Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
Time is one of the few resources we routinely spend without asking what we are receiving in return, and because the cost is rarely visible in the moment, it is easy to underestimate how much we are giving away. The question is not whether every hour produces something measurable, but whether we are consciously choosing where our time goes and whether what receives it still deserves it.
Time is one of the few resources we routinely spend without asking what we are receiving in return.
We give an extra hour to work that did not require it. We remain in conversations long after they have stopped being useful. We accept obligations because declining them feels uncomfortable. We spend time worrying about something we cannot yet resolve. We stay with things because we have already invested so much time in them that leaving feels like admitting that investment was wasted. None of these choices seems particularly costly in the moment. An hour here. An afternoon there. A few months longer than we intended.
But they are not free.
I understand and have experienced this personally.
There are periods of my own life I can look back on now and see quite differently from how I saw them while I was living them. Time spent worrying. Time spent waiting. Time spent trying to make sense of things that perhaps did not require quite so much of me. Time given to situations because I was already in them, because I hoped something would change, or because making a different choice seemed harder then.
Looking backwards can make the cost much clearer.
The temptation, of course, is to turn that recognition into regret. To calculate what we could have done with those months or years, or who we might have been if we had used them differently. But that spends more time on time already spent.
The past may give us information, but it cannot give us a refund.
Its value now is in helping us become more discerning about what we do with the time that remains ours.
This should not only be applied to personal situations
Think about…
- meetings that routinely take two hours when forty-five minutes would do.
- that report that continues to be produced because it has always been produced
- rework caused by unclear instructions
- unresolved problems that keep returning,
- decisions that are repeatedly deferred
- layers of approval that no longer add value
- people spending hours fixing symptoms because no one has taken the time to understand what is actually driving the problem.
We tend to notice the financial cost of these things because money appears on a budget, an invoice or a financial statement. Time is less cooperative. It disappears quietly. Yet every unnecessary meeting, repeated conversation, duplicated task and avoidable piece of rework is being paid for with hours that could have been used somewhere else.
The cost is not only the time consumed. It is also the work, thinking, attention and opportunity that time could have supported instead.
That does not mean every hour needs to justify itself through productivity.
Rest can be an excellent return on time. So can laughter, thinking, reading, doing nothing, being with someone we love, helping someone who needs us, or simply allowing ourselves enough space to recover. Not everything valuable produces an output, and not everything productive is valuable.
Have you considered what you are getting in exchange for your time?
There is a difference between deciding that something deserves our time and continuing to give it our time because we have not stopped to think about the exchange. There is a difference between investing another hour because it matters and surrendering another hour because saying no, changing direction, ending something or questioning the way we have always done it feels uncomfortable.
We cannot recover the time we have already given away. But we can allow what we now understand about its cost to change what we do next.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
What are you continuing to give your time to, despite having little or no evidence that your time is producing a return, and what would it take for you to stop?
About Giselle
Most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.
I’m Giselle Hudson — The Pre-Fixer. I help leaders see the real problem before they act, in my writing and in my work. I don’t fix; I pre-fix. Most advisers jump to solutions before they’ve found the real problem. I find it first — the part that isn’t fully visible yet. Once we see that clearly, everything else falls into place, and confident, right action can follow.
Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations — helping leaders make sense of complexity before they commit significant time and money to the wrong thing.
What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?
