Like most people, I’m lazy. No wait let me rephrase that, I like things that make life easier; like the right tool for the job. But these conveniences, even though they make my life easier come at a price. A price that I don’t think most people think about. So let’s break down some modern conveniences.
As my business has grown I’ve switched from doing my own billing and invoicing in Excel and Acrobat to an online service. With Excel, I would spend about 2-3 hours doing billing each month. I would have to figure out my totals, do some math, type up each invoice. Looking back it was a huge pain. Now I spend about an hour each month. I bill a lot more clients too. All I have to do is generate the invoice, edit it if necessary, and then email the invoice right from the online APP. End of the year is super easy, too. I just generate a report, takes about 1 minute. So for the year I’ve saved 20-24 hours of my life by switching to this service. This service also costs me $29/m so $348 a year. Well worth it in my book.
Another convenience that makes the business world run that I don’t partake in but my fiancée does is coffee, specifically the k-cups. I’ll admit these things are pretty darn nice even though they create similar waste to a regular coffee machine. On average a k-cup costs roughly 56-75 cents per k-cup. If you have one cup of coffee a day that is $204-$273 a year! My fiancée likes the k-cups from Aldi so we average 42 cents a cup so roughly $153 a year. That is compared to a bag of coffee that can give you roughly 40 cups, 13-25 cents a cup. If you use a Keurig or a similar machine that has a filter that you can put your own coffee in, then that isn’t a bad trade to cut your cost down to $47-100 a year. But who am I to stand in the way of a person and their coffee?
Convenience isn’t a bad thing, you just need to think about the end result. So next time you go for convenience, think about these things: What value does this convenience afford me? Is the cost really worth the time I’m not spending doing it a different way? What other ways are there of doing the same thing?
