Simple Ways to Increase Your Intrinsic Value

In the last post, we talked about understanding the intrinsic value of your time. Now let's talk about increasing it. Because here's the thing: your intrinsic value isn't fixed. It's not set by your degree, your job title, or where you grew up. It's built — deliberately, over time — through the choices you make about how you work, what you learn, and how you show up.

Here are five concrete ways to do it.

1. Increase Your Output Efficiency

The most direct way to increase your value is to produce more in the same amount of time — or the same amount in less time. This isn't about working harder or cutting corners. It's about working smarter.

Look at where your time actually goes during a working day. Most people, if they're honest, have two or three hours of genuinely productive work buried inside eight or nine hours of activity. The rest is meetings that could be emails, context-switching between tasks, responding to every notification in real time, and other habits that feel busy but produce little.

Identify your highest-value tasks — the things that, if done well, actually move the needle — and protect time for those first. Block out distraction. Batch similar tasks. Deliver results rather than just effort. People who produce clear, quality output are rare. That rarity has value.

2. Prioritise Properly at Work

Not all tasks are created equal. One of the most underrated skills in any workplace is the ability to identify what actually matters and focus on that, rather than treating everything as equally urgent.

The person who's always busy but never seems to move anything forward is usually someone who hasn't cracked prioritisation. They respond to whoever shouts loudest, tackle easy tasks first because they feel productive, and let the genuinely important things drift.

A simple framework: each day, identify the one or two things that will make the most difference if they get done well. Do those first, before email, before meetings, before anything else. Everything else is secondary. This sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it consistently.

3. Communicate and Be Transparent

Communication is one of the most directly monetisable skills there is, and most people underinvest in it. The ability to explain complex things clearly, to update stakeholders proactively, to raise problems early rather than letting them escalate, to give and receive feedback constructively — these are worth a significant premium in any organisation.

Think about the people in your workplace who seem to get noticed, trusted, and promoted. Often it's not the ones doing the most technically impressive work. It's the ones who are clear, reliable, and easy to work with. Transparency builds trust, and trust is one of the fastest ways to increase your value to any team or client.

Start by being proactive with updates. If something's delayed, say so early. If you've spotted a problem, flag it before someone else does. If you've done good work, make it visible without being arrogant about it. Consistent, clear communication is a habit anyone can build.

4. Never Stop Improving

Markets change. Industries change. The skills that made someone valuable five years ago may be less relevant today. The people who stay valuable — and increase their value over time — are the ones who treat learning as ongoing, not as something that ended with their last qualification.

This doesn't have to mean expensive courses or formal education. It means staying curious. Reading in your field. Watching what the best practitioners in your area are doing and understanding why. Seeking feedback on your work and actually using it. Taking on projects that stretch you slightly beyond your current competence.

The compounding effect here is real. A person who commits to learning just one hour a week will have invested over 200 hours in their development in four years. That's the difference between being a generalist and a genuine expert in something that matters.

5. Create Value for Others

This last one might be the most important, and the least obvious. Your intrinsic value doesn't exist in isolation — it exists in relation to what it does for other people. The person who thinks about how their work benefits their team, their clients, or their organisation — and actively works to increase that benefit — is someone who becomes essential.

Ask yourself: who depends on my work? What would make their lives or jobs easier? What problems do they face that I could help solve? The answers to these questions are your roadmap for increasing your value.

This applies in employment, in freelancing, in business — everywhere. The most successful people are almost always those who've developed a clear sense of the value they create for others and have built their skills and focus around delivering more of it.

The Long Game

None of these five things produce instant results. They compound over months and years. But that's actually the point. Anyone can do something impressive once. The people who build genuine, lasting value do the ordinary things consistently, over a long time.

Pick one of these five. Commit to it for 90 days. See what shifts. Then add another.