Time is Not Money: How to Value Time for What It Really Is

Helping clients create more time and make more money are two of my favorite ways to serve others.

It doesn’t take much observation to notice that most people think of time and money in the same way; it’s evident in the language we use.

Words like spending, saving, investing, managing, and allocating are prominent in the way we speak about both time and money. We speak about being “time rich” or “time poor” or being in “time debt” or a “time famine.”

These speech habits lead us to treat both time and money as currencies that can be exchanged for each other, in the same way that you’d exchange Dollars for Pounds or Yen or some other financial currency.

It’s no wonder, then, that we might form a belief that “time is money.”

Indeed, in some industries, professionals charge for their time, putting an explicit valuation on a quantity of time. Even in industries where you’re not billing by the hour, you might be encouraged to consider the “value” of your time.

This is illusory — and it doesn’t serve you.

Time Has No Intrinsic Value

Despite the language we use to describe time, you cannot “save” time — there’s no “time bank” where you can store away unused hours to pull out when you need them in the future.

Time is not a currency; it’s a container; the space in which we live and create.

This is an important factor to consider if you work in a field where you charge for your time. What are you really valuing?

Consider a pot of soup. Unless you’re using the pot to make something, the pot is just taking up space in your kitchen cabinets. The value of the pot is how you use it to make soup.

In the same way, time itself has no value. What has value is what we do within its container.

The Contents of the Container

The value is in

• holding space and listening to someone, to help them feel heard.
• the creative output we offer.
• the expertise, knowledge, and wisdom we impart.
• the experience we create for others.
• creating awareness for another.
• facilitating insights and breakthroughs.
• helping others avoid mistakes or find the right path.
• helping someone get a result that they desire.
• our energy, attention, and presence.

What Are You Really Selling?

If you are a service professional who charges for your “time,” consider what you’re offering within the container of time.

The value is not in the container, but in what you bring to it and what happens within it.

You’re not selling the pot, you’re selling the soup.