Two of the most important things about taking time to prepare is that it forces you to look ahead and it engages you in activities that are important but not urgent.

In a recent edition of The Weekly Review podcast, Jean and James talk about principles from You Need a Budget.

Jean explains that the fourth principle is "Age your money" which she describes as advising against paying for everything with money you've just earned. If possible, you need to get to the point where you aren't living paycheck to paycheck and you have a reserve that you can use.

As important as this, and the other YNAB ideas are for managing your money, Jean's bigger point was taking these ideas and bringing them to time management.

This last one gave her pause as you can't really age time.

On the other hand, it reminded me of the Steven Covey grid of items that are important or not important on one axis and urgent or not urgent on the other axis from his "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People".

Covey said that most of us spend most of our time on items that are urgent but not important -- and that was before email and text exploded, let alone Twitter and Slack and Facebook and ...

Instead, Covey suggested, we need to spend more time in what he called the second quadrant: items that are important but not urgent.

When we pause and prepare we do exactly this. We are spending time on items that are important but not urgent.

We age our time.

We get more value from it.