How Your Time is Costing You Money

While most busy professionals understand the old adage ‘time is money’ according to new reports, many are not aware of how much a work hour is really worth. New studies have revealed that employees are spending about 31 hours every month in meetings. In fact, only about 60 percent of the time they spend at work, they actually spend working productively.

The truth of the matter is that many people today, are wasting a lot of their time while working and not being as productive as they could be. This is wasting many people and many individuals a great deal of money. The average worker does not keep track of every single minute they spend on the job, or that they bill for, and this is causing many to be easting valuable time during the work day.

While the financial waste may be a motivator for some, even those who get paid a salary, or who don’t work to make a profit, will find that time management is a serious problem. While you may not actually earn a dollar amount for every hour you spend working productively, associating every minute of your work day with a certain amount of money is a great way to motivate and to help you be more productive. In turn, this can help your prioritize your tasks, more effectively plan out the hours in your day and be more productive.

While being less productive may not directly impact your wallet, you are wasting someone’s money, and if you learn to be more productive with your time, you can find the professional success you are looking for that may help you earn more money in the long run. Say you typically make $30 an hour. If you put this value on every hour of your work day and equate time sucking activities such as checking Facebook for an hour as wasting $30 of your time, you may start to see the world differently.

This is not only true for individual workers, but for managers as well. By placing a value on the time of each employee underneath you, you can start to delegate responsibilities and create a more productive overall team. You may have invited 10 people to a meeting, where only five really need to go for an hour meeting. If those five extra people are worth $100/hour; you have just wasted $500 of your companies money on something that didn’t need to be wasted. This can also help you determine which activities you should delegate to others. An employee who charges half of your rate per hour, may be able to do a job to the same quality that you can. if you look at the situation in this manner, you will be able to save your company time.

Thinking of the way you spend your time and your day in this manner can help eliminate the amount of time and money that is wasted during the day. This concerted effort can help both individuals and companies  alike be more successful and more profitable in their everyday efforts.