Time investment expert Kate Christie says you can better invest your time and regain at least 30 hours each month, with the right strategies and mindset.
Kate is an international speaker, best-selling author of four books and a self-professed time styler who helps many individuals, teams and businesses better invest their time.
Her focus and passions are to provide everyone with more flexibility, freedom and make sure ‘no one ever feels that they have to choose between two things they love for want of time’.
When deciding the best ways to use and reinvest your time, Kate told KnowHow founder Bushy Martin on the Get Invested podcast that there are four different ‘cost lenses’ to consider – financial, opportunity, emotional and physical.
She says one or more of these lenses will resonate strongly with each individual, and these ‘lenses’ should be used in any situation or when completing any type of task.
“The first is financial cost. Your time is money. If you work in a business or a profession where your time is charged by the hour to your clients … that’s what I want you to apply to everything you do,” Kate said.
“If your time is worth $50 now and you spend an hour every day on social media, that’s $18,250 of your time a year. Is this the best use of your time?
“The second which resonates with a lot of people is opportunity cost. So the cost of the trade-off, the cost of what you’ve lost, ‘what opportunities I’ve missed out on for spending my time this way?’. So if I spent an hour a day on social media, is that an hour I could have spent talking to a client, winning a new client, developing a new product or working on my strategic plan?
“The third cost lens is emotional cost. ‘How do I feel? Do I feel good or bad about how I’ve just spent my time?’
“[Finally], physical cost is anything I’m doing that’s making the pain. So if I’m sitting in front of my computer in isolation on back-to-back zoom meetings and I’m not standing up and I’m not getting a break, is my back going to hurt?”
When it comes to immediate time gains, Kate says it’s as simple as being SMART – an acronym describing a series of exercises that will help you get back over 30 hours of lost time per month.
The first two steps include being self-aware of your values and time pressure points, and mapping out a couple days to see exactly where you’re spending your time.
Kate then expands on steps three and four, which are to analyse and reframe.
“So you categorise each task from your timesheets into something. You must do something that you want to do, something that could be delegated or something that could be rejected. And the delegation, rejection sections are where you’re going to find all of your lost time,” she said.
“[Step four] is where you make some decisions about exactly what you’ve got to delegate and what you get to reject.”
Kate explains that different areas of delegation to consider on the home front include outsourcing, where you identify everything that you’re prepared to pay an expert to do, and insourcing, where the people you live with complete tasks themselves.
She also says that you should evaluate which tasks you don’t actually need to do at all, and which tasks you could be smarter about how and when you do them. After you’ve completed this, she says the last step is to take control.
“You implement the changes that you’ve decided to make in terms of your day and your time, where you’re going to be spending and investing your time versus where you’re just not prepared to invest your time anymore because the cost is too high,” Kate said.
Once you’ve achieved these five steps and you’ve regained your hours, Kate says it’s important you invest this time to achieve your goals.
“I don’t want you to get 30 hours back just to spend another 30 on email, on Facebook, or learning a TikTok dance. I want you to invest that time in identifying what your long term goals are across your health, wealth, lifestyle, family, career and business, and then start using those lost 30 hours to implement and get momentum towards achieving those life goals.”
Listen to the full interview here.
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