Ask most people whether time or money is more valuable, and they’ll say time. The reasoning is sound: time is finite. Your capacity to earn money is, in principle, limitless. You can always make more money. You can never make more time.
So the answer is settled — and then everyone goes back to organizing their entire life around the money.
I want to sit in that contradiction for a minute, because it’s where most of us live.
The “I’m so busy” tell
Here’s something I’ve noticed, and once you see it you can’t unsee it: the people who say they’re busy usually aren’t, and the people who actually are busy somehow always find the time.
A scarcity mindset around time announces itself through the word “busy.” It’s a wall. I’d love to, but I’m so busy. Meanwhile, the genuinely overcommitted people — the ones running real obligations — tend to make time for what matters, fast, without drama. They’ve already decided what their hours are for, so they’re not negotiating with themselves every time a choice comes up.
“Busy” is rarely a statement about the quantity of your time. It’s a statement about the clarity of your priorities. When the priorities are vague, every hour feels spoken for and nothing actually gets chosen.
The fix is a time audit
Money, you can audit. You can see where it went. So why do we treat time — the more valuable resource — as if it just evaporates?
Run a time audit the way you’d run a budget. Track it. Look at where it actually goes versus where you’d say it goes. Do it at the granular level — the day-to-day leaks — but more importantly, do it at altitude, across years. And start with the single biggest line item: your job.
Something like 60% of people don’t like their job. Sit with that. It’s the largest recurring expense of time most of us will ever make, and the majority of people are spending it on something they actively don’t enjoy. If you’re in the minority who loves the work — wonderful, you’ve already won the most important allocation decision there is. If you’re not, that’s not a small problem to optimize around the edges. That’s the line item to examine first.
Inertia is the quiet enemy
Here’s the real reason most people never make the change they keep thinking about: inertia is everything. Once you’re moving down a path, it’s enormously hard to change direction, and we almost never stop to ask whether it’s even the path we’d choose.
For us, the nudge came after our second child was born. We couldn’t find good childcare while I was finishing paternity leave. The cost for two kids ran about fifty thousand dollars a year, after tax. And so the trade was laid bare: keep exchanging my time with my employer for money, to pay someone else to spend that time with my kids — during the one stretch of their lives I’d never get back.
Written out like that, it’s almost absurd. But I’d never have written it out at all if inertia hadn’t been interrupted. The path I was on was a fine path. That’s what made it dangerous. Fine paths don’t trigger the examination that bad ones do. They just quietly continue, and one day you look up and you’re five years further down a road you never chose.
The job had gone stale anyway — little room to grow, work that no longer matched what I cared about. We’d always dreamed of living abroad, with family in Lisbon. So we went. It wasn’t only the childcare math. But the childcare math is what made us look, and looking is the whole game.
What “rich” actually means
When you picture a rich person, you probably picture the lifestyle — the golf, the resorts, the vacations. Spending money conspicuously.
But sit with the actual experience those images are pointing at. The thing they all have in common isn’t the money. It’s the control over time. The rich person isn’t enviable because they have a nice calendar to look at. They’re enviable because the calendar is theirs.
So here’s the reframe I’d offer: a genuinely rich life runs on more than money. It runs on health, on relationships, on a tribe of people who get you, on work that means something, on hobbies you’d do for free, and on the steady sense that you’re still growing. Money can support every one of those. It can buy none of them directly. And one of the surest ways to feel rich — available to far more people than a yacht is — is simply to win back control over your own time.
We set out to step off the wheel for two years, travel, and be present for our kids’ early childhood. The two years became something else: a life. Not idleness — a fake retirement that turned into pursuing the work we actually care about, in a community of people chasing the same thing. We didn’t get rich and then get free. We got free, and discovered that was most of what we’d meant by rich all along.
You said time is more valuable. I believe you. The only question left is whether your week looks like you believe it too.
Reply and tell me: if you ran a time audit this week, what’s the line item you’re most afraid of?
— Ashleigh