
What’s Your Time Worth? - jkopelman
http://blog.salescrunch.com/2010/09/01/whats-your-time-worth/
======
noonespecial
_You can always make more money, but you will never get time ill-spent back no
matter how high you climb or hard you try._

I've been seeing this one a lot lately so I'm going to go ahead and call it.
Bullshit. Most people directly exchange time for money in the course of
"making a living". This is why poverty is referred to as a trap (and a
desperate one at that). Poverty is what happens at the limit of this exchange
when it takes an extraordinary amount of time to to get very little (or goods
worth very little) money.

Instead of people "wasting their lives", what we see in this example is a
broken economic system that makes it more valuable for people to sit in their
cars two hours a week while the street is cleaned than the other available
alternatives. This should open the debate about the failures of public
transport or city planning or whatever, not merely provide a smug fellow on a
bike an opportunity to look down his nose at others.

~~~
loewenskind
People sitting in their cars 2 hours every day for a parking space is a
questionable use of one's time.

In my opinion the actual problem with the article is that it's not clear these
people are actually wasting time. Maybe they use this time to listen to
language tapes, audio books or something. In that case it could actually be
_valuable_ time to them. I treasure my 2 hours on the train because it's the
only place I can't be interrupted and don't have to feel bad about that fact.

------
papa
For a personal finance "classic" in this vein, I recommend "Your Money or Your
Life" by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin: [http://www.amazon.com/Your-Money-
Life-Transforming-Relations...](http://www.amazon.com/Your-Money-Life-
Transforming-Relationship/dp/0140286780)

The book has some interesting things to say about the value of time and, at
the very least, forces you to think about the trade-offs of time, money, work
and consumption. There's a particularly sobering exercise in the book that has
you consider how many productive, non-sleeping hours you have left in your
life which provided me with some new perspective I hadn't considered.

------
roel_v
"I challenge you to ask yourself what could you delegate, automate or
eliminate from your life to free you up for more important things or just
spend a little more time with your friends and family?"

So this is the new way to be an online writer - you make up some fluff
generalities and the 'challenge' the reader to fix it so that you as a writer
don't have to?

~~~
databyte
How in the world is the author going to delegate, automate, or eliminate
something stupid from your life to free up YOUR time. Each person fills their
day with different tasks, many mundane but everyone is unique.

It's not pontificating. It's simply "a call to action".

I mean, I have no problems pleasing my partner but maybe for you - it's
something you could delegate, automate, or eliminate. Maybe the author
should've added that in for you.

~~~
roel_v
At the very least he could've provided some examples, or case studies of
people who have delegated some personal tasks. And preferbly without parroting
the 4-hour work week. 'Hey look everybody, getting a maid to do your
cleaning!' is hardly news-worthy, now is it. If he can think of tasks that can
now be delegated that couldn't be 10 years, then maybe he has a point. As it
stands now it's just page filling.

