Time Debt

Debt is one of the great ills of this age. Fortunately I have never experienced it but reports indicate that there are huge incredible amounts of people in at least some kind of negative debt and that those rates keep rising. It comes from the basic principle of people spending too much and not bringing enough in. The concept of debt however I don't believe applies to just money. It applies to a number of other things, including what I would like to talk about which is time.

"Time is the great equalizer." 

That was a comment that stuck with me in one of the entrepreneurship lectures here at BYU. I had to wrestle it around in my mind a little bit to understand what it meant but I have come to very much believe it is true. We are all given equal amounts of the same currency, (time in this case) and are given the chance to spend it how we will. The phrase spend time is actually quite accurate. And depending on what we spend it on depends on what our returns will be, positive or negative, happy or sad, satisfying or not satisfying. That's where I believe the concept of time debt comes in. 

Time debt is essentially procrastination. It is when you spend too much of your time in a flippant way or towards things that aren't really what you need (or need to do) at the moment. And, like real debt, once one is found the grasp of time debt it is hard to get out. You basically have two options: you have get dragged through life a little bit and miss out on other things to be able to accomplish what you need to accomplish (in other words scrimp on your other activities in order to pay back your time debt), or you can openly fail whatever you had set out to do, be it a class, a project, and event etc. and lose reputation (declare bankruptcy). Neither solution is positive obviously and thus it is in our best interest to generally avoid time debt. 

If we do that time will work for us instead of against us and we will feel continually more happy as we accomplish more and more.