Connecting money to time

Have you been heard to say, "that's a waste of money!" Or, are you more likely to complain when someone wastes your precious time? We tend toward one or the other as our loudest protest. We might protest even more if we know the waste of one is quite often the waste of the other!

Time and money flow together as a complexity, and we who aspire to long and robust organizational leadership do well to become wise in understanding their intersection. Our insight starts by understanding the time value of money. Insight can deepen to wisdom when we also understand the money value of time. I'm not just reversing the words. The time value of money and the money value of time are similar, but they are not the same.

Here are two examples of the money value of time growing from the nonprofit world. Can you think of others from your life experience?

1. I was once with a nonprofit CEO who hoped to see a greater degree of voluntarism in his organization. He was asked if he had a volunteer time budget. That was a new concept to him -- to quantify the number of available volunteer hours and then consider how they could be allocated to support the organization's mission. He began to distribute those hours to have more mission effectiveness in spending volunteer time and greater accuracy when appealing for new volunteers.
   
2. Another nonprofit CEO began digging into board member involvement and the differences in the sacrifice they might make to be present.

Some board members were there because of an organizational partnership. They sat in their organization's guaranteed seat--their expenses and time contributed by their sponsoring organization. Their service is on someone else's dime, and they might not fully represent their point of view because of the organizational connection. They also might not represent the organization's mission for which they are a board member since their first level of relationship is to the organization that sent them. 

Other board members own businesses, however. They not only cover their cost to be present, but they sacrifice income-earning opportunities because they left their work to attend. They pay a double price to serve on the board, and this is before they make any monetary donation. 

In both these illustrations, the CEO was not tracking the contribution of time. Neither were they tracking the economic impact of that time -- not treating it as an asset supporting the mission and not noting how time contributions extended the organization's reach. And they certainly were not treating the contribution of time as a donation supporting the mission.

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Some folks are fond of saying that something is not worth their time. That is one measure. It is a more profound and wiser measure to consider what is not "time your worth." Time misspent by our choices or misspent by others cannot be replaced in the way that money can accumulate yet again. 

The more I understand this, the more fierce I become about not wasting time and even more fierce about others not wasting my time. Perhaps this awareness grows because I've had a few birthdays. The real reason, though, is that I lived long with a woman who took years and years to die slowly. She often reminded people not to waste her time with demands that took her away from what had distilled for her through her suffering. Every breath was precious, and cancer was already a time robber. Why waste it even more with pettiness, complaining, and misguided stewardship of precious resources?

-mark l vincent