How Your Credit Card Bill Can Help You Make Better Time Choices

Feb 2

Confession. While I pride myself on being a good manager of my financial resources (and have a spouse who is fantastic in this area), I must admit there are times I look at a credit card bill and go, “How did this happen?” The amount due is significantly higher than I had anticipated.

At first I try to rationalize that it’s been an unusual month or we’ve had unexpected expenses (and both are sometimes true). When I finally start going through the charges line by line, however, I find that there are several more common reasons I find myself scratching my (balding) head. They include:

Lots of small online purchases I didn’t remember (Darn you Amazon Prime!)
Recurring payments that show up once a quarter
Purchases made by other authorized users
Subscriptions I forgot to cancel
Impulse purchases

None of these reasons on their own caused my bill to be so high. It’s the combination of several of them.

I believe we have a similar experience when we find ourselves feeling overloaded. Physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted, wondering how we got into such a precarious situation. We say to ourselves, “But I’ve been working so hard” or “I don’t waste that much time,” when there are other underlying reasons that are bringing us to this point of frustration.

Then, much like looking for loose change in the couch (does anybody even do that anymore?), we start searching for ways to “pay the bill.” Unfortunately, there is no more time to be found. You cannot borrow it.

If you’re currently in an “overspend” predicament with how you are using your time, here are five suggestions to help you get back on track:

Be as mindful of your small purchases as you are of your larger ones

Rarely in my work with coaching clients do we initially recover huge chunks of time for them to use more wisely. It’s more like 15 minutes in one part of their day or 30 minutes in another that begin to help them climb out of their deficit. Think about how you are using some of the small increments of time in your day like:

Time between meetings
Waiting
First or last 30 minutes of your workday
The first 30 minutes after you wake up or the 15 minutes before you go to bed

🤔 How could you use them more effectively?

Identify The Cost Of What You Have Already Committed To

When was the last time you actually stopped and thought about the hours needed to complete the various assignments or projects you have at work? More importantly, have you looked at your calendar to see where work on those things can actually happen?

In a recent coaching session I was working with a college student who was struggling to find time to get his coursework done. When exploring his other commitments, he mentioned he was a volunteer coach for a sports team. He didn’t see it as a problem… until he realized he was spending about 20 hours per week in that role.

An exercise I use in some of my presentations is to have participants look at an upcoming day at work and block out all the time on their calendar they know is already committed to meetings, deadlines, etc. They are often surprised to find that they only have one hour where they have the opportunity to work on something beyond the urgent.

🤔 Do you know the cost of what you’ve already said yes to?

Know What The Purchases Of Others Will Cost You

When you say yes to an assignment do you fully understand what’s expected of you? Are others on your team making choices with their time that is putting more work on you? It’s not an easy conversation to have with a coworker or your boss about how their choices are affecting you.

The key is to remind them of how their continued choices can negatively impact something that’s important to them (i.e. deadlines, quality of relationship, etc.).

🤔 How are the choices of others with their time costing you more than you had planned?

Cancel What’s Not Working For You

Reflect on the choices you are making with your time that aren’t getting you the results you want. Some of them might include:

Time spent jumping from one task to another instead of focusing on one until done
Getting caught in the trap of “I’ll just look at social media for a minute” or “I want do do a quick check of my email” and you’re still in it 45 minutes later
Failing to be more intentional with the small amounts of time in your day
A lack of healthy boundaries when it comes to the length of casual conversations with coworkers
Not investing time to plan how you want your day to go and you end up being busy but not productive

🤔 What choices aren’t contributing to the results you want?

Budget for the impulse purchases

This may sound strange to you, but almost every day I think about how much time I will allow myself to waste, blow, squander or whatever you want to call it. It’s usually about 30 minutes between the end of my work day and supper with the family. I can do whatever I want with it.

Now when I feel myself wanting to do something impulsive with my time earlier in the day (like look up the history of Groundhog Day) or check on cheap flights to Salt Lake City for skiing (The greatest snow on earth!), I tell myself there’s a place for that in my day. And you don’t have to have just one slot in your day. I also give myself 10 minutes or so right after lunch.

This is also where I think so many people can make great strides in better managing their email. They impulsively check it because they haven’t created a dedicated space in their day to process it. All day long their brain keeps reminding them that they need to check their email because there’s not an identified time they will work on it. Remember, our brain hates uncertainty!

🤔 Where in your day could you plan to be more impulsive?

As I said in the beginning, I don’t think any of these strategies alone will wipe out all of the overload you are experiencing. But just like choosing one small financial debt in your life and working to erase it before moving on to a bigger one (Thank you Dave Ramsey!), I believe making these small choices to improve will give you the confidence to look for even bigger ways to achieve the work life success you really want.

Jones Loflin