Respect time. It’s more precious than money – we cannot earn any more.

Most of us don’t know how much time we have – not until we have very little left. We can estimate and consider how long we’d reasonably like to have but we don’t really know. We know it isn’t unlimited.

It’s a common discipline for us to budget our money but we hardly ever budget our time. Yes, we create schedules, but that is largely to get stuff done, to meet deadlines, to coordinate with others. We rarely consider it a budget – despite time being even more valuable than the money we can so carefully control.

We find years, months and weeks both specific and nebulous. When considering our future we often talk in years, moving it away from the context in which we spend time which is in weeks, days and hours. It is similar to considering our lifetime’s earnings when budgeting for a night out.

We should try and move these considerations into a common space. Consider your future in weeks. A 30 year old, anticipating to live to 80, has 50 years. That’s 2,600 weeks. How quickly a week flies. How many Monday mornings do we desire Friday to come? The weeks move by so quickly.

Spending 30 minutes per day on social media is one week per year gone. .

Like our finances, we have regular outgoings for time. Time sleeping is one example. We have time working, time exercising, time for bathroom visits, commuting, cooking, eating, etc. And we also know how to waste time. We don’t give our time much thought. We just let it slip away, without any consideration.

We can do something about that. We can set budgets. We can turn some of our regular outgoings into time we have consciously spent and enjoyed. We can schedule our social media consumption (the irony of the name of TikTok is not lost on us). We can consider what we are saying “yes” to in the context of how much of our time budget we’d be spending. We can also stop wishing our time away.

Spend your time more carefully than you spend your money. It’s the most valuable thing you have.