Gift your best time to yourself.

There’s a well-known concept in personal finance known as the ‘pay yourself first’ principle.

What this principle suggests is that, whenever you receive a paycheque, the first thing you should do with that money — before you pay any bills, before you buy any shiny new thing — is to pay yourself first. As opposed to paying yourself last, by only saving whatever is left over after everything else has been paid for, paying yourself first means immediately setting that money aside for future you in a savings account.¹

I don’t pretend to be a personal finance expert, but as someone who’s currently completing her fourth academic degree I do know a bit about time management. The reason I share the above example is because, from a time management perspective, it offers a tangible illustration of something that’s much less tangible: how productive we’re able to be when it comes to making progress on the things that matter most to us.

In the past, I’ve tended to push the tasks that are ‘for me’ to the very end of the day, squeezing them into whatever time has been left over after I’ve fulfilled all of the more pressing obligations that I have to complete on a regular basis but that do little when it comes to the fulfillment of my longer-term goals. The challenge, when it came to realizing my longer-term goals, had mostly been that although they were important to me in the long run their benefits were both largely intangible and relatively far in the future. Thus — and, again, just as tends to happen with a savings account — it was often difficult to prioritize them, particularly against the very tangible and frequently recurring deadlines of day-to-day life.

What this paying-myself-last system of time management would most often yield was that, as the week wore on and as ever more tasks demanding my attention popped up, I was getting less and less time to work on the ‘for me’ tasks I’d relegated to the end of each day. Much of the time, I was actually even just skipping them all together in lieu of something that felt more immediately productive, like getting an extra hour of sleep or squeezing in a workout.

You can imagine what the result was: a lot of time would go by, and little progress would be made on the things that were, ostensibly, very important to me. But, today, that’s no longer the case.

When it comes to time management, I now pay myself first — and, more than that, I allow myself the gift of giving my best time to myself.

These days, I’ve rearranged my schedule so that at least some portion of the things that are most important to the realization of my long-term goals happens first in the day, when I feel sharpest and most energized. What this has meant is that, among other things, I now read for about 2 hours every day, I’m no longer starting my messages to loved ones with “sorry for the delayed response!”, and my personal projects are coming along at a pace that feels meaningful to me.

(The post you’re reading now, and the monthly series to which it belongs, is one of those projects.)

What’s been remarkable is already getting to see how much the gains have been compounding over time. For one thing, it hasn’t been 20 or 30 of just any minutes spent working on my personal projects each day; it’s been 20 or 30 of my best, most focused minutes, which I’ve been finding to equate to much more than it otherwise would. For another, investing 30 minutes 5 days a week adds up to 10 hours per month, or 120 hours per year, totalling 15 8-hour workdays of time invested into some of things I’m most passionate about accomplishing.

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