Do you value time or relationships or money?

When I examine my value system, I’ve noticed that I value time over relationships over money.

TIME

I see this demonstrated by where I live relative to where I work. I always try to live close to the City to reduce the commute and travel in the opposite direction of the masses. This gives me two hours a day = ten hours a week = five hundred hours a year.

I jealously guard my time to think, work and play, right down to how I try to keep meetings as short as possible to achieve the desired outcome.

It works. By valuing time first I get more time to stay healthy with gym, eat properly and get enough sleep. I expand my mind by reading a few books a week and listen to podcasts from the great innovation minds of this decade.

RELATIONSHIPS

I have time to nurture my personal, professional, interesting and mentoring relationships. I get to work with many startups outside of my day job. These relationships have been valuable for my learning and growth. We help each other out. We recommend great talent to each other and I get to work at interesting places doing interesting stuff.

The innovation work I’m doing at the moment is a result of strong, respectful and real relationships I’ve nurtured over years which I value highly.

“A note here: I don’t mean ‘networking’ as an inauthentic way to gather as many scalps as possible to hit up for jobs or sell people stuff. I mean genuine pay it forward connections with no expectation of getting something in return.”

MONEY

The result of this is that I have implicitly chosen to do interesting work over getting the most money I can get at any given moment. I’m OK with this. My quality of life is great, I earn a decent salary and I love what I do.

I get that this isn’t for everyone, especially the ‘maximise the ROI of your skills’ crowd, and if that’s your thing, no problem. You simply value money over time.

Over the last 6 years I have built and sold my second startup, mentored hundreds of startup founders, worked with an enterprise dropbox competitor startup, dabbled in a bitcoin startup, consulted to Tier One companies in Australia around innovation and now get paid to think about how future technology is going to impact our business. This is worth way more to me than another 50k to 100k a year to stash away while I grind through each day hating my life.

I value TIME over RELATIONSHIPS over MONEY. What’s your framework to get the highest quality life?