Have you ever broken down your income goals to see how much your time is actually worth? It’s a great way to figure out which activities you should be allocating time for and which you should be delegating to someone else.

Let’s assume you want to earn $200,000. There are approximately 2000 working hours in a year. That means your time is worth $100 an hour. If you are satisfied making $100,000 annual; your time is worth $50 an hour.

Now you need to take a look at the tasks that consume your time. A great day to do this is to keep a very accurate and precise task diary for a week. Write down everything you do and how much time you spend doing it. If you don’t think a week is long enough, keep the diary for two weeks to make sure you have an accurate picture of how you spend your time.

The third step is to assign a monetary value to each task on how much it would cost you to have someone else do this task. If your time value is $100 per hour and it would cost you $150 an hour to hire someone else to do it, that task should remain on your calendar. If you can hire someone else at $30 an hour to do a task, that’s what you need to do.

Any task that you can delegate or hire out to someone for less than your target rate should be eliminated from your allocation of time. It is a waste of your time and talents to be doing work that you can get someone else to do for a lower cost. In that way, you will free up more of your time to do $100 an hour work.

Time is a finite resource. We all have the same amount of it every day, every week and every year. How we choose to allocate our time is one of the great ways highly successful people achieve that level of success. The refuse to get caught in the time trap of tying up their valuable time doing tasks they could pay someone else to do for less.

You can reach your target income level by maximizing the use of your time. If you can’t afford to hire out everything at less than your level, hire out the lowest cost tasks first and work up the list as your level increases.

Close your eyes for a minute. Imagine what your job would look like and how much more you could get done if you eliminated even just a few of the time-eating, mundane tasks you have thought about as you read this article. The sooner you begin the process, the sooner you will begin to fill your day with higher revenue producing, more challenging tasks. It’s time to start today.