Make Your Time More Valuable As Opposed to Working More

Do you ever wonder get why certain occupations have salaries that are five times the national average?

What makes some skills more valuable than others?

People that belong in the highest pay ranges inhabit a similar trait. Every minute of their time is worth more than what people might make in an hour. This is because they’ve spent enormous time and energy, making their time as valuable as possible. In other words, they have extremely high effectiveness when it comes to achieving results.

Let’s take western doctors as an example. For a common joe, going to the doctor might seem like a huge time waster and a hassle. You have to make the appointment, wait until the doctor is next available (they’re usually booked full), then commute to the clinic, then wait in the waiting room next to the noisy, sniffly kid—all this for a 2-minute diagnosis. 

For those two minutes, they can theoretically bill for $50 (this is a conservative estimate). Most people are extremely fortunate if they can make $50 an hour.

Now, let’s look at this from another perspective. For those two minutes, you’re getting a close to perfect diagnosis and borrowing from the doctor’s decade-long training and education in medicine. Doctors are extreme vaults of rich information. This is the same for lawyers, computer engineers, and business managers. They’ve spent years crinkling down to make their time as valuable as possible.

We might not all be interested in traditional high-paying careers, but we can put into practice some strategies that can make our time more valuable than ever.

Here are some of my top tips to get paid more for less time.

Diversify one skillset until you find the highest-paying one

I’m going to use writing as an example because that’s the skill I’m most familiar with. If you’re a writer, you probably have select favorites—- maybe you prefer writing blogs, or movie scripts. 

There are two ways you can go about this. I’ve tried both.

I started professionally writing in PR. I had zero experience in this style of writing, but all good writing regardless of style follows similar rules. Have good structure, flow, and grammar. The rest is bonus.

I could have made a killing if I just wrote PR articles all day every day, but unfortunately, the supply of this wasn’t high enough for me to make a full-time income.

If I really honed in on this particular skill set and continued down this route, I could have easily banked $70-100k a year. These are just salary ranges I came across when looking for similar types of jobs in my area. I have readers from different countries, but in Canada, this is considered a pretty fair and comfortable living income, and this is comparable to or even higher than what New York Times journalists make (60-100k a year).

And so that brings me to the second option. Take writing, the skillset, and look for different ways to capitalize on it until you find the one that is the highest paying. Usually, this is the scarcest, the one niche that not a lot of people are doing.

Take a quick look on Upwork, Fiverr, or other freelancing sites and observe what employers are looking for, and what prices freelancers are offering for their services. You can easily sign up for both a freelance account or an employer account (which I have both). 

Another way is to simply look for different types of writing jobs on job posting sites and look up the median income. 

Finance writing, technical writing, and SEO writing are amongst the highest-paying types of jobs from what I’ve observed. Again, these writers have probably spent a healthy amount of time becoming information vaults, so they’re able to write about these topics with depth and sophistication.

I’m using writing as an example but I guarantee you can do this with any type of skill. Specialization is important, but starting out, it’s important you remain flexible so you have the ability to switch if you want to. It’s easy to get stuck in a niche just because you think you’re good at it. But if something better comes along, don’t be scared to spend some time learning something new, especially if there’s a high chance it will pay you higher dividends in the future.

Be Open-minded, Don’t Enforce a Cap on Yourself

We often engage in employment contracts with the mentality—we’re not going to get anything better than this. The truth is, there is always going to be someone out there that is willing to pay you more for what you are currently doing.

Start somewhere, but don’t put limitations on yourself of what you can make. Our concept of what a healthy salary is all relative. We often gauge what a healthy salary should be by comparing what we’re hearing from our friends, colleagues, and parents or by doing our own market research. 

The truth is how much you should be making really depends on your own needs. If you’re living at home, you probably don’t need to make as much as someone who lives on their own to survive comfortably. It also depends on location, whether you drive or not, and your habits (travel, shopping, lifestyle). What people need to make to be comfortable is relative to their own habits.

Most people aim for high salaries because they think they need it, not because they actually need it. They will sacrifice their true passions and time to obtain this.

The sad reality is the more immersed you are in your work, the less likely you’ll search for better opportunities or build different skills. You start to feel comfortable in your role and you’re probably working yourself to the bone trying to obtain this ‘magical’ number that’s driving you.

For me, I was so intent on making a certain amount that I really bottled myself into one thing. And when you do that, it’s pretty hard to get out. It’s like putting all your money into one stock you think will perform well forever. The truth is, most of the time it doesn’t work that way.

The point here is to remain a little open-minded in the early stages of your career. Work hard at the things that are in front of you to develop skill sets, but don’t limit yourself to one thing. Always have an ear out for other promising opportunities.

You’ll find that a marriage of different skills can actually make you more valuable in the long run. For example, if you’re not only good at producing one thing, but you obtain other technical or leadership skills, you can expect a large increase in your personal stake at work.

Spend Time Close-to Mastering a Skill

I say ‘close to’ mastering because true mastery takes a long time. This is for people who truly want to specialize in one thing (ie. brain surgery or becoming a sushi chef), and they’ll be perfectly happy doing that for the rest of their lives.

For entrepreneurs, doing one thing for the rest of their lives is rarely even a consideration. Entrepreneurs like exploring and learning a variety of different skills, and niches, and their mastery pertain to building and scaling effective teams.

If you’re a producer and you spend years honing a skill set, you will receive more value for your input as time goes on. But it’ll always be one-to-one, input to output.

If you move out of the producer category and begin to let’s say, train a team of three. That same hour of your time can produce a multiple of three outputs. Read that one more time and observe the difference here.

If you truly want to receive more value for the same amount of time, not only do you have to get good at something, but you need to leverage other people’s time to help you achieve even more.

I hope this article helped you if you’re struggling with making more with the time you’re putting in. Obviously, it’s not an overnight endeavor, but having that awareness and building on top of your skills, diversifying, and eventually training a team is a time-proven way to make your time more valuable.