Over a glass of wine, one woman asks her friend, “what’s the most you’ve spent on a bottle of wine?”

Her friend replies, “oh, I don’t know… probably about 15 minutes.”

While I’m not really a wine person, I enjoyed hearing this joke the other day.

It highlights the fascinating relationship between time and money. The relationship that caused many of us entrepreneurs to venture out on our own in the first place.

We’re all accustomed to spending our time to earn money. This is the traditional model. And since everyone wants to “work" from home, I’m sure you can get a $15/hr job at Jimmy Johns—worst case scenario. So that’s the floor for the time-to-money exchange.

But where many struggle (myself included) is spending money to earn time.

When you’re young, you feel like you have forever and you wish you were older. You waste your precious time.

When you’re older, you wish you were younger and you could get some of those wasted years back.

As the saying goes, youth is wasted on the young.

But no matter how much money you make, you can only save so much time.

You can hire a chef to cook for you. You can hire a maid to clean your house. You can outsource tedious tasks in your business.

Maybe you can eek out a couple of extra years with proper nutrition and stress management… but there is no escaping the fact that your time is limited.

But time isn’t everything.

Go to any nursing home and you’ll find dozens of people with all the time in the world.

Time appears to be the enemy here. They are trapped in a sterile building with people they don’t know, forced to take pills they don’t like, and so they spend their days playing solitaire and waiting.

Which brings me to the real thing that we value.

Energy.

Or perhaps you might call it vitality.

Having time isn’t really what you’re after.

Having energy to pour yourself into the time you have and the things you do… that’s what you really desire.

To get rid of the nagging problems that weigh you down. To be able to focus on the people and the projects you love.

Conventional wisdom says that, “it’s not the years in your life (time) but the life in your years (vitality)," yet few act like this is true.

So when I’m asked how long I’ve spent on a bottle of wine, I don’t think about the money to buy it or the time I spent drinking it.

I think about the cost to my vitality over the next day as I recovered.

I’d much prefer to have a sip or two, maybe a glass, but never the whole bottle.

When you view time as the most precious resource… and you feel like you don’t have enough time, this is the response. Chug the whole bottle in 15 minutes because there is too much to do. You’re overwhelmed. And this what all the productivity gurus recommend, right?

But the cost of this “efficiency” is greater than the benefit.

In fact, when you’re rushing like this, there really is no benefit.

No savoring the taste, no lively conversation. No fond memories.

Just drinking from a fire hose. Checking off yet another box on your to-do list. You can pencil your friends in again next month for your mandatory "fun" and relationship maintenance.

But if you approach this with energy in mind, instead of time, you realize that there is a cost tomorrow morning when you wake up.

Every decision you make has a price—that’s the definition. To decide means to cut out other options.

So it forces you to think: Is this worth the cost? If it is, you ought to enjoy it. You ought to savor every sip and every moment of conversation. You ought to get the most out of this experience.

As you can imagine, this mindset doesn’t just apply to wine.

When you look back on your life, your memory isn’t filled with all the days you squeezed every drop of productivity out of your time, but rather, you fondly remember the days that you poured your energy into time unproductively spent with people and projects that you love.

Where in your life are you drinking the bottle when you should be savoring a glass?

Check,

Andrew Ryder

P.S. As I was loading this onto my website, another thought occurred to me.

What is the most you've spent on a course? $2,000? $5,000? More?

How about time spent? Hours? Days? 

Most often, the thing preventing you from getting your moneys worth is the time spent, irrespective of price.