“Spending” time

It’s easy to spend a full day working and not touch the thing you know actually matters…

The marketing stuff you’ve been putting off. The pricing you’ve been meaning to revisit. The follow-ups you said you’d send. The expenses you still need to audit.

Somehow those are the things that always get lumped into “when I have some time”.

There’s a phrase we all use that I never gave much thought to until this week…

Spending time.

Not using it or consuming it… Spending it. Like it’s money sitting in your pocket.

You can go out and earn more money.

But not time. Whatever you spent it on, that’s where it went. There are no refunds.

And, honestly, I’ve been making some questionable purchases lately…

Tweaking something that didn’t need tweaking. Going down a rabbit hole on a new tool. Building something because I could, not because I should.

None of them feel wrong in the moment (productive, even), but they all add up.

The cost of making things has dropped dramatically. Especially now that we have tools that can design, write, build, and automate faster than ever. The barrier to create something is basically gone.

But the price of our time is constantly going in the other direction. You’ve got less of it to spend now than a minute ago when you started reading this newsletter.

Yet, we tell ourselves we’ll get that marketing done, that pricing updated, those follow-ups sent, those expenses cut… “when I have some time”. As if the gap between where you are and where you want to be is just waiting on some “extra” time to magically show up.

But that’s not really how it works.

The business we have today and the business we want both get the same 24 hours.

There is (and won’t be) any more time, there is only a decision about how we spend it.