When you go for a one-hour event, do you know that there are other time costs beyond that one hour?

They are unspoken. Nobody dictates them. Nobody mentions them. But they exist, and if you don't see them, they will quietly eat into your days.

Let me show you what I mean.

The Math Nobody Tells You

Say you're going for a one-hour event.

Before you even start preparing, you will have spent at least an hour thinking about it. How you're going to appear. What you're going to do. Imagining what will happen there.

Then you spend at least another hour preparing for it. And that is the minimum. It could be more.

Then there is the event itself: one hour.

When you come back, you start going through it again. You remember things you said to people, how you reacted, mistakes you made. Should you have spoken that way? Was there someone you forgot to speak to? Were the things people told you true or not? You go through all of those motions, often unconsciously.

And then you sit down to get back to your work. But your mind is still in that setting, still in the atmosphere of the event you just left. You struggle to get your mind back into the framework of the work. If that task should have taken you two hours on a normal day, it might now take you three.

Add it all together, and that one-hour event has cost you at least four extra hours. The "one-hour event" was really five.

This is just a rough example. But it happens in different areas of life.

Even 9 to 5 Is Not 9 to 5

Think about your job. They say they are paying you for 9 to 5. But you spend far more than 9 to 5 on it.

When you come back from work, you think about everything that happened. You think about the tasks you carried out that day. You think about tomorrow and the tasks waiting for you. You can spend as much as five hours doing all of this, and I'm not even counting the time to commute there and back.

So time has unspoken costs. We have to be aware of them, and we have to limit them as much as possible.

The Cost of Breaking Your Flow

Sometimes even switching from one task to another carries a heavy time cost.

Say you're in the creative space. You're a graphic designer, deep in a design on your PC, and someone calls you. You engage in that phone conversation for just 20 minutes.

But after that call, it might take you another 30 minutes to get back into the flow you had with your design. So the real cost of that call is no longer 20 minutes. It is now 50 minutes.

Those are the unspoken costs of time.

Two Minutes Can Cost You Seven Days

This one is even more serious. Something that lasts two minutes can cost you seven days.

You can have a conversation with someone for just ten minutes, and those ten minutes can take a lot of your time afterwards. Maybe most of what was said was even falsehood, and now you have to take time to cancel it, to change your mind, to renew your mind about it.

If you are someone who meditates a lot, it's even more work for you. If you have not trained yourself to meditate only on the Word of God, you will spend a lot of time thinking about what was said. Sometimes it affects you for more than a day. Sometimes for a full week.

The Bible is clear about this:

"Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners" (1 Corinthians 15:33, KJV).

As a Christian, there are some people you shouldn't be having conversations with, especially verbal conversations. Texts are often not as powerful as spoken words. But two minutes of someone spilling hate, speaking down on you, might take you one full week of recovery: speaking the Word of God, declaring the Word of God, fighting with the Word of God.

And you could have avoided it and saved yourself that time.

Use the Word to Push Forward, Not Only to Defend

Now, of course it is good to use the Word of God. Hear me well on that.

But think about it. When you fight, there are different ways to fight. You either defend or you attack.

If you had avoided that conversation, the same Word you spent a week fighting with could have been used to push forward. You would have been confessing something else, declaring what you want to see, advancing.

You shouldn't be spending most of your time using the Word of God to defend. You need to use it to push forward, to attack.

And you can do that by understanding the unspoken cost of time: the unspoken cost of conversations, of interactions, of what you watch.

The Movie That Lasts All Day

You watch a movie for two hours. Then you spend the rest of the day thinking about it.

"That man shouldn't have slapped his wife." "That girl should have done this instead." You analyse it, sometimes with the person you watched it with, sometimes alone, just contemplating. You form opinions. You ruminate on it.

The movie was two hours, but this thinking and analysis can go on for four or five more. Sometimes that's not even a stretch. You're doing other things, and then a scene just comes back to you, and you keep thinking about it again.

The 30-Second Scroll That Costs 30 Days

Then there is social media.

You see an image for just 30 seconds and swipe past it. Maybe it's 30 seconds of nudity. You are going to pay for those 30 seconds, and you won't pay for them with 30 seconds. You can pay for them with 30 hours. You can pay for them with 30 days. Whatever it is, it can affect you negatively.

So there are unspoken costs of time to everything we do, and we have to be deliberate about it.

The good news is that you are not helpless here. On any of your accounts, be it Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or whatever it is, you can train the algorithm to understand what you want, what you like and what you don't like. Over time it adjusts, and when it does, it does so aggressively. This is what I have done with all of my social media.

Your Takeaway

You can't avoid every hidden cost. But you can stop paying the ones you don't need to pay. Here's how to start:

1. Count the full cost before you say yes to an event. Add the thinking, the preparing, the replaying and the time it takes to get your mind back to work.
2. Protect your flow. When you're deep in focused work, know that a 20-minute interruption may really cost you 50.
3. Guard your conversations. Avoid the people and exchanges that leave you spending a week recovering. Remember 1 Corinthians 15:33.
4. Use the Word to advance. Spend your time confessing and pushing forward, not only defending against things you could have avoided.
5. Be deliberate with what you watch and scroll. Train your feeds to show you what you actually want to see.

Every hour has a price. Count it, and spend your time on what pushes you forward.

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God bless you,
Michael Adegoke