Five Facts About Your Most Valuable Resource

We have several resources at our disposal as leaders: energy, money, customers, relational currency, even opportunity. But for years I’ve believed that time is by far our most valuable resource. Here are five facts based on that belief, including observations of what it means for us as leaders.

1. It is your only nonrenewable resource. Lose money in an investment gone south? You can make more. Lost customers over a misunderstanding or downturn in the market? You can find more. But every minute of every day is incredibly valuable, if for no other reason that once it’s gone you can’t get it back. While this shouldn’t paralyze us, it should drive us unquestioningly toward maximizing the effectiveness of ourselves and those we lead.

2. You haven’t been short-changed. Time is an equal playing field; perhaps the most equal of all our resources. Opportunity isn’t distributed fairly. Neither are other advantages. But everyone gets 86,400 seconds each day. Then tomorrow we all start over. What sets us apart is what we do with them.

3. You don’t have an advantage, either. Because of the equal distribution of time, you never have any to waste. Even our down time and rest time can be justified as investments in a bigger picture, and to be understood properly they must be viewed through that lens.

4. Stephen Covey was right: effectiveness really is more important than efficiency. It’s still amazing how many of us miss this, even though we have all heard it a thousand times. We don’t need to do more things faster; we instead need to ask if these are the things we should be doing at all. Because of that...

5. You need a stop-doing list. I heard this truth years ago, and it has stuck with me. Maybe the most of effective list we could have is made up of the things we need to stop doing. Making this list could be a powerful exercise for many of us, and should be driven by what’s important and not what’s urgent. The important should beat urgent every time. Make a list and give yourself permission to stop doing the things that land on it.