Time vs money - The dilemma for creators

Summary

• Time vs money is a constant trade-off for creators. Spend time = you save money. Spend money = save time.
• Spending money has the benefit of saving energy by getting help with things you don't like to do.
• Spending money can allow you to do a lot more in less time.
• Learning to spend money takes some practice, and mistakes can happen at the start.
• When you don't have money, spending time is the only option, so you will find a way to do things cheaper.
• By spending mostly time, you might work mostly alone, and this can lead to burnout if not managed properly.
• Spending money helps creators move faster and focus on their strengths when spent correctly.
• Spending money raises stakes to make things right and puts more pressure on decisions.
• I recommend starting by investing time to know the niche and know how you like to work. Then, use money to make things better for you as a creator.

Episode links

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Podcast transcript

As a creator, one of the biggest lessons I learned so far is the constant time versus money trade-off. Hi, my name is Tiago, and welcome to episode five of the Stack Junction podcast. Today I want to talk about time versus money because this is a trade-off I have been dealing with since I started being a creator.

So when you don't have money, you are investing time to have things on the cheap way. But when you can spend money, you can save time by not doing certain things.

A couple of examples to illustrate the point, manage hosting versus self-hosting. When having a website with self-hosting, you invest the time and save money because you do the installation, take care of maintenance and updates.

With managed hosting, you pay someone else and they do installation updates and security. And if you need help, support from the managed hosting might help you.

Another example is doing the work manually or automating. With automating, for example, you can pay a software to speed things up. One example that comes to mind is Recut.

Recut is a software that cuts the silences on videos. For example, I record a 10-minute video and when I make a pause to drink water, to think about something, Recut will cut the silences automatically when there is a silence in the video, so this saves time on the editing process.

So these are couple of examples of using time or money for as a trade off to illustrate a point that this is the kind of things I deal with and you to deal with as a creator.

So now I want to talk about some pros and cons of spending money because as I said, this is a trade off and spending money or time might be the best decision depending on your situation. So I want to to share my opinion here.

When spending money, the pros are that you save time and energy so you can focus on the essential things. For example, you can hire someone to help you with taxes so you don't have to file all your taxes alone.

Another example of a pro with spending money is that you can do more things. For example, if you can make content faster, you can produce more content in the same time.

Now, some of the cons about spending money is that you need to know what you are buying. A personal story is that I spent more than $1,000 buying lifetime deals of tools when I was starting as a creator. At the start, those tools sounded cool and that I will need them and I was investing money to build to where I wanted to be and I bought a lot of things.

But as time went by and I discovered more about how I like to work, the things I like, the things I don't like. Then, those, those softwares I bought was, not that they were bad, but they don't fit what I want to do and how I like to work. So I spent money because I didn't know what I was buying.

That was a mistake I made. This illustrates that there is a learning curve to know where to spend or where to save money. And at the start, this might be complicated as a creator to learn how to spend money because you can make great purchases or you can make very bad purchases like I did.

Now, when it comes to time, the pros of spending time instead of money is that you will save money.

This is useful when you have a very tight budget because if you don't have money, you cannot spend it. So, you have to invest the time and you need to know this. It might take you more effort, but it might be the only solution you have.

Another pro of spending the time is that you will do everything, so things will get done your way, you will control everything, do everything, and you will know how things are done.

For example, this is the opposite if you work as a team, someone else will do the work and you might have to review their work, and you don't, might not like that. So that's a pro of spending the time.

The cons of spending *time is that you will work alone most of the time.

And this leads to the next point that I have here is that you will have a higher risk of burnout. So if you don't like to do certain things and if you work alone because you don't have the money to spend or you just prefer to work alone, you will have a higher risk of burning out because you will do things you don't like.

If for example, if that is not liking to edit videos. That's something you will struggle with and you will find it tiring.

For example, if it is that you don't like writing, but you like to record videos, that's another example that if you have to write, you will feel more tired than if you were recording a video.

Another con of spending time on things is that you'll probably publish less because if you're spending time doing everything, you will have less time to do other stuff. Yeah. It's the trade-off because you, we are limited by time, and when we allocate time to one thing we don't have time for another, so that's a con.

So how I like to do things, I like to have a balanced approach. I like to spend money to help with things I don't like.

So for example, I prefer managed hosting so I don't have to deal with maintenance of my website. That's something that I don't like. I discovered that in the past after doing self-hosting for a long time, I decided that I don't like self-hosting, so I pay and someone takes care of my website.

Another example is I'm finding someone to help edit my videos because editing takes a lot of time and I need to spend time with my YouTube channel and my blog. I need to spend less time editing because there's a lot to do and editing I can find someone to do it better than me. So spending the money there is something that I am doing.

On the other side is that I don't have infinite money, so I can't buy everything I want, so I tend to look for bargains when spending money.

So I avoid spending all my time doing everything. And sometimes I save up money to buy something nicer down the line. For example, I saved money for a while to buy a better computer to edit videos faster and don't have my computer throttle when I was working and getting too hot. But that took time and I knew it.

This leads to the saying of buy it nice or buy it twice that I've been applying when spending money after committing the initial mistake of spending all my money upfront, buying lifetime deals, which was a mistake.

In summary, I think money helps creator move faster because they can publish more by finding help with software or hiring someone to help with little things that they don't like.

And by focusing on the strengths, if we focus on our strengths as creators, I think we will be happier and produce better content. But spending the money, I think also raises the stakes of making things right and puts more pressure on decisions. I've seen this because when it comes to spending money on something and the higher the amount of money is to spend, I feel more pressure to make the right decision.

And when I was just spending the time and buying the cheapest option, there was no stakes, basically because it was the cheapest and the cheapest was only one [option]. So, I feel I now have to make better decisions when spending the money. This applies to everything I buy as a creator. Be it software, hardware, or everything.

So I recommend starting by spending the time instead of money at the start, until you know the niche and you know yourself and how you like to work because you don't know what you don't know. And if you start splurging the money, doing things the wrong way, the wrong way for you, not for me, you will learn down the line that you might have used the money better elsewhere or you prefer to do things and spend the time.

So it's better you go slowly and decide where to spend money and where to spend time and learn along the way instead of listening to people just saying spend the money, spend the money.

And yeah, there are some things that I spend money, and for other people they might seem a mistake, but for me it makes so much sense. Spending money on, on certain things, that saves me time. So, yeah, it depends on you and it depends on what you do as a creator.

So this is Tiago signing out from episode 5 of The Stack Junction podcast. You can find me on thestackjunction.com or my YouTube channel at the Stack Junction.

Thanks for watching.