{"id":953,"date":"2025-04-30T16:25:24","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T22:25:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/janajm.com?p=953"},"modified":"2025-07-22T11:55:28","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T17:55:28","slug":"best-time-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janajm.com\/best-time-first\/","title":{"rendered":"Gift your best time to yourself."},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a well-known concept in personal finance known as the \u2018pay yourself first\u2019 principle.<\/p>\n

What this principle suggests is that, whenever you receive a paycheque, the first thing you should do with that money \u2014 before you pay any bills, before you buy any shiny new thing \u2014 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<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t pretend to be a personal finance expert, but as someone who\u2019s 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\u2019s much less tangible: how productive we\u2019re able to be when it comes to making progress on the things that matter most to us.<\/p>\n

In the past, I\u2019ve tended to push the tasks that are \u2018for me\u2019 to the very end of the day, squeezing them into whatever time has been left over after I\u2019ve 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 \u2014 and, again, just as tends to happen with a savings account \u2014 it was often difficult to prioritize them, particularly against the very tangible and frequently recurring deadlines of day-to-day life.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018for me\u2019 tasks I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s no longer the case.<\/p>\n

When it comes to time management, I now pay myself first \u2014 and, more than that, I allow myself the gift of giving my best time to myself.<\/p>\n

These days, I\u2019ve 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\u2019m no longer starting my messages to loved ones with \u201csorry for the delayed response!\u201d, and my personal projects are coming along at a pace that feels meaningful to me.<\/p>\n

(The post you\u2019re reading now, and the monthly series to which it belongs, is one of those projects.)<\/p>\n

What\u2019s been remarkable is already getting to see how much the gains have been compounding over time. For one thing, it hasn\u2019t been 20 or 30 of just any minutes spent working on my personal projects each day; it\u2019s been 20 or 30 of my best, most focused minutes, which I\u2019ve 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\u2019m most passionate about accomplishing.<\/p>\n

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1 <\/sup>The benefits are said to be twofold:<\/p>\n

1) You ensure that some amount is actually saved, as many folks in the pay-yourself-last camp often end up not paying themselves at all.<\/p>\n

2) You save substantially more, over time, because the percentage being saved will always originate from a larger dollar amount. Think of it this way:<\/p>\n