As a life insurance broker I am very aware of time. The average person arguably in the US will live to be 80 years old. That means we will have 2,524,651,960 seconds on this earth and the clock starts running the second we are born. To look at it another way, we have 29,219 days to live our life. Time is the great equalizer. No matter how smart, how rich, how pretty or clever we are, time is the same for us all. Let’s take a look at the value of time.

One of the strangest quotes ever thought of is “saving time”. No one can save time. Time keeps ticking no matter what we are doing. If we assume that most of us, for the first 22 years of our lives, are spent learning about life, either in school, at our first job, or in the military. The last 20 years of our lives are spent retired or at least slowing down whether healthy or not, this will leave us roughly 38 years to really make a life. These are the years we must really learn the value of time. These are the years we discover our life’s work, meet our mate, have our children, raise our family, take our risks, live out our adventures, learn from life’s lessons, and save for our futures. This means we have literally 13,879 days to make it happen. The most common phrase people state is “I don’t have time” which is only true when you die. We all have the same amount of time as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. When we say “I don’t have time” we should really just say “I don’t want to” which is more accurate. But people say “I don’t have time” as if it makes them seem important. It really says “I suck at time management” which means “I probably have a lot of other faults as well”. It does not make a person seem important but in reality seem incompetent. Never say that phrase again.

One of the biggest killers of time is a nasty affliction called procrastination. Procrastination kills more time than any war, disease or natural disaster. We must stay focused in order not to succumb to the temptation of procrastination. However, the answer is really simple. You have to budget your time like you budget your money. Make every minute of every day behave. You have to start living by your calendar and stay on task. Schedule family time first and fill the rest of the week with work and then play time. Everything goes on the calendar. I personally use Google calendars on my computer and it syncs with my Android phone which is always on me. I schedule my tasks days in advance and I stay on them. I also schedule a little “float time” to account for emergencies every day and if I make it through that day without an emergency, I have a task list that I tackle during that budgeted time. If I miss something, I schedule into the next available time slot.

Time is more valuable than gold or money. It is the one resource we cannot produce more of. We must become vigilant with time management and learn the value of time.

“If you are killing time, it’s not murder. It’s suicide.”—Lou Holtz

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yourfriend4life.com

Tim Wilhoit is owner/principal of Your Friend 4 Life Insurance Agency in Nashville, TN. He is a family man, father of 3, entrepreneur, insurance agent, life insurance broker, salesman, sales trainer, recruiter, public speaker, blogger and team leader with over 27 years of experience in sales and marketing in the insurance and beverage industries.