What Is Meaing Of The Saying 'Time Is Money'?

'Time is money' refers to the correlation between time and investment. Business people the world over know that time is as valuable as money. They compare the amount of time involved of various activities and try to do those which are the most worthwhile and maximize profit. For instance, the owner of a restaurant spent two hours a day folding napkins and preparing tables. She began to consider whether using those two hours a day on another activity like designing a menu would be better spent.

She calculated that she could spend £12 pounds a day to pay someone to help with preparation. That way, the restaurant owner could spend the two hours working on the menus. This would only be worthwhile in a business sense if the new menus drew significantly more customers.

If the restaurant owner made £30 extra a day because of the new menus, then it would be well worth her time. In the first scenario, when she was doing the table preparation herself, she was not making any extra money. In the second scenario, the restaurant owner hired someone for the table preparations and spent her time working on the menu. Her extra profit was £30 extra a day minus the wage. Thus, in the second situation she earned an extra £18 a day.

This famous saying was first used in its present form by 18th-century politician and author Benjamin Franklin. However, the idea is much older than that. A Greek orator is recorded as saying "The most costly outlay is time" in about 430 BC, and the saying was much used in the Middle Ages as "Time is precious."

The simplest meaning of this proverb is that time is indeed money; ie, every moment you spend not working is wasted because it means there's money you haven't earned. If you look at the older versions, though, you can see that originally it meant just that time is the most valuable thing you have - your greatest wealth, and unlike money you can't replace it when it's gone - and you should use it wisely.

In Victorian times children sometimes had to sew samplers bearing the words: "Lost: one golden hour, studded with sixty diamond minutes. No reward offered, for it is GONE FOR EVER!" Whether this made the children more aware of the value of time, I couldn't say.

The more work is done the more money I make