Beyond the clock – putting a price on time

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

– Charles Darwin (1958), “Autobiography and Selected Letters”, p.145, Courier Corporation

It never quite made sense. Of course time is precious, everyone knows that. We only live life once and time disappears so quickly so we should seize every single second. Consider the agile user story:

As an ambitious human whose time is precious
I want to maximise what I achieve each day
So that I get the most out of my day and my life

Since time was precious, I crammed as much as possible into those last 8 hours. Training, a side hustle, social plans. It didn’t last long. Soon I was exhausted and realised that there was something even more scarce than time – my energy.

Human energy is hard to measure, so let’s take an hour of effort to be an unit of human energy. Excellent, we’re back on track now. The next step was putting a price on my energy so that I could use that price to decide whether something was worth spending money on. If my time was worth x/hour and something costing 10x but saved me 20 hours, then it’s a bargain. Simple. I was earning around £12/hour after tax and deductions, so hiring a cleaner for £10/hour would be a no brainer.

Yet as a young engineer, I had plenty of time. Each day, I worked 8 hours, slept 8 hours, and had a whole 8 hours left each day and twice that on weekends. Did I really need a cleaner to clean my one bedroom in a house share, or even clean the entire house once a month? I wasn’t going to use that time to make more money, my salary is annual and I don’t get paid for overtime. If my time was so valuable, how dare I spend it on trivial silliness like taking a nice walk, or at the pub with friends? I should just go work in 80 hour weeks in a finance job and do basically nothing else. So I never got that cleaner.

These days, I price my time at £100 / hour, much more than my net hourly salary. I earn much more but work slightly fewer hours and still have a similar amount of free time. I realised that I had entirely the wrong perspective. I was working bottom up with time, whereas the correct approach is top down. Somehow the hours go slowly but the years go fast. Instead, now I ask what I want to achieve this year, this decide, in my lifetime, and look at the time I have to achieve it.

Survival is time consuming. I need 8 hours sleep each day, with another hour to wind down beforehand to keep the insomnia at bay. Making and eating food, personal hygiene, and simple chores like shopping and cleaning up after myself altogether takes another 3 hours on average each day. So already 12 out of 24 hours is spent on staying alive.

To make an incremental step towards my goals, I realistically need a block of around 3 hours of focused work. This could be working out to get in better shape, taking a Japanese class, or writing this article. Then the remaining 3 hours is mostly time to transition between activities or commute, with a bit left for leisure or more likely mindless scrolling.

I can manage 3 blocks a day sustainably which I split into morning, afternoon, and evening, for a total of 9 hours. In a week, that is 20 blocks (rounded down for ease of calculation and because we all need a lie in sometimes). I’m feeling the need for a table here.

If I just did the first three activities (work, training, social / leisure), then my life would stay much the same. Perhaps it would improve linearly. However, by spending 10% of my time on learning and continuous improvement, I can compound that each year to achieve exponential growth in my life. This is the time I spend developing new skills, planning major changes and investments, and thinking far too much about what I want in life and how to achieve it.

What would happen if I took on a couple extra hours of work per week for a year? It means I would need to compromise on my training, social life, or fun. That’s an immediate decrease in my quality of life. Or I’d compromise on my learning, which decreases my future quality of life. One block lost means I halve my progress, so in a year I’d lose 6 months progress towards my goals. If I wanted more money, I could conservatively increase my salary by 10% for several years by improving my skills or finding a better paid job, so I am much better off spending those hours learning than working more hours for a 5% salary increase.

My conclusion is that something that takes 2 blocks is setting me back from my goal by a week, so I would only take on extra work if it paid substantially more than my regular hourly rate. Similarly, a purchase which would free up a block of time each week is worth spending money on. So a better user story would look like this:

As an engineer who has limited energy and time
I want to carve out and protect blocks of time to work towards my goals
So that I can achieve the important goals I have for each year and decade of my life