More than likely you have spent a good portion of your life trading your time for money in the form of a job or freelance work. There is obviously nothing wrong with this since we all need to pay the bills somehow, but this habit of trading time for money is ingrained in most of our lives which leads to bad habits. In this article I want to challenge the idea of trading time for money by asking how we can buy back some of our lost time by trading money for time.

What Is Trading Money For Time?

It is pretty easy to understand what trading time for money looks like since we all do it for work, but trading money for time is a bit more complicated to understand. The easiest way to look at this would be hiring someone to do a task for you. For example, if you hired a lawn care company to mow your lawn this would save you a few hours every week, but it is going to cost you money. This is the simplest form of trading money for time, but there are many other ways to save yourself time.

Many software services, like Heroku which saves you time deploying your site but costs more money, are great examples of trading money for time. Physical products, like a snowblower which saves you from having to shovel snow by hand, are another example of trading money for time which most people do not think about. The final big category of trading money for time is education. Buying a course which will teach you a topic in 8 hours will save you a ton of time in comparison to if you decided to learn everything on your own and is another way people trade money for time. This is actually why I make my courses as short as possible since the main reason to buy a course is to save time and I want to save you as much time as possible.

As you can see trading money for time is much more common than it seems, but that doesn’t mean people are trading enough of their money for time.

Why Trade Money For Time?

I am sure that by reading through the things people spend money on to save time there was at least one thing on that list you thought was a complete waste of money. Many people would say that paying someone to mow your lawn is a waste since it is easy to do and doesn’t take that long. Those people are not wrong, but I guarantee you if I asked those same people how much money they would pay to have 25 hours in a day instead of 24 it would be a much larger sum than what a lawn care company would charge.

This is the power of trading money for time. You are essentially adding time to your day by removing things from your day that take away your time. That single extra hour a day may be enough time for you to finally finish the side project you are working on. It could also give you the free time you need to finally start working out or learning a new skill. Most people do not think about what they will do with the extra time when considering trading money for time. That is why most people think paying someone to mow their lawn is dumb since mowing is easy. The reality, though, is that they are not paying to have their lawn mowed. They are paying for extra time to work on their side project or other goals.

I personally just hired a fitness coach to help me with creating my meal plans and workout plans each week. This is not a cheap service, but it frees up my time by letting me work on writing blog articles, filming tutorials, and creating courses for you. To me the small amount of extra time I gain each week by not having to make my own workout and meal plans is worth the cost.

Saving Mental And Physical Energy

On top of saving time you will also save mental and physical energy by trading money for time. That is another reason I hired a coach. I was constantly running low on mental energy from working, creating tutorials, and writing articles on top of my normal life activities. By hiring a coach to handle my fitness plans I not only save myself a few hours of time, but I also save myself the mental energy of having to create those plans myself. This is one of the most underrated reasons to trade your money for time, because there is only so much physical and mental work you can do in a single day.

Improve Quality Of Work

Another important reason to trade your money for time is to increase the quality of work being done. Each of us has particular skills that we are experts at. For example you could be an expert backend web developer or an expert designer, but you are not an expert in everything. There are, however, other people who are experts at the skills you lack. Personally I am fairly well educated when it comes to fitness and creating workout and meal plans, but I am not nearly as capable as my coach. The plans he creates for me are much more effective than the plans that I used to create for myself.

This same effect can be seen in physical products too. A snowblower is obviously more effective at clearing snow than a shovel because it was made for that job. The same thing happens with software as well. If you need to deploy a simple web application than Heroku will take care of all the complex tasks for you in a much more performant and efficient way than you would be able to do it by yourself. The hardest part is just admitting that you are not the expert and that someone or something else is better suited to help you.

Conclusion

We have been trained all our lives to trade time for money in order to survive, but if you want to live the most fulfilling life possible than you need to learn to trade your money for time so you can achieve the goals you have always dreamed of.