How much is your time worth?
Time is difficult to put a price tag on. More than just dollars and cents, it directly translates into personal well-being and happiness.
It’s easy enough to count beans and calculate what’s tangible. You have a budget, you set some limits, and you make your decisions based on the bottom line.
Reduce your conference travel, save some money. Slash your advertising spending, save some money. Skip the executive assistant, save some money.
It’s easy to forget about considering the cost of your time—both tangible and intangible.
The bottomline: Founders and executives without an executive assistant aren’t saving money at all. They’re paying for it both financially, and in quality of life.
What Is Your Time Worth?
Before we find the ROI of an executive assistant, let’s calculate what your time is worth.
That would help you see the big picture and set aside the doubts you might have about using time savings as part of how you make business decisions.
Let’s pick a salary from an average range of founders and executives. Say you make $145K a year, and you work an average of 60 hours each week. This comes to about $46 per hour.
Now let’s consider your holidays and weekend. This is time which is more valuable to you, so let’s calculate it at time-and-a-half. This comes to $69 per hour.
Are you paying yourself $46 an hour to make your airline reservations or doing research? When you miss a weekend family event due to a phone conference, is it worth $69 an hour? Is that time better spent doing other things?
Without An Executive Assistant, Lost Opportunity Is Costing You
Perhaps you’re not convinced that spending almost $500 a week answering emails is such a bad thing. You’re managing to stay on top of all the messages, and you’re getting all of your other work done.
Have you thought about the opportunities you’ve lost?
Opportunity cost is when you miss out on real growth potential. Time you spent answering a “reply all” email could have been used to grow your business.
Instead of doing time-expensive activities, you could have been working on new business strategies, or developing new products and services. You could have been making new connections or developing key relationships. You could have been improving company culture
You could have been doing a lot of things, but you answered email instead.
Read more: How Much Does An Executive Assistant Cost?
How Are You Really Spending Your Time Right Now?
Now that we have a dollar amount for each hour you work, let’s look at the time you spend doing tasks an executive assistant could be doing for you.
The average executive works about 10 hours a weekday, four hours on the weekend, and about three hours while on vacation.
On an average work day, you probably spend 2.6 hours with your messages or email, about 13 hours each work week. You spend about 23 hours a week in meetings of some type. A quarter or your work time is spent communicating with team members and clients or suppliers. That’s about 15 hours a week. Dedicated internal communication takes up about 40% of your time (in a 60 hour work week), or 24 hours a week.
Obviously some of these tasks have overlap—working with clients via email, for example—but the point here is that if time is money (and you can see the calculations), simple tasks like answering email are costing you a lot.
Delegate The Things You Don’t Want To Do
Let’s go even further, and get into the things you absolutely can’t put a price tag on.
Namely, delegating the things that fill you with dread.
This is where we get into the happiness factor, where the difference between enjoying your day or dreading it is as slim as the paper your task list is written on. There are a lot of ways to destroy happiness, but procrastination is a big one.
Procrastination happens when we avoid doing things we don’t want to do until the last moment (and then it’s a stressful panic situation). Worst case scenario is that you have too many daily tasks that are a waste of time, that don’t build much opportunity, and that fill you with dread and unhappiness about your work.
Imagine if you could delegate all of those annoying tasks to someone else, instead of letting them hang over your head and ruin your day?
Get An Outstanding Executive Assistant To Increase Both Revenue And Happiness
It’s not too bold of a thing to say that an executive assistant can solve all of these problems.
At Boldly, we match you with a-list talent specific to your personality and need, someone you can trust.
That kind of executive assistant easily handles all of the tasks that consume so much time, and will even help you manage your time better now that you have more of it. You can delegate the things you don’t like dealing with and find a new energy and excitement about your work once those dreaded things are off your plate.
All of this leads to space for new ideas and the time for new opportunities.
Trying to save a few dollars by not hiring an executive assistant is costing you big time. It’s a decision that checks all the wrong boxes of wasted time, lost opportunity, and a significant unhappiness factor. It’s not saving you money in the long run, but it’s costing you in every other direction.
Get your time and opportunity back easily. Start by finding the perfect executive assistant through Boldly.
Topic: Remote Executive Assistant
