Wasted Time Equals Wasted Money

Apart from efficiency and effectiveness, prioritizing job performance is one other way of time usage that is important for business. It is always a battle to distinguish between what is important and what is urgent. Some chores are at times urgent but not important while some others are important but not urgent. It is your duty to classify these jobs appropriately before executing them. You must do what is urgent and important first before you do any other thing. There appears to be some consensus among business gurus to the effect that “urgent things are seldom important, and important things are seldom urgent.” It is your duty to decide which is which from your work schedule and your time budget.

Let me illustrate this relationship with academic work as we all experienced when we were in school. Then, we were all expected to write our semester examinations at the end of every semester. If we were to write five courses in one semester, four weeks to the examinations, all the courses were important but not urgent. When the time-table came out two weeks to the examinations, all the courses were still important but some were then more urgent than others depending on the schedule. When the examinations began, any course we had written was no longer important. The nearer courses on the schedule were both urgent and important while the farther ones were important but less urgent. This was how we were able to manage our study schedule till the end of the examinations. All the papers we had written became less important and less urgent at the end of the examinations. If you made the mistake as it happened to some of my course mates, to study for a course not scheduled for a particular day, you just had to settle for a re-sit. There were no two ways about it. If you found yourself in such a situation, you must have made the mistake of making what is important but not urgent suddenly important and urgent. For this mistake, you found yourself writing an examination you did not prepare for. Chances of passing such examinations were always very remote. This is how it works even in business. You just have to know what is important and what is urgent, and then schedule your jobs to fit the situation.

Balancing is the key. Plan your work and prioritize your activities. This is the only way you can avoid spending your time doing unimportant but urgent things to the detriment of the important and urgent things you have to do. Wasted time automatically means wasted money. You therefore must be able to manage your time well if you hope to succeed in business. But can time really be managed?

Time is Where the Money Is

Many of us live by selling our time. Time therefore is a precious commodity to human existence, welfare and well-being. Any commodity that is so precious must be jealously guarded and protected at all times. Unfortunately many people still drift around and waste their time doing things that have no direct bearing on how they can better their lives. Anchor yourself somewhere if you are a drifter. If you are not but you know someone who is, help them to find an anchor by giving them a copy of this article to read. Time is too precious a commodity to waste, believe me.

The use of time and how you grow the proceeds from your work are major determinants of how smart you work. The smart use of the time available to you determines how efficient and effective you can be in your business. To drive this point home, here is a paraphrase of some lyrics from a song that once dominated the Nigerian airwaves. It was made popular by a Nigerian musician. It goes like this:

“Time na money oh
Time na money.
No waka waka.
No gossip gossip.
No spoil another man.
Make you use your time well.
Use your time money go come.
Money no dey fall from heaven.
Use your time money go come.
Na true word I dey tell you so………”

This song may have been written in Pidgin English but the meaning is clear. “Time is money.” Effective and efficient usage of your time will earn you money. No more, no less.

“Efficiency is doing a job right” while “Effectiveness is doing the right job.” You could be effective without being efficient and you could be efficient without necessarily being effective. What matters in business is effective efficiency or efficient effectiveness. That is, doing the right job right always. It is not enough to be busy, the question is, what are you busy doing? If you do the right job well, the results are highly rewarding. No matter how well you do the wrong job, you can never get satisfactory results.