Time as an Investment vs. Currency

QUESTION

Hi Joey! I am a 14-year-old high school student. I have found it hard to manage my schoolwork and my side projects (lighting design, coding, etc.).

Are there any tips you have to manage your different time investments?

—Ziggy

Have a question for me? Submit it here.

ANSWER

Hi Ziggy, thanks for the great question! High school is a period of self-discovery, it’s nice to hear you’ve found activities that excite you.

Managing time is a lifelong challenge, so don’t feel disheartened if you aren’t mastering yours right out of the gate.

Time as an Investment

You specifically mentioned time as an “investment,” so that’s what I’m going to speak to first.

When I was in high school I played hours upon hours of basketball. I would shoot every day from the moment I got home until the sun went down. In retrospect, that time did little for me in the long run even though I enjoyed it. Thankfully, I had other interests, such as reading and writing, that have continued to give back as I’ve grown.

The definition of Investment is: The act of putting money, effort, time, etc. into something to make a profit or get an advantage.

Think about things you want to do as an ordered list. Each item has a different priority. Right now, schoolwork is the highest priority because it returns the biggest advantage. Then the next priority, and the next, and so on.

Time as a Currency

A currency is a thing we spend, or trade, for other things. In the case of time, we have a limited amount of Time Currency per day—24 hours—and we spend it on whatever makes the most sense.

While you can convert your Time Currency into a Time Investment, such as practicing your coding to get better, you certainly don’t need to spend all your time that way. Not every single moment of your day needs to pay dividends later. There’s a balance between spending time for Today You and Tomorrow You.

Sometimes you just need to go out and shoot some hoops.

If you sleep for 8 hours, go to school for 7, and commute for 1, that leaves you with 8 hours left to spend before and after school. A healthy day finds you spending some on the future and some on the present.

Now that you’re a little more aware of how time can be viewed and used, I recommend you let most of this go and just focus on enjoying yourself. You’re young—have fun. You can worry about this stuff later.

—Joey

Creator of Baronfig
Author of The Laws of Creativity

Kobe Bryant woke up every morning at 4 AM to take hundreds of shots—before practice even started.