306: The Economics of Doing Everything

[00:00:00] Tiffany Sauder: Our minutes can only be spent one time, and I want you to think about the economic trade off that you're making. Every single time you say something that needs to be done, you're like, it's no problem. I'll do it. Because we are buried in tasks, ladies. We are buried in into dues. We are buried in administering life and not actually living it.

[00:00:20] Tiffany Sauder: I'm Tiffany Sauder, entrepreneur, wife, mom to four girls and a woman figuring it out just like you. Come on, let's go build your Life of And. Welcome back to another episode of The Life of And podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Sauder. And, um, we are gonna talk today about the economics of doing it all before we get into the doing it all.

[00:00:39] Tiffany Sauder: I did the most today, um, had some like businessy meetings this morning and then had a facial, but not like the kind, gentle, soothing kind, like the kind where they numb your face, burn your skin, and then you pay hundreds of dollars and they send you on your way. So my face is like. 30% numb. I would say. I told Sam it feels like I can really feel the, like, air kind of feels weird.

[00:01:03] Tiffany Sauder: So anyways, just kind of makes me laugh when I say doing it all. Like we're just doing the most over here, wearing our skin recording podcast, you know, doing business, doing the stuff. So today my oldest also took the SAT, which it takes like so long to get your score, had no idea. Um, so I dunno, it's like exciting times in outer house.

[00:01:24] Tiffany Sauder: Okay. Economics of doing it all. If you are a woman who you look in the mirror and you think I'm super capable, if you are the woman who your friends are always texting for the answers to things, if you are the one who you feel like you are like shouldering the burden of team around you, the family around you, the community around you, and you are constantly tired, then this episode is very much for you.

[00:01:48] Tiffany Sauder: If you feel like you are waking up and doing your best to do it all. But still feel like you're behind. Then this episode is very, very much for you. If you've ever thought, I need to just be more efficient, I need to be more disciplined, I need to like be more organized, and then I'll be able to get it all done, then this episode is very, very much for you.

[00:02:08] Tiffany Sauder: Um, because today, like I said, we're talking about the economics of doing it all because like doing everything oftentimes can become a big part of our identity. And become almost a part of our personality. But it's also, I want you to see as a result of this conversation together, is it's a financial decision and one that you're making that you may not see and understand.

[00:02:30] Tiffany Sauder: And I hope that at the end of this conversation, you'll be able to see it more crisply and clearly, because the truth is most of us have never done the math on our decisions. And so our life and our outcomes are sort of doing the decide or the math for us. And I wanna be sure that you're making really clear choices, making sure you understand the investment of where you're putting your time and energy, and maybe where there's opportunity costs that you are not fully capturing and capitalizing on.

[00:02:55] Tiffany Sauder: So that's what we're gonna talk about today before we get into. The talking about the maths, which some of you're gonna be like, I love it. And some of you're gonna be like, oh, I hate it. I want to sort of have you close your eyes. Or if you're sitting somewhere listening to this with just like a 1% chance, that's the case.

[00:03:11] Tiffany Sauder: But I want you to close your eyes or think back. It's like when you were a little girl and you were 10 years old, maybe 12, laying in bed at night, imagining what it was gonna be like to be an adult. What your adult life life would look like. Not your job, not your salary, not where you lived so much, but what were the things that you imagined you would be spending your time on?

[00:03:33] Tiffany Sauder: I'm gonna give you some space to think for a minute. Might be adventuring. I feel like as a kid, I was like, I can't wait to make my own decisions. Traveling conversations, family time, being with your kids, doing new things, being able to have time to say yes to stuff. Like what did your. 10-year-old spirit, 12-year-old spirit dream of for your future self.

[00:03:56] Tiffany Sauder: I want you to make that list mentally and then I want you to take the an honest look at building a second list. And that is what actually takes your time. Like from the minute you wake up in the morning, what is taking your time? When you look at these two lists, we can look at the things that are getting our time are oftentimes not actually aligned to the life that we want to build.

[00:04:20] Tiffany Sauder: We dream of a life of adventure. We dream of spontaneity, we dream of connection, and yet what we're spending our actual time on is tasks. The medial, ordinary, everyday part of life is actually what is consuming most of our waking hours. It's what's getting our first energy. We will like, you know, make sure the house is clean.

[00:04:41] Tiffany Sauder: Lunches are packed. The utility area is picked up, and the shoes are parked Before we'll sit down and play with our kids. We'll, we'll make sure the tasks of the day are done and we don't actually make and take the time and have the space to invest in the things that, that I'm gonna say really matter in my worldview of value.

[00:05:01] Tiffany Sauder: If you will never evaluate where your time is going, you'll never change where your life is going. And so this episode is really about helping you count the cost of your choices and decisions. And so we're gonna take a little bit of time to walk through that. I'm gonna ask you some questions and have you take an inventory, are the things that are getting your time and energy.

[00:05:21] Tiffany Sauder: And I say your first energy, and what I mean by the first energy, it's like, you know, that sort of zone one energy. It's like I'm, I'm here, I'm present, I'm excited, I've got available capacity. It's like. Joyful, delightful energy versus that energy where it's like I'm pulling it out of my baby toe and I'm doing my best to be present.

[00:05:45] Tiffany Sauder: I'm doing my best to do a good job. I'm doing my best to not fall asleep. I'm doing my best to fake laugh, like, you know that energy zone, it's like. D zone energy when you're in that compartment. So we wanna give our first energy to the people and the things that we love, and I think this is part of the exercise of doing that well.

[00:06:06] Tiffany Sauder: So let's talk about the economics of doing it all. I wanna define economics, which is maybe insulting, but what I want us to remember is economics is the study of scarce resources and trade-offs. Economics is a study of scarce resources and trade-offs. There is always a consequence to our choices when we are deploying a scarce resource, and most of us have two precious scarce resources, and those are time and money.

[00:06:38] Tiffany Sauder: Those are the resources that in our adult life, we are most managing and facilitating the choices around. But what we oftentimes treat is that money is the scarcest resource. But the truth of the matter is, is money is a renewable resource. Time is not. There is nothing I can do, no matter who you are on planet Earth to make more time.

[00:07:04] Tiffany Sauder: We can do all kinds of things to give ourselves more capacity by making things go faster, or using ai, using technology, whatever things that, but we actually cannot make more time. We can make more money. It's a renewable resource. I can take a hundred dollars. Put it in a checking account that's earning interest and I can make more money.

[00:07:26] Tiffany Sauder: I can actually do that. I can start a business with $10,000 and I can turn that into an enterprise. I can invest it in the stock market. I can, and you can, we can all make more money, but we treat money as the scarcest resource instead of our time as this carus resource. And I want you to see that very acutely in your life and to start challenging your thinking.

[00:07:50] Tiffany Sauder: When you think about how am I going to get this done, we oftentimes say, oh, there's no way I could spend money on that. And so I'll use my time, but time is yours and my most precious resource. So when you allocate time, you are making an economic decision. Okay, so if I said economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources.

[00:08:12] Tiffany Sauder: So when you are allocating your time, you are actually making an economic decision. So helpful maybe for us to sort of frame it like that. But this is about managing a scarce set of things that I have a scar set of resources, the minutes that I have in a day, and making sure that I'm allocating those towards the things that most matter.

[00:08:32] Tiffany Sauder: So going back to our 10-year-old self laying in bed at night, we imagined allocating these precious minutes. To things we loved, things that delighted us to adventure, to joy, to creating, to relationships, to closeness. And instead we are allocating those minutes, our most precious resources too often, to the things that just allow us to sustain, not to grow, not to build, not to invest.

[00:08:58] Tiffany Sauder: So I wanna challenge us as women, as we put ourselves in this sort of super woman. Mode in our lives where it's like a, if so, if it's gotta get done, then I've gotta take care of it. And maybe taking care of it does not mean doing it. Maybe taking care of it means outsourcing. Maybe taking care of it means delegating it, maybe taking care of it looks like something other than you just picking up the thing and making it happen.

[00:09:25] Tiffany Sauder: Okay. The mental cost, I mean, this is kind of a little trendy on Instagram of like just the, the hidden cost, the mental cost of doing it all. But we behave the way we feel. So when you have this constant mental load, constant mental taxing, I think about this like computer program that is always, always, always running up.

[00:09:48] Tiffany Sauder: What needs to happen? Where do we need to go? What are the tasks? What needs to happen? Like how do I do this thing? Like, and it's just like, it's like buzzing out your nervous system and your head is always racing and you're in this constant sort of attack. Mode of, I've got all these tasks I have to do and I cannot be present.

[00:10:05] Tiffany Sauder: Like you guys know, it's like decision fatigue, remembering everything and just carrying the calendar in your head like that is the, that is a cost of doing it all. The mental cost, and I would even say the attitude cost would be another way to say that. Like you're kind of crappy to be around when you're in a place that you're so exhausting, exhausted.

[00:10:25] Tiffany Sauder: The second cost of doing it all is your literal time. We just said this is our scarcest resource. So it's the folding, the laundry, the running, the errands, the cleaning your house, like the cost is the physical ex. You expended those minutes. That's the second version, like literally you did the thing. And the third one is the financial cost.

[00:10:44] Tiffany Sauder: What we oftentimes don't stop to examine. Is what could you have spent those minutes on potentially that actually advanced the things you care about, advanced your ability to earn advanced, your ability to create wealth, advanced your ability to rest. We don't think about what is the financial cost of deciding to do what I'm doing, so let's say.

[00:11:11] Tiffany Sauder: You are in sa a sales role. I was talking to a commercial realtor not too long ago, and so commercial realtors are definitely built, they're paid in like a, you know, you like eat what you kill kind of thing, and she knows and understands that the more hours I can spend doing my job, the more I can get paid.

[00:11:32] Tiffany Sauder: Or as a business owner, I, I know if I can spend 20 more hours a year. On my job building my company, I have a higher chance of making more money and making more profit than if I spend the same 20 hours folding laundry and cleaning my house. It's at the, the numbers are way higher than that. It's like 20 hours a month.

[00:11:50] Tiffany Sauder: If I count the number of minutes it takes me, the number of hours it takes me to do laundry, clean my house, and go grocery shopping this easy. 20 to 25 hours a month. You take that times 12. Over 250 hours a year that are spent absorbed, doing simply, I will say, menial tasks. Things that are just advancing the tasks of your life versus actually creating wealth and creating return.

[00:12:18] Tiffany Sauder: And so what would it look like if we started to say these tasks that are not advancing my relationships, not advancing my connection, not advancing my ability to earn? I am gonna figure out how to pay for those things to be done so that I can get those hours back to worry, to rest, to connect, to adventure, those things that we thought we would be doing as adults that have so easily worked their way out of our lives.

[00:12:45] Tiffany Sauder: What if we gave back some of the administrative task of life and took back? The things that we dream best. So I want you to literally write down this formula of how much you earn in a year divided by 2000. That's approximately how many working hours we have, so. Your annual income divided by 2000 working hours, and that's your hourly rate.

[00:13:11] Tiffany Sauder: I wanna take a quick moment to thank my partners at Share Your Genius. For the past four years, they have been an incredible part of my journey. Behind the Microphone, Share Your Genius is a content and podcast production agency that helps leaders and brands bring their message to life. So whether you're trying to find your voice, develop a content strategy, or get your leader behind a microphone.

[00:13:30] Tiffany Sauder: They're gonna help you make it simple, strategic and impactful. If you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, uh, and, and there's 2000 available working hours, that's $50 an hour, that's your hourly earning rate. So that's what you're paying yourself to fold the laundry. That's what you're paying yourself to clean the house.

[00:13:50] Tiffany Sauder: That's what you're playing, paying yourself to manage every administrative task. If you make $250,000, it's more than that. So, and I think we often. If we think about like even our incentive compensation, like, Hey, if I work, I believe if I work 70 more hours this year that I'll be able to hit my $10,000 bonus.

[00:14:09] Tiffany Sauder: Think about your time in that way. It has been, I think, one of the biggest unlocks to my ability to not just start one, have one company, but to have three, to not just have one stream of income, but to have several is to say, my highest and best use. In my life is to be a mom and is to be a creator and is to help create opportunity and potential for other people.

[00:14:32] Tiffany Sauder: That is what I most love in life and when I can get the rest of life to work automatically where I'm not spending my time on these things and strategically as I make more money to not just buy more things, but to take some percentage of that and say I'm gonna buy my time back. By h hiring somebody to do my laundry.

[00:14:53] Tiffany Sauder: I'm gonna send my laundry out. I'm gonna hire somebody to help me around the house. I'm gonna hire somebody to mow our lawn. I'm gonna like, over time I've hired people to do all of these things and I've earned those things. I've earned those yeses, and it's only created more earning potential for myself and for our family.

[00:15:11] Tiffany Sauder: So I want you to think about that. What are you paying yourself hourly to do these kinds of tasks? And what would it look like if you got rid of it? And before you shut me down, I would encourage you to set aside your defensiveness if that's how you feel right now, and just give it a test. Outsource your laundry for six weeks and say, of these four to eight hours a week that I'm getting back, what do I want to do with that time instead?

[00:15:41] Tiffany Sauder: And don't just let. Those hours get absorbed into like everyday life. Be very specific with right now on Tuesday night, what I'm doing is I'm folding laundry in front of the TV for two hours. Instead of doing that, I'm gonna take my kids to the park for two hours. I'm gonna exchange that task of folding my laundry for the time with my kids, and I'm gonna ask myself in six weeks do I feel closer or further away from the person I dreamed of when I was 10 years old.

[00:16:09] Tiffany Sauder: That's what I mean by this economic exchange. Our minutes can only be spent one time, and I want you to think about the economic trade off that you're making. Every single time you say something that needs to be done, you're like, it's no problem. I'll do it. Because we are buried in tasks, ladies. We are buried in to dos.

[00:16:27] Tiffany Sauder: We are buried in administering life and not actually living it. Another way to think about this in like our econ classes, juniors and seniors, or sophomores and juniors, is, think about it like capital allocation. The more I earned, the more I outsourced, the more I outsourced it created more space. The more space I had, the more creative could I could be.

[00:16:51] Tiffany Sauder: The more I earned, the more I outsourced. The more I outsourced, the more time I got, the more time I got, the more creative I could be. The more creative I could be, the more I could earn do. Do you see how. It served my goal of being able to live life and not just administer it. So I'm just asking you to take a leap of faith and just try it, test it with one thing.

[00:17:13] Tiffany Sauder: Start with your house, cleaning your laundry, which is my favorite, or because it literally never goes away and the mess is so visible. Or get your groceries delivered if you're not already. Or have someone help you with food prep or use like an outsourced meal service. Those are kind of my like start here.

[00:17:28] Tiffany Sauder: Start there. If you're trying to figure out where to find the money to get support for help, like this, the smartest, easiest thing that I can tell you to do is to get the cash you have today and have it work for you. Not in an investment, not in the stock market, not in giving it to somebody else to hold for several years, but to put it in a high interest.

[00:17:53] Tiffany Sauder: Earning money. Market account, which is like bank's fancy word for it, earns lots of interest and keep it there. And after a year use the interest or after six months, use that interest that you've earned to actually pay for a service. So my partners at First Internet Bank, they have an incredible high yield money market account.

[00:18:13] Tiffany Sauder: It earns over 3% at the time of this recording. They need me to put like little disclaimers in here, but it's like over 3%. So if you have $50,000. Earning 3% over the course of a year, which it's not been as low as 3%, like it's higher than that. That's about $1,500 a year of interest that you've earned in just your rainy day fund, your savings account.

[00:18:35] Tiffany Sauder: If you're like me and you're a business owner and you've got taxes, money set aside for paying taxes. Let that money earn interest for. And if all you spend is the interest and you never actually dig into the principle, you still have the money, you still have your $50,000 and you're just taking every year the interest that you earn.

[00:18:53] Tiffany Sauder: And put that towards taking care of paying for the stuff that you don't want to do because you wanna invest time in people and you wanna invest time in projects, and you wanna invest time in yourself. That doing all the tests, the economics of doing all, doing it all does not allow. So please try that.

[00:19:09] Tiffany Sauder: Please do that. Please make sure that your cash is earning interest for you. This is not a cd. It's not locked up. It's always accessible for you. My husband and I were, you know, kind of saving towards a big remodel or buying a house or whatever that looked like, and so we had this cash that. We were able to put in this account and say, Hey, let's make sure that even while we're sitting and we're wondering and we're planning, we're trying to figure out what's next.

[00:19:34] Tiffany Sauder: Let's be smart about our cash and make sure that it's earning interest for us. So if you do not already have a banking relationship that has. A product like this, please reach out to my friends at First Internet Bank. They're incredible. There's a link in show notes. The, the cash, I wanna reiterate this.

[00:19:51] Tiffany Sauder: It's, it's accessible to you. It's not tied up in a long-term cd, so it's so easy, so simple. It's called First Internet Bank. So literally you can do everything you need to do, uh, from the comfort of your home. It's all on the internet. They don't have any retail locations, and so their online support is so helpful, all those kinds of things.

[00:20:07] Tiffany Sauder: So please, ladies, let's be smart. The last thing I'll add to this idea of. This conversation of economics is, it's not always a simple equation of what is the highest financial return of my minute. Because if that was the case, if we made every decision of our lives based on the highest financial return of our lives, we would miss out on a massively important part of life, and that is the values aspect of life.

[00:20:38] Tiffany Sauder: What are the things I want to do? What are the things I want to play out? What are the things I want to participate in that fulfill my values? Expectations of being a mom, my values, expectation of being a spouse. My values, expectation of being a member of a community. And so as you're thinking about what to outsource, it is also against the filter of what makes me feel like a mom.

[00:21:00] Tiffany Sauder: For me, cooking is a huge part of my vocabulary of being a mom. And so for me, that would be the very, very, very last thing I outsourced, if ever, because I get tremendous joy in it. It's a creative outlet. It's a way that I can physically use my hands at the end of the day, which helps me rest. It allows me to serve my family.

[00:21:19] Tiffany Sauder: I love the smell of, um, garlic and onions, and so all of those things, while cooking may not be the highest return on my dollar as it relates to the economics of my minutes, it's a very high return. On return on values or return on life for me, and so some people say, I love to mow the lawn. I, I love to do these things.

[00:21:42] Tiffany Sauder: These are rituals and practices and disciplines that help me feel connected to my space and help me feel connected to my family and help me feel connected to the role that I'm playing. That does matter. When you're playing out the economics of your life, the economics of what you want your time to go towards.

[00:22:00] Tiffany Sauder: So that is not irrelevant. But what we're talking about is the economics of doing it all is very expensive. It takes oftentimes all of life for you because you don't even have time to enjoy the pieces that you actually do enjoy because they're crowded out by the tasks that drain you, that have no meaning, that create so much activity that you don't actually have the time and space to do the things that you do enjoy at a pace that allows you to actually experience it.

[00:22:30] Tiffany Sauder: The goal is not to eliminate everything, although if you wanna do that, I mean go run at it. I love that for you. But the goal is to increase our return on time. The goal is to increase the quotient, I would say, of of valuable to invaluable activities and tasks in our day. So I guess to close out, like doing it all feels really noble.

[00:22:54] Tiffany Sauder: It can make us feel important to everybody that we're serving. But I would suggest and ask for you to consider that maybe it's not the wisest way to view our lives. Because when you understand the economics of your time, you stop measuring your worth by how much you carry. And when we measure our worth by how much we carry, we are oftentimes looking for the people around us to tell us what a superhero we are.

[00:23:22] Tiffany Sauder: Holy crap, you are doing it all. Holy crap. You're amazing. Holy crap. You know, you really are. But it's the fastest way to resentment and burnout I've seen, I've experienced in my own life. I've seen other women say, when you are living a world of doing it all, the truth is you are really doing none of it at all.

[00:23:41] Tiffany Sauder: You are experiencing none of it at all. It's maybe a clearer way to say that money is not the goal, although it's an important piece of what we're doing. Capacity is the goal. Spending our time on the things that give us. A life that we actually desire. That 10-year-old girl laying in bed was like, man, I bet this is what it's gonna look like to be an adult.

[00:24:02] Tiffany Sauder: So here's what I want you to do. I want you to do the math on your hourly rate. I want you to look at whether or not the things that are getting your time are bringing you joy and those things that are not bringing you joy at once. You'll literally start having a prioritized list of these are the things in order that I'm gonna work to give away.

[00:24:23] Tiffany Sauder: To send away, to outsource. And if you're trying to figure out how to pay for that, put your cash in a place that's earning interest and use that interest to begin ever so sporadically to give yourself a little bit of space. Maybe you can't afford a housekeeper every other week. Maybe you can afford a housekeeper twice a year.

[00:24:41] Tiffany Sauder: Start there. Give yourself a little bit of capacity and intentionally use that capacity that you are buying back to put it towards something you value. Your rest, your adventure, your relationships, your growth development, making more money, whatever those things are. I hope that this episode made you think differently about your time.

[00:25:03] Tiffany Sauder: I hope that you're starting to see that your time is your most precious resource, not your money, because with more time, we can oftentimes figure out how to make more money. So we know that if we don't do something, nothing changes. So I encourage you to take action on this one. Um, it's a place that I'm just maniacal, and it's important to me that we push this conversation to the foreground because nobody's coming to save you.

[00:25:27] Tiffany Sauder: It's your job to create the capacity. I hope you'll send this to a friend if it helps you see your life a little bit differently, and maybe even like, go grab a coffee or take a walk and talk about it together and challenge one another's assumptions about where you think you are the most important person to do something.

[00:25:44] Tiffany Sauder: Maybe you can get some help with that. So I'm rooting for you. I'm cheering for you. Sam and I are here if you need us. And uh, thanks for listening in to this week's episode. We'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to the Life of And this is your weekly reminder to keep making bold choices, saying clear yeses and holding space for what matters most.

[00:26:03] Tiffany Sauder: As always, if you like this episode, I'd love for you to drop a review and share it with your friend. It's the fastest way that we can grow the show. Thanks for joining us. I'll see you next time.