The kids are back to school! You no longer have to wrack your brain thinking of ways to keep them occupied every minute during the summer. Your days are now your own. You send them off to school, and the next 6-7 hours are full of bliss, quiet, work, working out – you time … sort of.

Say you send them out the door around 8 or 8:30. You finish your morning coffee in peace, reading the morning paper, or the morning headlines, or scrolling through your morning feed. You finally get yourself up from the kitchen table, clean the dishes, and head back into your bedroom to get dressed for the gym. Now it’s 9:15, maybe 9:30. You pick out your outfit, put a couple of meals together for the day, and it’s 10. You chug your pre-workout, and head out the door. It’s a 15min drive. By the time you park, chat with the front desk person, catch up with your friend in the locker room (or are held captive by the nice, polite, little old lady who talks to you about anything and everything), it’s 11 o’clock when you start your workout.

I’m not going to narrate your entire day, but if any of this sounds familiar, then listen up. The expression, “Time is commodity” is not just a cliché; it’s life. A commodity, by definition, is a material that’s meant to be bought, sold, or traded – implying there’s value to it; so too with YOUR time. Your time is valuable. We say, “I spent time…” doing such-and-such, because TIME is prized. Our time and our attention is finite. We only have 24 hours, or 1440 minutes, in a day, so imagine that each of those 1440 minutes is a dollar in your pocket. Every minute you spend on social media scrolling through mindless feeds, chatting about insignificant or superficial things, or day-dreaming while looking at billboards on the free way are HUNDREDS of dollars thrown out the window.

Is that how you’d treat the money in your bank?

Spend your time like you spend your money. We say, “Pay attention” – Because ATTENTION is a currency. Every minute you lose to someone’s story on Instagram, or to getting caught up in industry gossip, is another dollar out of your pocket.

If you’re not careful about planning it, your day will get ahead of you more easily than you think. So even though your kids are out of the house, that free time can be replaced by hours of senseless activities – all of which will leave you wondering, “Where did my day go?”

So pay attention. Spend your time wisely.