Maximise your time: The powr of a time dividend

We know you didn’t join Powrsuit for our finance prowess – every time we mention money, our email open rates drop off a cliff. So, while we figure out how to put the fun back in funds, we’re trying a new approach and applying investing concepts to something we can all agree is important: time.

The term ‘dividend’ originated from the financial world. It’s a pretty simple concept: you invest money in a company, and in return, you receive a portion of the money it makes. 

We know the theory works with finances, but does it apply to another scarce resource? By investing time, can we create more of it?

Your time can pay dividends

There are a few key traits that unify Powrsuiters. We embrace growth mindsets – recognising that our abilities aren’t fixed but can be developed. We also believe that change doesn’t happen by chance, so we take intentional action to get from here to where we want to go.

Another thing that unites Powrsuiters? We invest a small amount of time in ourselves every week to free up more of it. That’s exactly what you’re doing right now, by the way. The time you spend reading about critical capabilities like active listening, time blocking, networking, conflict management, problem-solving and prioritisation pays dividends. You shortcut challenges, reduce unnecessary waste and make decisions faster.

So, why is time our biggest barrier?

If we ever start spouting the benefits of a 4.30am wake-up to ‘get ahead’, you have our permission to send this newsletter straight to your spam folder.

The goal isn’t to spend all your time pursuing productivity; it’s to invest a small portion of it to create more of it. This is the same approach we should take with money – pay yourself first so you can spend the rest on whatever you want.

However, when we’re stuck in the busyness trap, it’s easy to forget the theory. Lack of time is a convenient excuse because it’s really believable. It’s the same excuse we use to avoid investing money – if you don’t have lots of it, it can feel futile to invest any of it.

This is flawed logic. You will never have enough time or money until you start investing it. And, you don’t need a lot of either to start putting in place good investing habits. 

How to create a time dividend

If you’re a typical modern worker, you probably spend 10+ hours each week in meetings. The rest is spent reacting to last-minute requests, making decisions, replying to emails and trying to get deliverables out the door. 

Despite your best intentions, you never seem to be able to find space to reflect on what’s working and what isn’t. You’re stuck in a cycle of trying to cram more into less time.

What if next week, you do one thing differently? At 9am on Monday (before checking emails), you grab a cuppa and spend 15 minutes reviewing your calendar for the week. 

The first thing you do is politely decline a meeting – you won’t be an active contributor, so an AI tool can record the transcript and send you a summary. You then email the agenda for a second meeting and realise you only need half the time you thought. A third meeting is a status update with just one other person. You write the update now and email it with another polite message requesting to cancel the catchup.

Fifteen minutes and three quick actions just saved you around two hours. That’s what we call a time dividend.

But what if you can’t change any of your meetings? You can still prioritise your rocks and lock in deep work time to tick them off. This time-boxing removes the temptation to context-switch and protects the time you need to get these critical tasks done.

If this saves just sixteen minutes during the week, you’ve created a time dividend.

You’re not alone. Nudges work.

The best feedback we received this week was from someone who uses Powrsuit to stay focused. She has a busy schedule and knows how easy it is to fall into bad habits. So, she treats our weekly nudges as a chance to stop and find one opportunity to generate a time dividend.

In that feedback, she perfectly articulated the Powrsuit promise—we make it easy to regularly invest a small amount of time in yourself so you can get a lot more of it back. 

If she can do it, so can you. So, what time are you investing this week?