Like many of the other phrases I've looked at in this blog series, this one has a right time and place. I'm a business manager, so I frequently deal with the "time is money" concept. We pay our employees, so their time is indeed money to us. I'd be foolish not to count the expense of our salaries in figuring the cost of some program. If a program is 2 hours long and we didn't have to buy anything to throw it, the program wasn't free, it probably cost hundreds of dollars in staff time. If the staff wasn't doing that, they'd be doing something else for us. It's a basic concept in accounting. But that's accounting. It's not the real world. In the real world, time is most certainly not money. It's so much more than that.
If we went around with the mindset that time is money, we'd probably end up super stressed and very busy trying to maximize the value of our time. We'd be neglecting our relationships in favor of productivity and rushing from one thing to the next, missing the beginning and end of everything. And...I may have just described the lives of many Americans. Life is about much more than cash, or money, or income. The richness of life is not measured in dollars and cents - we know this, it's frequently talked about. Yet we still live our lives this way. I'm terrible at this. I stay very busy. I've got a very long to-do list and wasted time is more than just a nuisance to me. It means something isn't going to get done, or I'm going to lose quality time with my wife, my friends, or my pillow.
Time is not money. Sometimes we need to have a mind to throw that equation out the window and spend our time extravagantly. Sometimes we need to throw it to the wind and spend an extended amount of time with someone. Maybe they need a kind ear. Maybe we do. Or maybe they just need the extravagant gift of several hours of your time. When we allow time to equal money, we lose our relationships.
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