Good morning, happy Monday, and happy Valentine’s Day!
“Life is short, live it. Love is rare, grab it. Anger is bad, dump it. Fear is awful, face it. Memories are sweet, cherish them.”
– Anonymous
I came across a fun website: www.timeanddate.com/date/duration.html
Here you can type in any start date and any end date and it will tell you how much time has elapsed.
I discovered I am 15,747 days old today. Good to know 😊
This however, got me thinking about how short life is.
If I have a life expectancy to age 90, which is the default age we use for our financial planning analysis, that means my total life expectancy is
- 1,080 months
- 32,872 days
- 788,928 hours
- 47,335,680 minutes.
A large portion of that time has already elapsed in my life.
My friends, time is so precious, and we all have a limited amount of it. As James 4:14 says “What is your life? You are mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”
As a financial planner I have conversations virtually every day about spending or investing money.
With money the concept is fairly simple: if I spend money, I get a good or service in exchange for it and the money is gone. Whatever I purchased will likely be worth less at a future point (example: my phone, car, and furniture are all worth less now than I purchased them) or may be worth nothing (I spent money on lunch yesterday and there is no resale value on that). On the other hand, we have investments, where we allocate dollars with the intention of growing the value of those dollars over time (example: 401k contributions or a house purchase).
Generally speaking, investing money is considered a good thing and spending money is a necessary thing to survive (I have to eat after all).
But what about time? Here’s my question for us to ponder this morning:
Do we spend time or do we invest time?
It is so easy to spend time and it takes work and intentionality for us to invest time.
I saw a statistic that the average American checks their phone 58 times each day and spends 3 hours and 15 minutes a day on their phone. Add to that that the average 181.7 minutes (roughly 3 hours) we Americans watch our televisions, and we are spending over 6 hours on average staring at a screen! (This does not even count computer screen time!)
Now there are times when watching a screen can be an intentional time investment, but I would have to imagine the majority of that time is simply spent (AKA wasted).
I am as guilty of this as anyone. After a long day, sometimes I just want to ‘veg’ and stare at a screen and turn my brain off. Maybe that’s ok for a little while, but if I’m not careful I look up and hours have passed by and I just wasted an entire evening that I could have spent with the people that I love.
I’m sure my 2 boys (ages 11 & 9) think we are exceptionally cruel parents because we place strict time limits on electronic devises for them. I call iPad games and YouTube videos “mind numbing activities” and I simply won’t allow countless hours of their lives to be spent on them. Why spend the time when we can invest the time?
As we approach Valentine’s Day tomorrow, I would like to encourage all of us to be intentional about our time. Do we invest it or spend it? When the day is over did I invest my time in the relationships that matter or simply watch another TikTok video?
Invest time with the people we love. Invest time in making ourselves the best version of ourselves we can be. Invest time doing things that will make us proud of the way we spend our day.
The minutes, hours, days, and weeks of our lives are passing by. We won’t get the time back. Let’s invest the remaining time we have wisely.
I treasure the friendship I have with each of you!
Make it a great week ahead!