Timing it Makes it Valuable.

Oh crap. I have to take care of this.

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

How Time Dictates Perceived Value

This podcast episode is about 10 minutes long. If it was about 30 minutes long, would you find it to be more valuable or less valuable? And do you ask me then? Well, Mark, it depends what’s inside of it. It depends what the content is. Okay, what if it was an hour and a half? Well, you again, you’d probably say, well, what about the content? Uh, what’s the intent? But you would have your upper limit based on what you would think the value was of what it contained, right?

We do tend to assess value based on time and we do tend to set time based on value. Everything is about that. Your 30-cond elevator speech, uh, giving a talk of a certain length, introductions, if you go to a networking event and they say, “Well, give us your 30-cond or your 1 minute introduction.” And so forth, even your video calls are of a certain length, you have in your brain preset amounts of time that you think have a certain value based on certain activities.

So, knowing that, you may not be surprised by what I’m about to tell you. And what I’m going to tell you is that timing gives something more value.

The Connection Between Time and Energy

And what do I mean by that? I mean, if you say you’re going to, and again, I like to use housework because it’s universal. If you decide you’re going to clean up your kitchen, you have already decided how much time you think it’s going to take, how much time you’re willing to donate to it, right? If you look at your kitchen and go, “Oh my god, this is going to take 2 hours. How did this get destroyed? And and why am I so backlogged on what I need to do in it?” You’re going to say, “I don’t want to do that. Maybe I can do a shortcut. Maybe I can only do a piece of that that will take a certain amount of time.

Which is interesting because as I say, life is made of three things. Time, energy, and resources. And in that case, you’re not even really choosing the amount of energy involved. You’re choosing time. But time and energy are connected. Because the longer you do a thing, the more energy you use. So by assessing the time, you’re kind of assessing the energy. But in this case, you’re focusing more on the time involved because you don’t feel like you’re necessarily going to run out of energy. You feel like, look, I don’t want to do this for that long. I have other things I want to do. And obviously, we do that also in our jobs and our focuses in our life that say, “Hey, I’m going to do this. This, this takes a certain amount of time.” And we juggle time and there’s calendaring things. And that’s an entirely different episode.

So timing obviously plays a part. But what do I mean when I say timing gives it value?

How Constrained Time Increases Your Effort

What I mean is this. If you say you’re going to do a certain kind of cleanup or a chore or what have you and you tell yourself that you only are allowed to do it for 5 minutes, you will find almost invariably that you put a lot more effort into doing it because you’re up against the timing. And now you have tangibly measured the task. You’re not telling yourself you’re going to clean a kitchen. You’re telling yourself you’re going to give yourself 5 minutes of effort.

And what do we know about the way humans handle effort? We do things iteratively. And you can listen to the episode l