A Different Way of Thinking About Productivity

A great example of a time asset: Steve jobs driving his car without a license plate." Steve Jobs discovered a loophole in the California vehicle registration laws. Anyone with a new car had up to six months to get a proper license plate for their new vehicle. During the first six months, however, you could simply drive the vehicle without a license... See more

A very interesting time debt: doing work poorly. " If you don't edit your article now, you'll have to fix the grammar later. If you write sloppy code now, you'll have to debug it later. If you create a poor product in the beginning, you'll have to service customers and process refunds later. Every low-quality piece of work is a time debt that you h... See more

This is not to say that all time debts are bad. Perhaps you enjoy serving on your school committee or volunteering with a local organization. However, when you make these commitments, you are also creating a time debt that you will have to pay at some point. Sometimes the debts we commit to are worth sacrificing for, many times they are not.

Email is a time debt that most people participate in each day. If you send an email now, you are committing to reading the reply or responding with an additional message later. Every email you send creates a small debt that you have to pay back at a later time.

TIME DEBTS are actions or choices you make today that will cost you additional time in the future.

TIME ASSETS are actions or choices you make today that will save you time in the future.Software is a classic example of a time asset. You can write a program one time today and it will run processes for you over and over again every day afterward. You pay an upfront investment of time and get a payoff each day afterward.