How to value your time as an entrepreneur

Your time is valuable and you have to treasure and manage it well, because time cannot be bought, sold, traded or built. You can only manage it well.Focus your time on income generating activities, other things can be outsourced, delegated or deleted. You can outsource them to your virtual assistant, delegate them to your team or personal assistant or delete it.Your time and income have got to be in sync. Meaning that when you decide what task to do you have to look at the opportunity cost of it. If you spend 1 hour cutting the grass, whereas it could cost you £10 for someone to do it for you and in that 1 hour you can make a deal that will pay you £100. The opportunity cost of mowing that grass is £100- because you could have created the £100 by doing something else and delegating the task to someone else.That is one expensive garden activity. Often, the trust cost of something is not determined by what you get, but by what you miss out on.Cutting the grass is not an income generating activity. Do no work for less than you are worth.I was watching a documentary about workers in a big company and they were getting paid around £5/hour during the day shifts and being paid £7 during the night shift. But the night shift was twice as tiring and exhausting, yet they were only being paid x1.4 times the wage compared to during the day. To truly compensate for the extra energy that you need to spend during the night, they'd have to offer you £10/hour to make it worthwhile. People working there would be better off working the day shift only, because although it pays slightly less than the night shift, there is so much less energy needed to perform their entire shifts.Warren Buffet was playing golf and someone made a bet that he could get a hole in one for $10,000. Warren did the calculations and figured out his chances of getting a hole in one, which is summarised to be 125,000/1. So the bet of $10,000 did not truly reflect his chances of getting a hole in one and was in fact undervaluing his odd.It is worth also understanding the differences between price and value. Price is what you pay for something, whether it is an object, person, software etc, whereas value is what you get. There is a company in London that sells shoes for £500, yet they will last you a life time, made out of premium materials, by the best crafts men and probably custom fit to your feet. Whereas the £1 shoes from Walmart or Asda may break after a month and you'd have to buy them again.I was out with some friends one night recently and it was 1am and they wanted to go to a strip club in another city, around 26 miles away. It was 1am, there were no more trains and I was their first point of call to get there. They offered to pay for my petrol, so I calculated how much the petrol would cost and I said it would be £15 each, so £45 in total. They were not happy to pay this, but they misunderstood what they were getting for £15:No more trains for the day, so I was theiremergencychoice.It was Saturday 1am and I had been awake since Friday 7am, so it is inconvenience to me.They were paying for my speedy and efficient driving.Paying for my safety precautions as a driver (having been recently discussing how I have been driving for 4 years and one of them was for only 2 years).I could get them to the strip club in 1 hour, much faster than a taxi or a train.I was out that night for drinks and catching up, not to be a ad hoc taxi service.They could have paid a high price, but they would be getting a lot by me driving them to the strip club.Understanding your time and value is not being being lazy or ripping people of, but being paid in proportion to your skills and services. It is about managing your time well and recognising your own value.Learn more about this topic in one of my books:101 Entrepreneur Mistakes and Lessons.