Focusing on the Value of Your Time Can Tire You Out.
Calculating the value of your time can be helpful in making money decisions, such as how long it will take you to pay for the new gadget you want, but it has a downside. It turns out that the old adage “time is money” can tire you out.
A recent study published in the Academy of Management Journal examined how workers’ stress levels change when they assess their earnings over time rather than total wages. To assess this, the researchers measured cortisol , the “stress hormone”. They found that when workers were made to think that “time is money” while completing a task, their cortisol levels were nearly 25 percent higher. The study concluded:
A commodified view of time can heighten impatience and cause someone to “use their time wisely.” And thinking about time as money can reduce the value of a person’s work and psychological attachment to work, thereby making tasks more stressful. Thus, the increasingly common work patterns that commoditize time can increase stress.
In other words, when we value our time in monetary terms, it makes us value less our work and also worry about whether we are making the best use of our time. One of the study’s co-authors, Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford Graduate School of Business, criticizes the economics of jobs and hourly work in general for making people more aware of how much they make with their time.
There’s another side to this, though: your time is valuable. Most of us want to use it wisely. In fact, the value of our time is priceless, but when we work, we get paid in return. While there is too much emphasis on this number, it can be stressful, but not knowing what that value is can be problematic too. If you consider yourself to be making good money, say, $ 80,000 a year, but your employer also expects you to work 60-80 hours a week , your idea of how much you earn does not take into account the value of your precious time at all. …
In many paid positions, employees are simply expected to donate more of their time and effort without actually being compensated for it. Ideally, you want to be paid for that extra time that you give up (or at least use it to your advantage when you’re negotiating a raise). So: know your worth, but don’t control your time. Time can be money, but your health is even more valuable.