We all know the old idiom “Time is Money,” but how can we prove how much money our time is worth? There are simple steps you can take that will help keep you on task and find out where you’re spending most of your time.
1.Calculate How Much You Make Per Hour
Look at your latest pay stub or tax return from last year to remind yourself of your yearly salary. Divide your yearly salary by the number of hours you work in a year.
For example, let’s say you work 2000 hours a year, and your income is $50,000. Divide your income by the number of hours you work in a year, and you’ll find your hourly rate. In this example, your time is worth $25 an hour. And if we want to break it down even more, divide $25 by 60 minutes in an hour, you would be worth $0.42 a minute.
Use a stopwatch or a task timer app and start tracking how long it takes you to do every aspect of your daily work tasks. Start your timer for each individual task as you complete your day. If you’re doing any prep work, printing out forms, getting yourself organized, driving to a location, the work done at the location, and any follow-up work are different contributing factors of your time and make sure you record each one separately.
By tracking your time, you will see what you spend most of your time doing and not doing. Make the most of your time by staying on task, and If certain tasks take longer than they should, then figure out ways to expedite those tasks so your time is used as efficiently as possible.
Once you get an idea of how many tasks you do in a day and how long it takes to complete each task, you might not factor in distractions like time spent on your phone. Plan ahead for these distractions and set aside time outside of your normal work schedule. Waking up 15 minutes early to catch up on the social media news of the day, or planning 15 minutes when you get home as a time to catch up on personal emails and text messages is a good way to eliminate common distractions throughout your whole day.
If you’re spending your valuable time finding files on a computer, customizing them for a customer, waiting for them to print, sorting your forms accordingly, and then filing them in a folder after the job takes up valuable time, this is time that could be better spent. Although doing all that might not take an entire hour, if you’re worth $0.42 a minute, and those extra steps took 10 minutes, that’s $4.20 of your time you just spent. You could also factor in paper costs and ink costs if you want to go that extra mile.
Using digital and online forms saves your team precious time and money. Downloading and uploading forms is a much simpler, quicker, and more efficient process than printing and sorting. Having an efficient digital filing system in place will also save time on the follow-up process of a task.
Do the math yourself and see how much time is wasted on little things. If you find you are wasting too much money because you’re wasting too much time with outdated or no technology, contact Formlink Systems today to see how we can make sure your time is as valuable as possible.
