate with sufficient executive presence. People are subconsciously programmed to react to executive presence, and fall in line behind you regardless of your or their rank in the organization.
One important part of this type of executive presence is “time first” communication. This is when you communicate with people in such a way that it, both overtly and covertly, it reminds them of the passage of time. When you do this, it makes them both instinctively respect and value you, and also, helps you salvage your time.
Make no mistake: The vast majority of resources out there about becoming a better communicator don’t work like this. Instead, they are engineered to deprive you of authority and make you labor for others more effectively. That’s why, they will teach you subservient and compliant methods like “active listening” or “building empathy”. These are not meant to give you control over your time. These are meant to get you to spend more of your time for the outcomes others seek, and do it with a smile.
Sure, some of these techniques also have their place (i.e. sales, high-pressure negotiations, etc.). But when it comes to your day to day work and winning the competitive game of careers, when it comes to saving yourself wasted time, majority of common communication techniques don’t work.
You have to get more imaginative and embrace “time first” communication. Imagine this:
Imagine leading a team of a 31 professionals. Before you take over, the previous boss had setup about 10 hours of recurring meetings each week to communicate with and run the team. You inherit those meetings. That’s a lot of meetings…
Now, if you are a “time first” communicator, you would start by cancelling all of those meetings. Then you would institute a single meeting of 30 minutes each week to deal with everything that needs to be dealt with. You would lead the discussions in these meetings with zero empathy or active listening. You would cut people off all the time. You would stop meetings despite having open agendas or ongoing conversations, by turning off the lights and shooing everyone out of the room. You would get everyone used to respecting your, as well as each other’s time. You would basically break all the mainstream rules to save as much time as possible and even act like a jerk if you have to.
What would the results be? Perhaps your team would be ecstatically happy, because you saved them from attending useless meetings that they never wanted to attend in the first place. Perhaps this would give them a lot more time to do actual valuable work. As a result, perhaps your team would become much more productive and successful. Perhaps your team would win a massive award for being a hyper-competent team in an organization of 12k+ employees. Perhaps things like this actually happen…
10 hours of meetings reduced to a 30 minute meeting. That’s what happens when you embrace “time first” communication. (Hint: it’s called “time first” because time is the first principle that guides everything you do when communicating. It’s your first consideration. Of course, it’s not your only consideration, but it is your primary one.)
Remember this: Mainstream communication techniques are safe techniques that everyone can practice. They are meant to make everyone feel safe and comfortable. They are equitable. But they are not effective in getting things done, or getting you ahead.
Communication techniques like “time first” communication that get you ahead are shunned by our society. This is precisely why, you must master “time first” communication! If you wish to take control of your time during your work, look at what is being shunned and who is doing the shunning and you will not only learn of ways to save yourself time, but you will also grow in wisdom.
3. Embrace a High-Value Career Imprint
Your beliefs, mindsets, attitudes and behaviors are critical when it comes to owning your own time, and not getting it owned by the people you work for.
Remember this: Not everybody has the same mental contract with their employer.
Some people think that they are trading their time for money; That’s what they think their work contract says. Others think they are trading their expertise and opinions for money. Even others believe they are exchanging specific business results for money.
Depending on what you believe, your relationship with your time and your boss will be monumentally different.
Of course, like many other aspects of your career imprint, it’s not what’s going on at the surface level, it’s what’s going on in your subconscious mind that matters. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you say to yourself or pretend to believe about what you’re exchanging for money in your profession. What matters is what you embody in your day to day.
Do you look forward to the end of day? Do you ever find yourself checking the clock in the afternoon, hoping it was closer to when you clocked out? When you take lunch do you worry about being away from your desk too long?
If you answer yes to any of these questions, you are not only exchanging time for money, but you are also offering a subservient role during that time as part of your mental contract. In which case, it is practically impossible for you to gain control of your time at work.
What’s more alarming is that, exchanging time for money in subservience leads to a dead end – you can’t multiply your salary beyond cultural limits (i.e. “oh accountants only make $X”) , or automate it away (i.e. you pay me for the outcome, I subcontract out the work).
To get your subconscious out of the time for money mindset, you need visual and environmental devices to remind your subconscious of what it’s supposed to be doing: building up your self-esteem as a professional who exchanges business results for money, rather than a laborer who sacrifices time for survival.
Yes, I know. I’m opening up a can of worms and it can be confusing at first. But in time you’ll get it. And once you get it, your time will be under your command.
If you don’t know where to start with this, you should apply to the Top Professionals newsletter and take the 30 Day High-Value Career Imprint Transformation Challenge.
Above all else, dear visitor, please remember that time is of the essence. Don’t waste a second…
Get control of your only finite asset that can never be replenished, by taking complete control over your career. It is possible. Others have done it before. You deserve to do it too.