Not all hours are equal. Is that an hour on a boring day, or during Less Wrong meetup?
Even with perfect flexibility of selling your time, the more you work, the more tired you get. And the less free time you have, the more you value it.
And it’s usually not just about “time” but also about how much you like or dislike the work. I could outsource cooking, but I like to cook. Should I trade one hour of cooking for one hour of something I hate, only to make extra $10? I am not a money maximizer.
You are rarely literally selling your “time” anyway; it is usually a combination of time and work, isn’t it? (Though there are a few jobs where most of the time you are paid for being there.)
Calculating “value of time” makes most sense when you compare two business opportunities against each other, or two ways of saving your time against each other. If one customer pays you twice as much per hour as the other one, and the work is comparable… If two gadgets cost about the same, but one of them saves you five minutes each day, and the other saves five minutes once a month...
Not all hours are equal. Is that an hour on a boring day, or during Less Wrong meetup?
Even with perfect flexibility of selling your time, the more you work, the more tired you get. And the less free time you have, the more you value it.
And it’s usually not just about “time” but also about how much you like or dislike the work. I could outsource cooking, but I like to cook. Should I trade one hour of cooking for one hour of something I hate, only to make extra $10? I am not a money maximizer.
You are rarely literally selling your “time” anyway; it is usually a combination of time and work, isn’t it? (Though there are a few jobs where most of the time you are paid for being there.)
Calculating “value of time” makes most sense when you compare two business opportunities against each other, or two ways of saving your time against each other. If one customer pays you twice as much per hour as the other one, and the work is comparable… If two gadgets cost about the same, but one of them saves you five minutes each day, and the other saves five minutes once a month...
Yeah. All of these considerations make the idea of valuing your time a bit confusing to me.