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Getting The Biggest Bang For Your Time

Some people prefer doing certain things that are extremely ineffective with regards to time but somewhat cost effective. For example, some may queue to get their cars filled with CNG (a cheaper alternate for petrol). The caveat is queue is often much much longer. People would waste hours of their day to save 20% on the fuel cost. We’ve all seen that happen at some point in our lives.

Some people go to the water filtration plants to get free and filtered water instead of having a water company like Nestle deliver that to their doors for a cost of $1.5 per 5 gallons. We’re all presented with choices like that everyday whether to save 30 minutes of our time or $1.5.

I know my choices well but at the same time I understand not all choices apply to everyone. Although, I’m curious whether many people even weigh these choices at all and regardless of what your situation is I encourage you to weigh those choices at the very minimum.

I’d save time over money every chance I get because time is money and if my time is used effectively I can make a lot more than what I would have saved by doing those manual chores.

A friend of mine asked me whether he should start a YouTube channel, or a social media agency, or a dropshipping business, or build an e-commerce brand. That’s for him to decide of course and I told him that too. He probably needs to work on what he can do better and more passionately? Since he has an internet marketing background he probably can do all of these things progressively and passionately. But it is obvious, that one of these choices would be better than the rest and he needs to take that into consideration.

Which of these options would create the maximum value in the shortest amount of time. That is what he should be doing. Short-sighted people, which I’ve been guilty of many times myself, would gauge in the revenue for each of these businesses. I’m assuming revenue won’t come easily from the YouTube channel but value will still be created outside of revenue. An asset will be created. Similarly there would be pros and cons for each of those options. Dropshipping for example could be extremely lucrative with respect to revenue, but most dropshippers fail to create any value outside of revenue at all.

Yes you can spend $100,000 on Facebook ads and generate $200,000 in revenue in a month. After taking in consideration the cost of goods sold, most likely you’re taking home $50,000 every month. But with delayed shipping times, no quality assurance on the products, you’re most likely not going to have pleased customers resulting in no asset creation. The moment you stop your operations, you realize you’ve very little repeat purchase, that you no longer have any traffic or customers on your store, and basically if you wanted to flip your store today, you’ll fetch exactly $0 for it.

My only advice is whatever you’re going to venture into always look at the value you’re going to create and the time it takes to do so. If you’re good at and passionate about 5 things, which one of these should you work on is a mathematical problem and a spreadsheet could answer that better than a friend.