In our day-to-day plan, the questions often comes up about how we are choosing to invest our time. Make no mistake, it truly is an investment, in most cases more meaningful than any financial ones we might make. Investing the time is an important balancing act for all of us.

Work is work. That’s neither a good or bad thing. Our days are hopefully filled with meaningful challenges and interesting problems to solve. Hopefully. But with every job, with every career, their can be days where the onslaught of tedium is overwhelming. Whole mornings devoted to emails and afternoons spent in meetings and evening back in email jail.

Investing the time for us means spending it appropriately for a better overall return. It is not taking time to work on something else, go for a walk, or workout. You will know when you are in over your head as your portfolios get unbalanced, just like any investment. But, just like a shortened work week has been proven to up productivity, so do these diversions in attention throughout the day, as long as they are equally productive.

I am not suggesting that you should engage your passion for consuming TikToks or YouTube videos. Those are just strict distractions and lead to an overall loss in the investment. No, the point is to do something with your time, spend it improving yourself, solving a problem, or being creative. If you engage your mind differently throughout the day, you are more likely to come back to your immediate tasks inspired, perhaps even finding new perspectives or inspiration.

If you can focus on investing the time more wisely, you start to realize that you aren’t really wasting time at all, but you are spending it on yourself.

You and best work are worth it.