Subscriptions are the future of sustainable, growing businesses. They can also change your life.
It’s obvious by the success of Spotify ($10 a month for all the ad-free music you want, wherever you want), crazy ideas like The Dollar Shave Club ($6 per month and you never have to think about buying razors again) and specialty products like Tonx coffee ($24 per month and you have the freshest, tastiest coffee delivered to your doorstep) that subscriptions are catching on and they aren’t disappearing soon.
Businesses love subscriptions because they generate recurring income with no added costs. While they are beautiful for business, costs compound quickly for consumers.
We all have a finite amount of subscriptions we can support based on our income, but we can transpose the subscription-model idea to our time as well.
I call it subscription limitation.
Subscription limitation is considering every purchase and decision in terms of a recurring cost, and then limiting your choices based on the time or money you have left.
Essentially, consider everything you buy and do as a subscription. Spend your money and your time based on how much you have in dollars or hours divided by days, weeks or months to calculate a recurring cost.
For example, say your favorite cologne costs $24 and normally lasts 12 months. That’s a $2 per month subscription.
Or maybe you’re contemplating buying a $120 jacket, and you assume it will last 5 years. Again, a $24 per year (or $2 per month) subscription.
That means the swanky spray and trendy overcoat you wear, based on the length of time they will last, cost essentially the same in subscription terms.
Subscription limitation brings everything into equal terms of value. Whether you have $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 a month of disposable income, you’ll have to make decisions on how to spend what you have wisely. Crunching everything into equal per-day (or per-month or per-year) subscriptions helps you make the best decisions.
This process works well for making purchasing decisions, but I really love applying it to time subscriptions.
I post 2-3 times per week on my blog, which takes about 1 to 3 hours per post to research, write, edit, cross-reference, and find or design images. Then an extra 30 minutes per post responding to comments, checking stats, posting it to social networks, and fixing any other errors readers (read: my wife/editor) find. That’s just content and doesn’t include the reading I do for creating a compelling blog, maintaining the blog from a technical perspective, generating new ideas or dabbling in new design. Essentially this blog is a 10+ hour per week (and most of the time more) subscription.
We all own 168 hours each week to spend. We have to be ruthless in evaluating how we’re spending those hours to make the most of them.
Time is the great equalizer, because you can’t buy more of it, making time-based subscriptions the most limited of all recurring costs.
It’s a guarantee that 92+ hours of my week will be spent sleeping (52 hours) and working (40+ hours). Leaving me with 76 hours to spend on my time-based subscriptions. Investing time with my wife into our marriage, connecting with friends and family, working out, blogging, eating, reading, and relaxing all need to fit into those 76 hours, which seems pretty crazy to believe.
Considering the average American spends 34 hours watching TV a week, it’s obvious we’re awful at realizing the limited nature of our time and options. Subscriptions help.
It helps put things in perspective, and especially helps those of us who are indecisive and can’t seem to choose activities wisely (toss in waffling back-and-forth on decisions to our time subscriptions, while we’re at it). Not only that, it will keep you out of debt, because you shouldn’t spend more than what resources you have left (Impossible to do in time. Possible, but foolish, in finances).
So, start by making a list of all the things you have to do in a week, all the things you want to do in a week, and all the things you actually do in a week. Then, start calculating your activities into per-hour subscriptions to review how much time you’re actually spending and equalize the things you’re doing to the even playing field of subscriptions.
Once you realize you’re investing (if we can call it that) 20 hours a week into TV and you aren’t making an impact on the world around you, start canceling subscriptions like it’s going out of style.
Do the same with the items you’re often buying and for other decisions you’re trying to make about purchases. That will help you prioritize and discover the true value of what you’re investing your money in. Obviously, it’s super helpful in realizing if $10 a month is really worth it for music from Spotify or if you’re better off sticking to the FM airways.