Out of Time, Man

It's a timing tragedy,

  I think it's nine

  When clock says ten

This girl wouldn’t wait

For the out of time

Out of time man. 

How true.

These are the lyrics of Out of Time Man, the famous soundtrack from Breaking Bad: A story of a chemistry professor who understood the cardinal concept of opportunity cost and time.

In this post, I’d like to underscore my perception of time while looking at it through a pair of economic spectacles. To all those proponents of scarcity – Lionel Robbins being the most prominent of them all, and his disciples such as Sir John Richard Hicks, Friedrich Hayek and Charles Goodhart – here is a question for you: Why isn’t time the scarcest resource of all?

I raise this issue because although land, labour, capital and the like are oft-quoted specimens of scarcity, the one scarce factor of production that humans seem to understand thoroughly – and fear wholly – is time. With an average life expectancy of 71 years, we surely value every second that rushes by. Or do we?

If you are working in a private company or a public corporation or your own start-up, remuneration is mandatory and, unsurprisingly never enough. But that’s a discussion for another post. At work, you are getting paid for the money that you invested in getting educated, the money you spend to get the job done for a client and the money you spend on yourself and family. And of course, you’re getting paid for the time you lost getting educated, working 40-hour work weeks and your free time. But is time rightly valued in the status quo?

I do quite a lot of freelance writing, editing and proofreading on this online workplace called Upwork and a recent job is what got me thinking. Apart from fixed contracts, an Upwork freelancer can also apply for hourly jobs. Now imagine that you’re a freelancer and you decide the rate per hour for a particular job and there you have it: your time has successfully been valued, right? Wrong! You get paid that amount for every hour you spend working on projects on Upwork. If you were to total that amount and divide it by the total number of hours spent on Upwork irrespective of whether you had a job or not, you’ll be in for a shock. You earnings per hour will be meagre; no wonder you’re unable to buy a car that’s been in the works for the past couple of years.

How did this rude shock come to be? Time, you see, is like beauty. It depends on the eyes, and in this case, the perception of the beholder. Valuation of time is extremely tricky, and in my opinion, a personal choice with an a la carte menu. A common starting point, however, could be asking yourself, “How much should I charge for an hour of my time?” Now some of you are bound to look at that question differently and while others will direct their attention instantly to hookers. Avid followers of the economic demi-gods, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, will be aware of the SuperFreakonomics chapter on the business of prostitution and its profits. A good interaction with those in the profession could reveal important ideas on the economics of time. But that’s an interview for which I’ll need parental permission. 

How do you value your time? Your time could be worth the time others spend with you. It could be a trade-off where you decide to go for a show that has a ticket costing Rs. 1,000 for a half-hour rom-com movie that your other half loves and you despise. At your company, you might be informed that your client values your time at a such-and-such rate. But these are just the raw materials. You might want to consider the college fees you’ve paid for the past couple of years, the time spent stuck in traffic or the time lost while stalking someone on Facebook.

A really good place to check out the various methods of valuing your time is this article by James Clear, who writes about behavioural psychology and performance improvement.

What are my motives for writing this blog post? Here are a few:

1. Once you calculate the value of your time, you might realise that a lot of your precious and fast-depleting resource is spent on trivialities. A lengthy water-cooler conversation to pass time at work, one hour too many spent on your phone or your morning bathroom routine could all be pared a little here and a lot there.

2. You just might understand what Einstein propounded all those years ago. Well, not really. But you will be in a better position to understand the relativity of time and how something (like a walk in the park with your loved one) cannot be quantified by the time spent in the act. You’ll begin to respect decisions of others and your own too.

3. You could take the longest nap of your life with no hard feelings. By valuing your time and performing activities that enhance your utility or satisfaction, a happier psyche is guaranteed. So, when your time has come, you know exactly what it’s been worth and you’re happy with the price tag hanging around it.

4. My ulterior motive for drafting this blog post is to measure what my time is worth. Let’s calculate: I just spent two hours working on a post that will earn me nothing and will in turn cost me for the time spent in research, the internet data used and the opportunity cost of watching a good La Liga game on TV.

What are you waiting for? Get busy livin’ or get busy calculating how much livin’ is worth. And hurry, because you’re outta time.

P.S. The joy of writing and expressing myself, the cognisance that my blog is being read and the chemically induced emotional feelings of achievement and pride are the returns on my time invested in writing this post. Now that’s some real value for my time.