Do you know what you have in common with Elon Musk, Steph Curry, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, and J. K. Rowling?

You all have the same number of minutes to use however you choose, every single day.

24 hours in a day multiplied by 60 minutes gives all of us 1,440 minutes – take away a reasonable amount of time to sleep, eat, shower, and hug your kids, and you’re left with 1,000 minutes.

You can use your minutes to conquer the world and earn buckets of money, write books, train for a marathon, hang out with your family, have drinks with friends, buy groceries, meditate, or watch Netflix.

Every day you wake up with a fresh 1,000 minutes in your bank of time.

You are the CEO of that bank, and it is totally up to you to determine how you want to put those minutes to use.

You’re as rich in time every Monday as the actual richest man in the world.

You can no longer think of your time as free.

Big you – successful you – knows that time is expensive, and when we think about our time like we do our money, we can shift our mindset to not throwing it away.

You wouldn’t throw away $100, would you?

Well, that’s what you’re doing with an hour and a half when you’re not being productive – you’re basically throwing your income out the window.

Bye-bye, money!

The clock starts ticking the second you wake up, and if you aren’t aware of how those precious minutes are being used, it will suddenly be 9:00 PM and you’ll be wondering (once again) how you didn’t find the time to call back all of your clients, follow up with that new contract you made last week, or finally have that “date night” with your partner.

“The day got away from me.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow!”

Sound familiar?

That’s because you’re…

1) trying to do too many things at once.

Multitasking is NOT productive. Quit it. It’s much better to make a mile of progress in one direction than it is to make a few inches of progress in ten different directions.

2) failing to make time for the important stuff.

You need to set priorities. Pick three things you want to do today, and then don’t do ANYTHING until those three things are complete.

Want to grow your business? Make an hour of cold emails the first thing you do when you get to the office.

Want to make your business run more efficiently? Start your day by auditing your systems and processes, and then figure out where they need to be optimized.

3) wasting time on things that don’t matter.

Do you really need to spend the first hour of your day reading the news? How about “resting” by watching two hours of Netflix in the evening?

It’s not my place to make those decisions for you – YOU have to determine what’s best for YOU – but I have a feeling that you’d feel even better if you spent that time sending emails, figuring out what your day looks like tomorrow, or spending time with your loved ones.

Time is the only resource you can never get back.

So, where are you spending you 1,000 minutes today?