I’ve turned into a fairly materialistic person after starting a family, which kinda goes against this list, but I promise I have a point.
I’ve now started valuing my time in money, quite explicitly. Let’s say an hour of my time is worth roughly 50 euros. I can make more money by doing more work, I’m not limited to 40 hours a week when feeling productive, nor am I required to fulfill 40 hours a week when I have a bad case of executive dysfunction. So any time I’m out running errands, it technically IS costing me this much money.
If I have the option to spend X hours doing something, I’m going to ask myself if it’s worth it being X * 50 euros poorer for this. Spending time with friends or family? Absolutely worth it. Going on a walk to clear my mind? Still worth it. Drive around a bunch of drunk people for money? Nope, because nobody is going to be paying me enough to make it worth my while and it’s not an activity I enjoy doing very often.
I’ll make a similar calculation for spending money to gain more free time. If I’m working on my car and something is going to take me 10 hours, but my shade-tree mechanic 3 hours @ 35 euros an hour on his lift… Yeah, I’m going to pay him and hang around while he’s doing it. I just bought 7 hours of free time (so 350 euros) for 105 euros.
That does NOT mean that when I make the calculation that I’m going to always actually use the saved time for work right away. I might just hang around at home, take the baby for a spin in the stroller, listen to podcast I enjoy… Hell, maybe I’ll take a long ass bath. This is just a way to get myself thinking “hey, my time is worth too much to be doing this”, because in the past I rarely said “No” to anyone who wanted me to do anything, and also I’d spend lots of time on anything that could save me a minuscule amount of money.
I’ve turned into a fairly materialistic person after starting a family, which kinda goes against this list, but I promise I have a point.
I’ve now started valuing my time in money, quite explicitly. Let’s say an hour of my time is worth roughly 50 euros. I can make more money by doing more work, I’m not limited to 40 hours a week when feeling productive, nor am I required to fulfill 40 hours a week when I have a bad case of executive dysfunction. So any time I’m out running errands, it technically IS costing me this much money.
If I have the option to spend X hours doing something, I’m going to ask myself if it’s worth it being X * 50 euros poorer for this. Spending time with friends or family? Absolutely worth it. Going on a walk to clear my mind? Still worth it. Drive around a bunch of drunk people for money? Nope, because nobody is going to be paying me enough to make it worth my while and it’s not an activity I enjoy doing very often.
I’ll make a similar calculation for spending money to gain more free time. If I’m working on my car and something is going to take me 10 hours, but my shade-tree mechanic 3 hours @ 35 euros an hour on his lift… Yeah, I’m going to pay him and hang around while he’s doing it. I just bought 7 hours of free time (so 350 euros) for 105 euros.
That does NOT mean that when I make the calculation that I’m going to always actually use the saved time for work right away. I might just hang around at home, take the baby for a spin in the stroller, listen to podcast I enjoy… Hell, maybe I’ll take a long ass bath. This is just a way to get myself thinking “hey, my time is worth too much to be doing this”, because in the past I rarely said “No” to anyone who wanted me to do anything, and also I’d spend lots of time on anything that could save me a minuscule amount of money.