Billionaire Warren Buffett Said Time Is The Only Thing Money Can't Buy — 'I Can Buy Anything I Want…But I Can't Buy Time'

Warren Buffett doesn't schedule much. In fact, some weeks, he barely schedules anything at all. And when Bill Gates first saw Buffett's nearly empty calendar, it flipped his whole view of productivity.

"You know, I had every minute packed, and I thought that was the only way you could do things," Gates said during a 2017 roundtable with Charlie Rose. "And the fact that he is so careful about—he has days…"

"That there's nothing on it," Rose said, jumping in.

"That there's nothing on it," Gates repeated.

"Absolutely," Buffett added.

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Gates was amazed. "It's very high tech, be careful, you might not understand it," he joked, describing Buffett's plain paper calendar.

Rose pointed out that in one week of April, there were only three entries. Buffett responded, "There will be four maybe by April."

"File taxes," Gates added.

But it wasn't just a novelty. Gates said the real lesson was about time management—and who actually controls their schedule. "Sitting and thinking may be a much higher priority than a normal CEO, where there's all these demands and you feel like you need to go and see all these people," Gates said. "It's not a proxy of your seriousness that you fill every minute in your schedule."

Buffett agreed. "People will want your time," he said. "It's the only thing you can't buy. I mean, I can buy anything I want, basically, but I can't buy time."

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Rose said, "So to have time is the most precious thing you can have."

"I better be careful with it," Buffett said. "There is no way I will be able to buy more time."

Buffett also credited his Omaha lifestyle with helping him preserve that time. "For 54 years, I spent five minutes going each way. Now, just imagine that was half an hour each way. I would know the words to a lot more songs, and that's about it."

Rose pointed out how much time that actually adds up to. "If you're talking an hour a day difference coming and going, and that's two and a half percent of a person's work week. That means over 40 years, you're talking about a year."

The mutual admiration wasn't just about calendars. Buffett said, "I learn from him. I like to learn from all friends, and Bill happens to be a particularly good source. That's the fun of having friends, Charlie."

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Gates said one of Buffett's most important lessons came before they even met. "He wrote an article for Fortune magazine that I read before I met him—that it's not necessarily a good idea to leave large sums to your children. So that was pretty fundamental. I remember reading that and I was convinced that that was right. And I thought, wow, now you have to think of how to give it away."

When asked if they saw eye-to-eye on politics, Gates said, "On almost everything. The general sense that you've got to keep the economy turning up greater output, and that you have to allocate it in a fair way. Yes, that basic framework we see very much the same."

Turns out, you don't need back-to-back meetings to run a business empire—you just need a little space on your calendar and the discipline not to fill it.

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