The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
10/20/2015 column
As the sun sets on a warm fall day, panic starts to rise in me as I realize I didn’t get anything done today! “Where did the day go? I don’t even have half the things on my to-do list done!” With the hours of daylight dwindling, it feels as if time slips away as quickly as the sun sets past the horizon. I feel like we don’t have enough time to get everything done before the snow pushes the migrating geese southward and us inward. That also makes we wonder…do we ever really get all our jobs done on a farm in a day?
As the daylight hours grow shorter, our list of jobs seems to grow longer which creates a sensation of urgency. We keep trying to squeeze in as many tasks as we can in a day. We have more than enough jobs for everyone and a few extra to spare. There is equipment to wash up for winter storage. Manure piles to be spread across the harvested fields. Of course all that manure has to be tilled in the ground right away too. There is dry corn to haul to town and more corn to combine and dry down. The rounds bales of corn stalks have all been stacked and are waiting to be covered for winter storage. The uncompleted summer projects need to be picked up and put away till next year. The garden needs to be cleaned out and strawberries need to be bedded down for the winter. There are Asian beetles to brush off of the house and spider webs to sweep out of the barn rafters. I still haven’t had time to wash windows in the house or the barn. Then there is the list for tomorrow. Sometimes it makes you want to crawl under the covers and hide, but you have to keep moving because no one else is going to get those jobs done except for you and maybe some extra help.
I spent a little too much time in the tractor chopping stalks earlier this month and my mind started to wander. I started to think about time and its value. Benjamin Franklin said “time is money.” Here is another way to look at time as money when every second counts. The author of this story is unknown. “Every day a new account opens for you with $86,400 deposited for the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposit, the loss is yours. It carries over no balance for the next day. It allows no overdrafts. There is no drawing against “tomorrow”. You must live in the present on today’s deposit. Invest it so as to get the utmost in health, happiness and success from your daily deposit.” Eight hours of sleep would use $28,800 in the daily account. Worth every penny!
As farmers, I think we are sometimes guilty of not fully valuing our time. We seem to work for nothing on most days. You do what you have to do so the bills are paid, there is food on the table and everyone is healthy. If you’re able, you put aside any extra money for those times when the cash flow is slow. We have no problem working. Our problem seems to be what to do when we’re not working. If we’re not working, we’re not earning money and therefore we’re wasting time.
I know farm business managers tell us we need to pay ourselves a fair wage for our time and labor, but what is our time worth? What are you worth? A New York psychiatrist and author, M. Scott Peck says “until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”
The value of time was the discussion in the barn this past week. Mark and Jonathon were trying to figure out the economic value of their time to do a job. They both had solid facts, figures and theories. They explained their points of view with great restraint and respect for each other’s ideas. They came to the conclusions they could earn an extra $500 in market gain if they didn’t put a value on their time and effort to do the job. So the real question came down to what their time was worth. My question was what were the plans for the extra money?
Economics teaches supply plus demand equal value. We all have the same 24 hours every day. Our supply is constant. Demand is the variable factor in this economic equation. Economist Robert Gilman wrote a paper on “The Importance of Time”. He says as we increase the time spent on any one activity (like earning money), we must give up other activities. Our 24 hours are always full. Adding a new activity always requires dropping or reducing something else. Something has to give. The cost of time is not something we have to pay to someone else, rather it is the loss of other options.”
A neighbor was telling me how differently he and his son value time. The son will quit before a job is done because he needs to be somewhere for his family. He will finish the job when he gets back. When he was growing up, the family had to finish the jobs before they could go anywhere. Most times they ended up missing events. In either case, the jobs were completed but on different values of time.
Despite our rush to get as much done as we can, there are moments when time is priceless. It isn’t always about the best economic return on your investment but on how you impact or touch another person’s life with you time and presence. We need to pause to be swept away by the sheer beauty and power of a sunset ablaze with vivid colors. We are reminded that our days here on earth or numbered. What we do with these precious minutes is the true value of our time.
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As their four children pursue dairy careers off the family farm, Natalie and Mark are starting a new adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their farm north of Rice, Minnesota.
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