Time is the most limited factor for every professional trying to catch all the knowledge that he or she needs. This fully applies for everyone who is trying to enter and persuade SAP related career. Learning SAP is endless process of investing personal time in reading, thinking and practicing. On the other hand everyone needs spare time to get rest and be productive on the next day.  Having time for friends & family and for every other thing which you like is critical success factor to your happiness. This also includes passionate SAP followers who have fun with learning it :).

Personal example

In last several months I was struggling with managing my personal time, because I spent a lot of it in furnishing and setting our new apartment with my sweetie. As you could imagine this results in many hundred of hours planning , choosing and making decisions about what we should buy, who and where should be place it. After 5 months of truly no spare time for ourselves, we were really tired.

Maybe you are thinking that we have choice. Just hire an Internal Designer Professional who could make blueprints, 3D visualizations and subcontract someone to be responsible for purchasing the materials & furnishing and managing the workers for installment. This would end in professionally designed flat and not to underestimate – less efforts from our side. There are some pros and cons, but everything has a price and if we calculate our invested time in researching so many things which every professional will know right away, we could result in some not so pretty bottom line :).

Every person has many opportunities to save time by acquiring professional who could deal with particular task. In most cases almost everyone think in terms of money and spending, but nobody is calculating the value of his personal time. Also, many professionals do not account the travel time to particular job opportunity with a bit more money instead of closer job workplace with a bit less remuneration. For that reason I will try to provoke your thinking with the idea to calculate your time for any task or activity that is exhausting your personal time.

When you calculate your time, you could decide whether or not to:

• Hire Internal Designer or do the furnishing by yourself 🙂
• Choose one job opportunity instead of another depending on the time you spent on travelling
• Choose one gym instead of another depending on the travel time and the capacity of the equipment (waiting times)
• Repair the car by yourself or use professional
• Cook or call delivery
• Travel by car if it is faster or get a bus/subway
• Clean up your house by yourself or hire a cleaner
• Iron your shirts or include the tasks in the responsibility of the cleaner/house assistant
• Repair your house or hire professional, etc…

Some people enjoy making some of the activities mentioned above which results in positive effect on their happiness. Knowing that, everyone should collect those activities which at the end make the happiest from the alternatives that she or he has. Here is one simple equitation which shown the idea:

Activity 1(effect) + Activity 2(effect) + Activity 3(effect) +……….. = Result (Happiness)

In average working day, we sleep 8 hours, travel 2 hours and work 8 hours which let 6 for everything else. In these six hours you should have a rest and choose to perform activities that you like if you want to be happy. It is known factor, that you are not going to voluntary sacrifice free time on work that you don’t like if it’s not paid really well (overtime rate). The same logic applies also for every other activity that we do in our life. Just in many occasions we are not going to get money for that, but instead we could free up some time paying on someone else to do the job.

Let’s do some assumptions and after that some calculations:

1. Working time – 21 days x 8 hours = 168 hours
2. Different coefficients for evaluation of your time. This is related to the negative effect that you have from doing an activity that does not have positive effect on your personality.

Coefficients for different activities:

• 0.5 – those things have neutral effect on you, but lose your time
• 1 – things that are annoying, but within the norm
• 1.5 – things that are unpleasant and have negative impact on your physical and psychological condition
• 2 – unpleasant activities which you hate and makes you feel bad for the rest of the day

It is very subjective to determine the right coefficients for any activity that you have so here are some examples. It really depends on your preferences:

• 0.5 – waiting in the traffic jams, loading the the dishwasher
• 1 – ironing my shirts, waiting other persons in the gym for heavy loaded equipment
• 1.5 – waiting for a bus, dish washing by hand
• 2 – waiting for a bus in cold or rain weather

With combination of several monthly incomes and coefficients mentioned above we will prepare matrix table showing different hourly rates which you could use to evaluate your time.

Conclusion

With the help of the rates we could make decisions whether or not to hire someone or do it by yourself. We will also have choices between hiring a taxi or using a public transport. At the end, you will have many opportunities to free up some time paying for it in terms of expense or less income. It all depends on you :).