⏳Value of Time

Wanna know about the only non-renewable resource that we should cling on and probably we are using it in the wrong way?

🌟 The only non-renewable resource

Time... uhhhmm this is gonna be kinda subjective. But here is my perspective on this. The way I see it - time is the only non-renewable resource that we have that is more valuable than anything else. And I don't feel like spending my money to save time.

I would like to start by sharing a personal experience of the value of time over money. So when I was attending a workshop at IIT Madras, I had to travel from Guindy to Ennore (~40 km) and I was accompanied by 3 of my batch mates from the same workshop. We had to collect some data from Ennore and return back to our workshop. So all of us decided to take the public bus for the travel as it is a costlier journey, except one of our batch mates who suggested taking a cab. But the cab would make a huge dent in our pockets despite the fact we were students. And the rest of the gang refrained from using the cab. But that guy was very particular in taking a cab, not that he had too much money but the one thing that he said to us blew my mind off. If we had to take the bus, it would roughly take 2 hrs and another 2 hrs to return back. But if we are gonna take a cab it would hardly take us an hour and we can spend the rest 3 hrs in some productive work. That’s when I realised that time has more value than money.

I found this highly relatable tweet on Twitter by Jem.

💸 Spend money to buy time

If you give me 100$ and ask me to make a table, I am pretty sure that I can make one. But, perhaps, it would take me a month or two to make a single table as I am not an expert in that or the fact that I have not made one before. The one month time that I spend making a table can drain a lot of energy and resources but if I am gonna hire a carpenter for the same work and I am gonna have a pretty table ready in the next few days. Of course, there is an utmost personal satisfaction that you are gonna get if you made the table by yourself if you are doing it out of passion or as a hobby or if you wanna learn the art of making tables. Otherwise, I would say it is just an utter waste of time of 1 month which you could have spent productively on things that can give more return than the 100$.

When most people hear about delegation their instant response is "I don't have enough money!" And I get it. It's a valid concern. The way I got over that doubt was by setting a fixed hourly rate. A dollar value of my time. Back when I was starting my first part-time job, I decided that an hour of my time would be worth 250 INR. If something could be delegated for cheaper, I'd use services like Fiverr to hire freelancers who were more than happy to do things like data entry or video editing. This way I got more time to do high-impact things for my professional and personal life.

Apparently, Indians underestimate the power/value of time just because of fact that Indians are getting monthly and they don't calculate their hourly rate, whereas in the US, every citizen knows their hourly rate and that's why they value their time more than Indians.

Following the delegation principle, a lot don't have time to clean their room or car. It is not that they don't like cleaning stuff; it is just the fact that they just don't have time. So they outsource it by hiring a maid or buying a service on Urbanclap which means they don't need to spend an hour on cleaning. Similarly, suppose your hourly rate is 1000 INR but you spend an hour searching for a flight ticket with a 200 INR discount, you think that you saved 200 bucks but you actually lose 1000 at the same time. This doesn’t make any sense. Hence it's gonna be fine to spend money to buy you some time and this perfectly explains why time is more valuable than money or other expenses that we make.

🎨 Satisfaction with DIY?

As I said before in the table-carpenter analogy, there’s the satisfaction of doing it yourself. That's kinda true. A lot of the best times I’ve had are when I cooked a big meal with friends instead of ordering outside, or spent a whole day building IKEA furniture with my family. True that I wasted my time but actually not. I feel these are some valuable times that I spent and time spent on memories is something that you are not gonna regret in your life.

So in the future, before delegating a task I’ll try to think: what non-obvious benefits might I miss out on? Would this be a joyless waste of my time or a good life experience?

That’s why a lot of people take risks at a young age because they value their time a lot and even if you failed you have a lot of time to rebound. For example, starting a business in 20 or moving into a new city involves a lot of time, but even if you fail them you have a lot of ample time to catch up with your life.

TL;DR ⟶ Time >>> Money.