Time Management Tip 6: Buy Your Time (Literally or Figuratively)

Book in a Month: The Fool-Proof System for Writing a Novel in 30 Daysby Victoria Lynn Schmidt, Ph.D.

Check out this pearl of wisdom from Dr. Mira Kirshenbaum’s The Gift of a Year: How to Achieve the Most Meaningful, Satisfying, and Pleasurable Year of Your Life: “Use money to buy time by using money to get people to do things for you that will save you time … . Whatever it costs you, spread out over a lifetime it isn’t that much.” Okay, maybe you don’t have tons of money to get babysitters, eat out, and hire maids, but could you barter for some of these things? Ask for favors? Agree to babysit next month for another mother if she babysits this month
for you? Could you afford to eat take-out three times this week? What about frozen dinners? Can you whittle your cleaning routine down to a bare minimum, once-a-week chore?

Just think about this for a minute. How much money is spent on hobbies, goals, and entertainment in this country? Billions of dollars! Yet when it comes to fi nding the time to write, we are reluctant to spend any money at all to do it. Why is this? Most hobbies, desires, and
activities cost something to partake in it. And these things usually are not part of our lifelong dreams and goals. They most certainly don’t have much of a chance of giving us a return on our investment as writing may do for us. So what’s the problem here?

One writer I know spends eighty dollars a month on a haircut, yet he can’t imagine splurging on a new notebook to jot down his ideas. Something is off here. For thirty dollars a month, he could have a new laptop computer to write when he has to travel for work, but there is no
way he will ever buy it. It’s all about choices.