Principle 1: The economics of your time

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There is one thing you, Bill Gates, and I have an equal amount of, and that’s time. We each live and operate within the constraints of a 24-hour day. How we choose to portion that out in terms of sleep, work, and play is how we manage our lives.

Prior to VCRs, the Internet, iPods, and DVRs, we let executives decide when we would consume video and audio programming. We would orchestrate our lives around television shows. When I was a kid, I could rattle off the prime time lineup of all three major networks for every single day of the week. Six years ago I got TiVo and I have no idea what’s on any network at any given time on any given night. Network scheduling no longer has any value or relevance to me. What’s on my TiVo does.

The number of hours in the day hasn’t changed. What’s changed is we are no longer beholden to anyone else’s schedule. The on-demand culture of new media has allowed us to reclaim our individual time by allowing us to completely program our sleep, work, and play as we choose. No need to make it home for the six o’clock news; CNN Headline News is on 24 hours a day plus they have an archive of hundreds of stories online. Just turn it on when you’re ready to watch. Except for live events like sports, there’s truly no need to know when anything is on anymore. Welcome to the world of time shifting.

Appointment programming is dwindling. Instead of rearranging our schedule to get home for Seinfeld at 8pm, we’re putting in the time, money, and effort upfront by purchasing a DVR (digital video recorder) like TiVo. We take the time to install it, configure it, plus learn the device’s interface and the remote. Once we’ve done all that, we program the show(s) we want to watch. It’s worth it to us because we see its value in managing the time it takes to consume TV-based media.

To take advantage of the benefits of any new media, we have to spend some time upfront learning the tools. Every day more of us are willing to expend that effort to take back more control of our 24 hours in the day.

Some things just can’t be improved

To this day I still keep a paper “to-do” list because I’m so overwhelmed that I need to look down at a piece of paper to tell me what to do next. Yet, I’m such a massive geek that I did spend time looking into the multitude of online to-do list programs like Ta-da List.

And after spending hours playing with all of these tools I realized that no program could beat the convenience of that notepad. It’s always there. There’s no instruction manual. And I don’t have to boot up my computer or have an Internet connection to use it.

People’s willingness to expend the energy necessary to purchase a new device and/or learn a new interface is often proportional to the time saved compared with a previously used alternative means. For example, prior to podcasts and iPods there was still a way to listen to audio programming on a portable device like a CD player. But the process of going to a website, navigating the site to find a program, downloading the program to your computer, burning it to a CD, labeling the CD, putting it in your CD player, and then managing all that physical media was far too time consuming. And as a result, very few people took advantage of this kind of portable on-demand audio. Given that there was such a limited audience for this type of audio content, very little was produced.

The introduction of podcasts eliminated many of these manual layers once necessary to consume portable on-demand audio. The reason podcasting took off is because users saw the “effort to controlling your time” ratio improving in their favor.

New media gives us the tools. It’s up to us to determine if it’s worth the effort to learn to program it. We’re constantly weighing the financial and time costs to determine whether it’s in our best interest to adopt a new tool. It is for this reason every easy-to-use and cost-efficient innovation that shifts control to the user becomes successful (e.g., iPods and podcasts, RSS technology, TiVo).

We have stopped focusing on just the eight-hour work day. New media causes us to think about all 24 hours in the day. It’s blurred the line between work and play. I watch funny YouTube videos in the office (don’t tell anyone; they already know). I listen to informative podcasts during my commute. I play games on my mobile phone while sitting on the john (I confess). I troll for news stories and write emails while people are late for meetings.

We not only have more choice of content, but we have more choice in terms of how and when we can consume and share information.

Our time is equally valuable. With the rash of new tools designed to filter information, consumers try to choose their content wisely. In turn, producers must do so as well. When people do choose to consume your content, be appreciative of it. They chose to give you their time and attention—two very valuable commodities. Thank them by giving them a reason to come back.

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