BE 639: Invest Some Time With Us Today!

This is the Business English Podcast episode 639. Invest some time with us today. Welcome to the Business English Podcast from All Ears English. Get the English skills you need to achieve your dreams in global business.

For a presentation, a meeting, or your office party, this is Real Business English with your favorite American hosts, Lindsay and Aubrey, coming to you from Arizona and Colorado, USA.

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Hello, Lindsay. How are you? Good, Aubrey. How's it going? How's everything? I am great. I am excited to talk about time today. Time is very important in US business culture.

Lindsay, what is one way that you like to spend your time? Oh, I love walking. I love walking just in my neighborhood. Actually, it's pretty walkable.

We have a park up the street and yeah, just being out in the world, out in the city and walking around. So that's the thing I miss most in the summer in Arizona. It's too hot to just go outside and go for a walk at night.

Still warm, but at least the sun's not beating down on you. So yeah, because I do love that too. I don't walk around the neighborhood. Amazing. Yeah. How do you like to spend your time, Aubrey?

What'd you say? I guess with my kids, right? More and more, I have four children. So I have to really carve out time to spend with each of them. And that probably is my favorite, especially now that they're getting older, they're going to be moving out soon.

That time feels fleeting. It feels more and more precious. Oh, for sure. Yeah, I can imagine. Oh my gosh. Yes. Good, good use of time, I would say. Right.

But this is really interesting. In US business culture, so many of the verbs that we use about time are the same verbs we use about money, right? We buy time, spend time, save time. So this is interesting today.

We're teaching some phrasal verbs about time that are the same verbs we use to talk about money. Yeah, that is fascinating. Interesting. Okay. So guys, before we go any deeper into the episode, hit the follow button.

Right here on Business English, we publish three days a week. You don't want to miss a single episode. All right? Yes, absolutely. And of course, you guys have heard this phrase, time is money.

Oh, yes. It's a famous saying, meaning time is a valuable resource, just like money is. It was actually coined by Benjamin Franklin. I didn't realize that.

Did you, Lindsay? I did not realize that. Yeah. No, I didn't know. It's good to know. It was in his 1748 essay, Advice to a Young Tradesman. And so, yeah, this is really interesting.

He was showing young workers the value of labor. And what he said was time is precious. Time is money. Time is the stuff of which life is made. I'm like, that's so interesting.

It's funny. We hear these phrases and we don't always know who said it first. Where did it come from? Yeah. And imagine how much that phrase, how much influence that phrase or just that idea has had on American culture, American business culture and American culture, right?

We do not like to waste time. No, it's so true. It's such a priority, right? We do value it right up there with money, which makes sense. That's why our vocabulary is the same for money and time.

But I saw this. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. No, I was going to say, we value it right out there with money. People will spend money to save time, right? To get that time back to, like you said, spend time with their kids, right?

Exactly. Yes, definitely. I saw an interesting article in monocle.com. So this is an online article, which was talking about how important time is in US business culture, just like you were saying, Lindsay, right?

We're often looking at ways to spend time in order to spend money in order to save time. Because it's such a valuable commodity. And it was really just talking about how it's all through all fields. This is important, right?

Whether it's production, investment, risk taking, there's an aspect of time being really valuable in every field. Oh, for sure. For sure. Capitalizing on time, not wasting it, making the most of your time.

Oh my gosh, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. Exactly. Yeah, so true. So we wanted to go into some of these interesting verbs that we use that are really about money, but we use them for time.

So the first one is buy time, right? Here we're delaying something temporarily so that you have more time to make a decision or to solve a problem. So for example, we ask the client for more information to buy some time before making a final decision.

Yeah, exactly. Which I love this phrase. And it's fascinating to think about because you can't actually buy time. Like you said, Lindsay, you could buy something that might save you time.

This is such an interesting idiomatic thing to say. Another example, you might say, let's schedule another meeting to buy us some time while we work on a solution.

Yeah. Strategic things to do when you're in negotiations with a company or you're trying to win a client, for example, we have to be strategic about getting ourselves more time.

Exactly. And it's interesting that we use that verb buy, right? Because we could say that we need to get more time or we need to make more time. There are so many ways that we could say that.

It's interesting that we say bye. Yeah, we don't really say get more time. We don't say win more time, get more time. We say buy more time, buy ourselves time.

But we also say spend time, right, Aubrey? Yes, exactly right. Which means to use time doing something. But we don't say use time. Instead, how do you spend your time?

Just like we spend money. We talk about spending time. Right. For example, I spend a lot of time responding to emails every morning, or she spent several hours preparing for the presentation.

Yeah. So interesting how just like we were talking about money and spending it, then we're also talking about spending time. What do we value? What are we willing to spend time on?

And then save time. Of course, this is a huge part of our culture. What does this mean here, Aubrey? Yeah. So just to do something more efficiently so that less time is needed, right?

For example, automating reports could save us a lot of time. We hear about this a ton now in the age of AI. What can we use AI to save? How do we use it to save time?

Yeah. I mean, just yesterday I was doing some competitive research with Claude and Claude created me a whole spreadsheet with multiple columns and companies and just the depth of the research that I know. I mean, some of it could be wrong and we know that we have to be careful, but that would have taken me 10 hours and it took five or 10 minutes and It's mind-boggling the kind of time that that can save us, like how quickly they could process something that once upon a time would have taken just hours and hours.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. So AI is truly going to change a lot of things in the working world in the next couple of years, I think. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. Another example is using a template will save you time when preparing the proposals. This is interesting, too. And we talk about templates, right?

Anything that we can have pre-prepared and fill time in, we talk about how that can save us time. Mm hmm. Hey guys, it's Aubrey. Have you ever sat in a meeting, had a great point and stayed quiet?

Not because you didn't know the answer, because you weren't sure how to say it. That's exactly what the Business English course is for. You'll learn the language for small talk, meetings, emails, and presentations. Then you practice your fluency live with real people every week in our open conversation club.

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Go to allearsenglish.com slash business. That's allearsenglish.com slash business. All right. And invest time. What about that, Aubrey? Yeah. So this means deliberately using time because you expect it to produce a valuable result later, just like investing money, right?

We're expecting a result later. We invest time in the same way. Yes. So for example, it's worth investing time in training new employees. Yeah. Or we need to invest more time in developing relationships with our customers.

So it's interesting when we choose to use the verb invest, because we could say we need to spend time on this. But really, we're wanting to imply that this is meaningful, right? We're willing to invest time because there will be a payoff. Yes, exactly.

And then waste time is kind of the opposite of invest time, right? This is using time inefficiently or on something that really isn't worthwhile. So I feel like in business, we're always making that debate in our mind. Is this a good use of time or is this a waste of time, right?

It's always often hard to know the difference. Often you don't know until after the fact. Sometimes you don't know until you do it and you're like, okay, that was a waste of time. Exactly.

It's never that simple. It's like, obviously, sitting and watching TV is a waste of time, right? What I'm trying to work. But if there's something that seems like it could be a good use of time, we don't know until later, like you said, Aubrey.

Yeah, that definitely happens. All right. So for example, we don't want to waste time arguing about something we can't change. Yeah, we use there are some chunks like this that will say waste time, right?

This would be if you you're in a meeting, and there's something that really you have no control over, and you're still taking time out of the meeting to talk about how it should be different. This would be a great phrase, right? We probably shouldn't waste time arguing about something we can't change.

For sure. All right. So there's a lot of phrases and they are all linked in a way to money. So time and money, very much linked. Let's see this in a role play, Aubrey.

I am a manager of product development and you are a senior software engineer. We're preparing to launch a new mobile app feature here. Okay. Awesome. Yeah, let's do it.

All right. How are we looking on making the Friday deadline? Oh, not good. I've been spending a lot of time fixing some bugs. Could we ask the client for another week?

That would buy us some time to review everything properly. I'd like to avoid that if we can help it. I worry they'll feel like we're wasting their time.

Good point. What if we automate some of the data analysis? That could save us a lot of time. That's a good idea. I think we should invest some time in setting up the system properly.

It could make things much easier in the long run. Oh, so interesting how you would use all of these in one conversation. It doesn't even seem strange, right? Because just when we're talking about time, all of these could come up.

For sure. So first, you said, I've been spending a lot of time fixing bugs. And then you said, we can ask the client for another week, it would buy us some time to review everything. Yes.

It's so interesting of all the verbs we could use, right? There are so many ways you could get this message across. This is what we're going to use the most commonly, these same verbs that are about the same as spending money. Yes.

And what else, Aubrey? What did I say after that? And you said, I worry they'll feel like we're wasting their time, right? If I'm sort of saying like, oh, could we get another week?

And there's a reason that you don't want to delay, right? We're always looking for ways to not waste anyone's time. Yep. And then I say, good point. What if we automate some of the data analysis that could save us a lot of time?

Now we're onto the verb save, right? Yes, exactly. Anytime we're automating something, we're trying to find shortcuts in order to save time. All right, good.

Let's see. And then, yeah, that was it. Oh, no, there's one more. What's the last one, Aubrey? Yes, the last one you said, I think we should invest some time setting up the system properly.

So yeah, this is where if we're going to create a system to automate it, you're saying, let's invest time now, take the time that's necessary in order to do it right in the first place. Yes, love it. So yeah, clearly time, money, very linked in American culture. I'm curious if that's true in our listeners' cultures.

Aubrey, that would be a great question. Maybe we'll create a poll question about that. Yes, come back to Spotify, answer our poll question. That is interesting.

We know how important it is in US business culture. Is it equally important where you live? Yeah, I love it. And guys, go check out 635, how piggybacking can boost your performance at work.

And for a final takeaway, I mean, when we're learning a language, we're learning a culture and we can't just learn this in isolation, right? So we've talked a little bit today about American business culture, reflect on your own culture and look at the words in your language and see how they reflect the culture. I think that would be super useful. Yes, this was fascinating to me.

It's interesting how most native English speakers won't have made this connection. We don't think about how we're using the same verbs when we're talking about money and time. So that would also be an interesting conversation. If you work with anyone from the States, you know, point this out.

It would be interesting to hear the reactions. They might be like, huh, I never thought about that before. Yeah, I love that idea. All right. Good stuff.

All right, Aubrey. Thanks for being on the mic together. We'll talk soon. All right. Awesome. See you guys next time. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to Business English, a podcast just for you, the high achieving global professional.

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