Know How Much Your Time Is Worth so That You Can Make Good Use of It
How much is an hour worth to you?
Whether you are calculating your time by how much you make per hour or how much time you use, it is in your best interest to know exactly how much your time is worth so that you can both plan and spend it appropriately.
As Romy Neustadt, author of You Can Get Everything, Just Not At The Same Time, explains at MarketWatch :
Let’s say your hourly wage is $ 300. The 10 minutes you could spend browsing Facebook to take a break from a particularly tedious project? It’s 50 bucks and you might find it a worthwhile escape.
But 45 minutes of getting lost in a scroll hole without even realizing where the time went? That’s $ 225 for the toilet. If good health is one of your priorities, this time could be spent doing yoga, jogging with a friend, or massage.
Honestly, it’s hard to squeeze a massage into 45 free minutes, unless your home or workplace is already very close to the massage studio (the same goes for jogging with a friend, if you are not already near the gym or treadmill and you both the same 45 minutes free). There are reasons why we “roll the hole,” as Neustadt put it. Sometimes we just can’t think of anything better than using our time.
But Neustadt’s argument is that we should try to value our time a little more, rather than waste it thoughtlessly. She used the hourly wage metric to pin numbers to the hours, but you can also use a percentage-based metric; For example, if you spend 45 minutes browsing social media, you will spend 3% of the 1440 minutes you have every day.
Of course, when you factor in sleep, commuting, hygiene, cooking, etc., you can find yourself spending 37.5% of the two unplanned hours you have every day on social media.
And that may be enough to revise your time budget.
Neustadt also suggests outsourcing tasks that are cheaper than your hourly completion and forgo any new commitments that are literally not worth your time. While not all of us will be able to devote our financial resources to tasks such as cleaning the house or cooking, and even if we have the money, there are many reasons we might not want to, we can still ask ourselves should whether we agree to the next laborious request that we meet, or just say no.
Because every hour is truly valuable, and our job is to spend as many hours as possible living the life we really want.