uccess With Money
uccess With Money
Your Personal Guide to Achieving Success With Your Money and Your Life
Not everything we do can have a dollar value, but a lot of things do. In this action step we will see how to use visualization to help us guide our activities, when appropriate, by assigning and recognizing their value in monetary terms.
Some years ago when a “back to the land” movement was popular in this country I read a book about modern day homesteading that included quite a few rather interesting concepts. One had to do with learning how to value various forms of work.
The author had made a list of his various chores such as gardening or chopping wood for the stove and then calculated a value of each activity in terms of dollars. While some of these paid as little as 50 cents an hour by his calculation, one (picking some kind of greens that grew wild in a ditch along the road and which he sold to a local restaurant) paid about $40.00 per hour.
Now in his case he didn't want to spend all his time doing the highest paying job because his whole goal was to live a self-reliant lifestyle, but he thought it worthwhile to be aware of the value of his work. He had a good point.
Especially when we operate our own business, something I recommend on some scale for most people who want to succeed financially, it is an extremely valuable idea to become aware of the monetary value of our various activities.
If you do have a business of any kind, no matter how small or large, you will have less trouble with this idea. Some activities are effectively useless, others are highly productive.
I used to do a lot of public speaking. People paid me for the time I was speaking. I spent a lot of time preparing. But it was easy to see that time I spent marketing (arranging for engagements) and time speaking were worth a lot more than time spent arranging the contents of my briefcase!
But even if not a business owner, it is useful to look at your work related activities and think about their value to you in terms of earning power.
One employer I met educated his employees about this when they received orientation. He would point out different workers and observered how much he paid for workers in that area, offering to pay the new employee the same if they could do the same work!
As an employee, think long term about the value you can contribute to the business by your activities. I know one employee who has arranged to get different pay from his employeer for different work by getting training for a specialized part time job with irregular hours.
Perhaps you, too, will want to make a visual chart as this homesteader did, listing a number of your primary activities with an estimated hourly value beside each one. Post it where you can see it from time to time.
This simple technique could generate the motivation needed to assign more time to those projects that will produce the most results. If you have a chart that suggests one activity produces $5.00 in value to you and another $25.00 it isn’t hard to see how that might shape your choice of what to do next.
Most people squander a lot of time. Using a tool like this can be a good technique to help us focus on doing more productive work, the activities that produce the most income.
This action step may not be for everyone. It may be more difficult to do for some than others depending on the nature of their work. But it can be quite informative for anyone to at least think through the dollar value of their work and the implications that has for activity choices.
