In 1748, a 42-year-old printer in Philadelphia handed his shop to a partner and walked away from work for good. He had enough money that he'd never have to work again. Then a friend asked him for advice on getting ahead, and Benjamin Franklin sat down and wrote one of the most repeated sentences in American society:
"Remember that time is money."
This appeared as the first line of a short letter called "Advice to a Young Tradesman". While the rest of the letter he wrote was pretty ordinary, it was that first line that everyone has remembered. What did he mean by that?
Franklin was saying that (in today's money) if you can earn $400 a day and you take the afternoon off, the $50 you blew on lunch and a movie isn't your real loss. The $200 you didn't earn is.
His point was that an idle afternoon costs you what you didn't make. It was practical advice for a guy running a shop, and I don't think Franklin meant anything more by it. But, boy, did we sure make more of it than he intended. Keep reading…
(By the way, Franklin didn't even come up with the phrase. A London newspaper printed it in 1719, when he was 13 years old. He just made it famous, which is how most big lies get started: somebody people trust repeats something that was already floating around, and it sticks.)
Franklin wrote a sentence about a shopkeeper's wasted afternoon, and America turned it into a way of life.
Whether or not you say "time is money" out loud, you don't have to. You believe it anyway. How do I know? Well, if you've ever felt guilty on a Saturday for doing nothing, or figured out what a 2-hour lunch "cost" you, or opened your laptop on vacation because sitting still felt like losing money, then you're telling the world that you believe time is money without even knowing it.
(I've done all three, and I bet you have too.)
But time is NOT money!
And believing this has consequences. Literally. Let's look at the research.
Sanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer are researchers at the University of Toronto and Stanford, and they spent years studying what happens to people once they put a dollar figure on their hours. What they found is consistent, and it's pretty ugly.
People who think of their time as money say they feel more rushed. They're less willing to volunteer, and when they do volunteer, they give fewer hours. They enjoy their time off less.
In one experiment, they had people calculate their own hourly wage and then sit and listen to a piece of music. The people who'd just done the math couldn't enjoy it. Something in the back of their mind kept asking what the listening was costing them.
These weren't workaholics. They were regular people who had been handed a lie and they believed it hook, line, and sinker. (Sound like anybody you know?)
The modern version of Franklin's sentence is "buy back your time." It's the title of a bestselling book by Dan Martell, and his whole method is built on a formula he calls the Buyback Rate. You take your annual income, divide it by 2,000 to get your hourly value, and then divide that by 4.
So if you make $200,000 a year, the formula says your hour is worth $100, and you should hand off anything somebody else will do for $25 an hour or less.
Now, I'm not saying the advice underneath is bad. If you’ve been following my writings for any amount of time you know that I teach you how to get work off your plate. I've taught that for years, and I still believe it.
But look at the very first thing the formula asks you to do, which is to price your hour. That's the exact behavior DeVoe and Pfeffer measured, and it's the very thing that makes you impatient with your own kids at the dinner table. So the very first step of his method locks you in the same cage he's promising to free you from. Don't you see the problem here?
And I need to clear something up, because I've used the phrase "buy back your time" in this newsletter a few times over the years. What I was teaching was a rule I still believe: if you're going to spend a resource, spend the one you can get more of to get the one you can't get more of. In other words, spend money to get your hours back from work, and never the other way around.
I now realize that the words "buy back" were sloppy, and I want to fix that. You can't buy time – no matter how many books Dan Martell sells. Not a minute of it, not at any price.
What money actually buys is somebody else doing the work. The hours that are freed up as a result of someone else doing that work were already yours to begin with. Money didn't create a single one of them, and it never will. Please do not gloss over this fact.
I know this may sound like splitting hairs, but it isn't. Once you see the difference between buying time and buying work, you can't unsee it, and everything else I'm about to say depends on it.
I call this the Currency Trap.
Money is a currency. You can earn it, spend it, lose it, and earn it again. It flows – and we always hope it flows in way more than it flows out!
Let me give you a real story to illustrate how money as a currency works. My cousin was a successful contractor in the early 2000s. Like many people he lost everything in the 2008 crash. When the dust settled, all he had left was a pickup truck and his wife. Five years later he was a millionaire again.
Money flows. Money regenerates. Money comes back (even if sometimes very slowly.) I've watched it happen to almost everybody I know who kept working after they got knocked down. Heck, it's happened to me a few times.
But hear me clearly: time does not work like that. You get 168 hours this week, you'll get 168 hours next week, and not one of last week's hours is coming back no matter how much you pay. Time is the only resource you can't earn again, borrow against, or buy at any price. (Which, btw, is why I NEVER will reply to an email, DM, or other message from a stranger that says anything like, “Can I borrow a moment of your time?” The answer is no, because you cannot repay it. But I digress…)
Now, you may already be thinking, "Yeah, but Einstein proved time is relative." He did. And it's true, if you're near a black hole or moving at a serious fraction of the speed of light, time starts to bend. Down here where we live on Earth, it's a rounding error. An astronaut who spends 6 months on the space station comes home a few thousandths of a second younger than you. Big deal. Nobody on this planet has ever gotten a 169th hour, and nobody's week has ever come up short at 167.
Someone else may argue that they've experienced getting lost in a project and looked up and realized that 3 hours passed, but it felt like time stopped for them. But it didn't. Regardless of what it feels like, everybody on this planet gets the same 168 hours a week. Period.
The Currency Trap is what happens when you take Ben Franklin's sentence further than he ever took it. He said a wasted hour costs you what you could have earned. That's it. He wasn’t trying to equate something as precious as time with something as common as money. But unfortunately, we heard him say “time is money” and decided time and money were the same kind of thing – that they were equivalent – so you could trade one for the other any time you wanted.
That's the lie, and Franklin didn't tell it. We did. As a result millions of people trade their non-renewable hours to chase renewable dollars and think that they’re doing something smart, trying to squeeze more money out of every hour.
But think about the phrase "knowledge is power." Everybody believes that one too, but nobody in their right mind thinks knowledge and power are actually the same thing. You can't deposit a college degree, and you can't spend one. We all understand it's just a comparison.
"Time is money" has the same grammar structure, but somewhere along the way we quit treating it like a comparison and started treating it like a fact. And we started writing books about it and building lives around it. And giving TED talks about it.
So let's test it like a fact.
If time were money, you could save it. You can't. Every hour you don't use is gone at midnight, whether you used it well or not.
If time were money, you could borrow it. You can't. Nobody has ever gotten next week's hours early.
If time were money, you could earn more of it. You can't. The richest man on earth gets the same 168 hours this week that you do, and the same 168 next week.
You can save money, borrow money, and earn more money, and people do all three every single day. But you can't do any of those things with time. That's how you know they were never the same thing, and that Franklin never really intended any of us to take that phrase literally.
But we did and that's why books like Buy Back Your Time become bestsellers, because people still believe this lie, even though "time is money" never meant that to begin with.
Why am I harping on this so much? Because this is a golden cage if I've ever seen one. The gold is efficiency and time management. It looks like productivity, and it feels like getting your money's worth out of every hour of the day.
The bars on the cage are that money can be earned again while time can't. So the harder you follow the rule, the more you lose the very thing you were trying to protect. (Ouch.)
So what do you do with a resource you can't save, borrow, or earn?
You quit trying to manage it. Time shows up at a fixed rate and leaves at the same rate no matter what you do, so managing it was never possible to begin with.
What you can manage is where your attention goes inside the hours you've got. That's the reason I built the 10-Block method around focus instead of time, and it's the reason I wrote back in August about what multitasking actually does to your brain.
The bottom line is that you don't control the hours on the clock, and you never did. What you control is your attention and what you focus on during those hours, and that's a big difference.
Let me get biblical for a minute, because Paul wrote something to the church in Ephesus that sounds, at first, like he's agreeing with Ben Franklin.
"See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil." (Ephesians 5:15-16, NKJV)
"Redeeming" is a purchase word. The Greek behind it is exagorazō, which literally means to buy something up out of the marketplace, and in Paul's day it's the word you'd use for purchasing a slave's freedom out of the marketplace. So on the surface it sounds like Paul is on Franklin's side and Martell's side, telling you to go buy/redeem the time.
But the truth is that he isn't, and you can see it if you look at what the time is being bought out of. Paul isn't buying days back from a schedule. He's pulling them back out of waste. Exactly the way Franklin meant it in 1748.
Paul's picture is a man who can see his days getting lost to foolishness, and who gets them back by walking wisely inside them.
There's no exchange rate in that verse. Nothing gets traded for money. Paul is telling you to pay attention to how you're living, because the days are getting away from you.
That's the truth Franklin's sentence buried. The day is already yours. You can't buy it and you can't sell it, so the only decision left is what you're going to pay attention to while it goes by.
And I'll leave you with this about Franklin. He quit working at 42, and he spent the next 40 years doing things a man doesn't do if he thinks every hour has a price tag on it. He flew a kite in a thunderstorm, invented a stove and refused to patent it, started a public library, and helped start a country.
Franklin understood that "time is money" was advice for a workday, not a rule for a life. We're the ones who turned it into something he never meant, and we've been paying for it ever since.
Time isn't money. Money is the one thing you can earn again, and time is the one thing you can't.
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