

Ask HN: What is the worth of an hour of your life? - macco

How do you guys value time?
I would like to hear your thoughts on this.<p>Time is a scarce resource. So what is the worth of an hour of your life?
Is it what you could earn in this hour? 
Is it $5? 
Is it $5000?
Ist it priceless?<p>I try to think about it, because I want to estimate the worth of my product idea, that could save a customer up to 1000 hours of her free time. So what is this product worth?
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icey
Your product could save your customers 1000 hours of their time over what
period of time? Is it a savings of productive time or leisure time? The number
sounds hand-wavey.

Someone might tell you that their time is worth $100 bucks an hour (for
example), but I think you'll find there is no way they'll pay nearly that much
to save that hour - unless you're talking about automating a very unpleasant
task.

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makecheck
I think the best guideline is to imagine the percentage of time someone has to
work. Although some people are lucky enough to work reasonable hours for high
pay, many are not. Assume that an hour of their free time is basically
priceless.

Having said that, some people will also be more efficient. Imagine if you have
a car, versus walking or using a bus; you might complete 5 errands in an hour
by car, that wouldn't be possible without a car. To "save an hour" means
different things to these people.

Time can even be a bit of a paradox. If you make a task 1000 hours faster, you
don't necessarily "save" 1000 hours of free time, due to multi-tasking.
Consider a small, repetitive task. If it takes a few minutes to finish, I will
switch to something else, or maybe go get a drink, effectively compressing the
elapsed time to zero. Whereas, if it takes just a few seconds, I'll probably
sit and wait, which is dead time. In the end, I'll waste more time on the
"faster" task than the slower one!

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fburnaby
It completely depends on what's happening at the time! And even worse, you can
only know in retrospect. Some of my time in this life has been priceless and I
wouldn't give it up for anything. Much of it turns out to be near useless, on
the other hand.

I make ~$12/hr right now, but I'm into what I'm doing (that is, I think it'll
generate some of those priceless moments eventually). But given that I'd like
to have more money (it may even end up saving me some time!) if you have
$30/hr for me you can have a bunch of my time.

That's probably a more philosophical answer than you were hoping for. But
given that I have no money, I'm probably not within your target market
anyways, so consider me to have spared you an outlier.

edit: grammar

~~~
mmt
Even though I'm someone who "has money," I find this point very relevant.

I've wrestled a bit with the OP's question in more than one context for years,
though primarily in the case of calculating how much a particular position's
total compensation is worth, making sure to consider commute time, for
example. It also comes in handy when trying to figure out the value of non-
sick time off, such as holidays, which is not convertible to cash.

My current attempt is to use a number as a factor of my effective hourly rate,
but that has been unsatisfactory. If I'm unemployed, that factor approaches
zero. Somewhere around 2000 hours annually, it goes above 1.

That is, if the factor is 1.1, I'd consider it worth my while to get paid 10%
over my effective "normaly" hourly rate, to sacrifice free time by doing work
on the side, assuming cash is the only reward. The reverse is also true,
though at an objective rate: vacation is worth a factor of 1 by definition,
since it's convertible.

I tend to do (read: have Calc) do these computations on pre-tax money, though
post-tax money is what's personally real to me. Either way, it doesn't much
matter, since, at any given point, the question for me is of marginal, not
overall, value.

I've been assuming total hours, but that's obviously false, since I'm much
less likely to take side gigs if my "day" job is paying enough, raising my
free time factor as high as 1.5. I'm also more likely to take vacation (since
I'd be making a free time "profit" of .5).

In the context of the original question, my salary converted to hourly is a
close enough approximation to how I value my time. From an employer's
standpoint, I use the rule of thumb of $2/minute (like a 900 number!) as the
cost of lost productivity for wasting my (or anyone else's productive) time.
This, of course, only scales to a company of moderate size, as I'm sure most
readers here are quite aware.

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yannis
Hey! I thought this question was philosophical! If you could save me two hours
a day of commuting in heavy traffic by teleporting my body I would pay $
39,000.

~~~
Mankhool
Commuting is the subject which make me think most about time and the value of
time. Unless you are lucky enough to be able to telecommute, you have a choice
to make with respect to time and the value you place on it. I have always held
that one should live close to where they work, or work close to where they
live - something that I was fortunate enough to be able to do until last year.
Since then, and for the first time in my life, I have become a commuter and I
miss the 1.5 hours per day that I lose because of it. Even if I could bill for
that loss, it would not be worth it because even with the pay I am still
robbed of some of my time. The only way to recover that time is to get up
earlier in the morning and/or stay up later at night in order to accomplish
what I cannot with that missing 1.5 hours.

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avalean
You should not put a price on your hour if you're developing a product. Since
if you do the math afterwards, then your hour is worth pretty little.

~~~
macco
Very encouraging, thanks :)

