Are We Worthy of Our Time?
Mundane tasks steal our time, every single day. We don’t even notice it. We’re blind to the thievery, often satisfied in the fact that we are just so busy. We may say we have no time, but give it away without a second thought.
Sure, I’ll wait on hold.
Yes, I’ll attend the 10th school picnic this year.
No problem, you can pick my brain over coffee.
We don’t think about how much of our time we’re giving away. We just keep giving it away - as if we have an endless amount of it. It’s something that drives me insane. I think about this a lot. I want to help people by screaming at them - “Hey! Stop it! You don’t have time for that! You’re running out of time and you don't even notice it...”
Each of us was born with the same amount of time. Some practice time frugality. Others, not so much.
Time frugality is the concept of being intentional with your time and knowing its value. You’re thoughtful about how and where your time is spent. You’re aware of your time’s worth and look for ways to save it. We are frugal with our money, intentional about where and how we spend it, and save it. Why don’t we do this with our time?
Would you spend money to get your laundry done if it saved you 5 hours in a week? How long should you wait in line for a free Krispy Kreme’s donut? Should you spend 40 minutes on the phone with Amazon chasing a refund for the $10 package of socks that are too small?
D.G. Brown wrote about the value of time in the 1970 Ethics and International Journal of Social, Political and Legal Philosophy. Brown argues that time is like money. You have a certain amount of it that you can spend. Choices are made daily on how to use it everyday. You might save time getting home by choosing a different route that avoids traffic. We often hear people saying they are going to spend time with friends or their kids.
When we speak of our time casually we refer to it as something that is exchanged, something that has value.
By being more thoughtful about how we spend our time, we give it value. Time frugality intentionally exchanges our time to benefit us. Money doesn’t make you happy. Time does.
Have you ever thought about how much your time is actually worth? Calculating and knowing the value of your time helps make more thoughtful choices on how to spend it.
ClearThinking.org created a calculator to help individuals put a dollar value on their time. The calculator has helped to put data behind what drives our decisions to how we spend our time. Spencer Greenberg, the founder of ClearThinking.org, has found inconsistencies in users’ thinking. For example, a user might be able to make $50 an hour by doing additional part-time work but refuse to pay a company $30 to do a routine errand that would free up an hour of their time, even though he could pocket $20 by doing so.
One of my favorite research papers on calculating how much we think our time is worth is the Lyft example. Lyft spent a great deal of money to do research on the behavior of individuals when faced with a time vs money decision.
Say you’ve requested a car to pick you up. Would you pay $12 more to be picked up within 5 minutes, saving time? Or would you rather wait for 20 minutes to save $12. What kind of decision do you make and why?
Each of us is worthy of our own time. It’s ours, and only ours. Frugality of money is well discussed. Time frugality continues to be our society's missed opportunity. It is sorely undervalued.
Every day we receive a new 24 hour batch of time. There's no way to refill your time spent. Each day we get to choose to be time poor or time rich.
Are you worthy of your own time?