The Time-Value of Action

We all have a lot going on and a lot of demands on our time. I have used the idea of the time-value of money to help me prioritize my time and actions just like you can use it to prioritize investments.

Quick aside just in case any readers don’t know the idea: The time-value of money says that if everything else is equal, a dollar today is better than a dollar tomorrow. The reason? In those interim 24 hours that dollar can do something useful.

The inspiration for this post is my ongoing challenge to work towards my personal, professional, and societal goals. Every week there are many more things I would like to work on compared to what can possibly fit. And so, I prioritize based on various outcomes I care about.

There are a number of approaches I use to manage my limited time. One trick I use to avoid spending half my week managing my priorities is to make some strategic decisions about how to spend it. For example: I write a single post here each week to make sure I’m making gradual progress towards writing a book. Similarly, I cook dinner for my family nearly every night because it’s a hobby I enjoy and benefits my kids. I also do little things like trying to stay on top of my inbox and messaging with friends most days because no matter how busy I am, connecting with others is a priority for me.

Each of these are examples of things I do to try to handle one of the fundamental paradoxes of prioritization: How do you balance the urgent and the important? If we apply the idea of time-value of action, you can create a mathematical representation of that trade-off. Generally, the important has a larger impact, but the urgent takes less effort to get done.

With many important projects, some of which take years, there are other important tasks that may be on the back burner for a VERY long time. I just replied to an email from over two years ago because I was finally ready to take the next (tiny) step to acting on it.

All the above is particularly on my mind in an era of substantial turmoil in the world. I’m making good progress on some very important projects, which are starting to have real impacts on the world. But there are urgent problems today where I wonder if a little bit of my focus now would save a lot of headache later since “a stitch in time saves nine.”

Ultimately, I have more questions than answers about how to prioritize my days. I do find some actions give me more energy to take on the rest, and other things drag me down. I think mostly in terms of measuring my actions by how much they make the world a better place several years in the future, as well as how happy I’ll have been with that life (integrated over time).

One last note: Children are a good illustration of what I like to call “the inevitable progression of time.” At the end of each year, you’ve had some experiences and skipped others. When I prioritize based on the time-value of action, it’s easy to think one year is sort of the same as the next. But there are real changes happening in the world each year that we will never be able to roll back. I think living your values every day is a good way to represent prioritizing those urgent-ish, important on average choices as well.