I'm on a gap-year, studying at home. So I don't trade in cash much. But I do barter my time frequently with social partners. "Finance" doesn't refer simply to cash, but also to time, as a capital resource. Let me share a bit of FPA about the barter of time.
I got feedback from some partners that the quality of time spent together was inferior. I struggled to rectify this, because the feedback was inconsistent, and ultimately somewhat correlated with the quantity of time spent, but noisily so.
In order to reduce the volatility of feedback, I've generally recommended social contracts for regular and/or minimum time commitments. This helps a bit. So then business with such a partner transitions from having 100% ad hoc meetings, to having a mix of pre-allocated and ad hoc meetings. In order to improve the quality of relationships, I might from time to time allocate additional ad hoc time ... following which, it becomes severely demotivating to receive feedback that the quality of a relationship is reported to have decreased, despite increases in time allocated to that relationship.
So most recently what I've done is to introduce a protocol of priority-checking for ad hoc time allocations. Every time an option pops up for ad hoc time ... with any counterparty with a known track record of sending quality complaints my way ... I will now try to evaluate the option by pre-emptively sending a prioritisation request along the following lines : "client, would you prefer, if we had MORE ad hoc time this week, or if we made qualitative improvements to our pre-allocated time instead?"
This ought to be an interesting study, which may improve my margins.
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