Time != Money

We've all heard "Time is money". Whether time is money depends on which one of them you're spending. It's true if you're spending time. It's not true if you're spending money.

We have to spend our own time in such a way as to maximize the money from it. But I'd rather pay someone for the results I want; their time in itself is worth nothing to me. It doesn't help me if they take longer to give me results. It doesn't cost me if they finish quickly so long as it's the same result.

If you're paying money, you can't really receive time in exchange. The time it would take you to perform a task is longer than the time it would take a paid professional. The outcome would differ as well. There isn't an equivalence in the time you save and the time they spend. So ask yourself when spending money to receive time, are you paying for their attention? If not, how much is the result worth to you?

The problem with paying for the result of a service is that it's subjective. Time, by contrast, is easy to measure. That makes it convenient to set a standardized value on time. But we still don't really buy each other's time. The same person can do a valuable task in one minute, and a less valuable task in an hour. So our evaluation of what our time is worth is a measure how that averages out. We also take into account bits of overhead. Employees evaluate a wage to take into account time spent driving to work or thinking about solving work problems during free time. Employers evaluate a wage taking into account time spent in the office taking breaks for smoking, bathroom, drinking fountains, taking private phone calls or an email or two, and other necessities of life.

The corollory to thinking in terms of results is that I'm comfortable being paid "by-the-result", at a flat rate based on the market value of the benefit, rather than just measuring when I'm in the office. I don't want to feel like my wage is a punishment on my employer for the time they've taken from my warm body; I want to feel like I've been rewarded as a measurement of specific contributions! That's exchanging benefit for benefit. Territoriality about time can create a climate in which the transaction feels like an exchange of harm for harm; taking money in exchange for taking time. Then each party might want to ensure the other is losing an amount that justifies what they are losing. Who benefits from that? That's what I would call a lose-lose situation.

Comments

renniekins on May. 18, 2007 12:07 AM

I can buy time with money. Example: my living room renovation. I could have spent a LOT of time - learning how to repair plaster, prepping the area, moving furniture, putting on several layers of paint, trying the faux finish, messing it up, trying it again, de-prepping the area and putting everything back.

Instead I bought all that time by paying somebody to do it for me. During the time I bought, some of it was spent working (making more money!), I did school stuff, and I did various things that I enjoy more.

matt-arnold on May. 18, 2007 1:11 AM

I disagree, but I already described your renovation in my post... so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

rmeidaking on May. 18, 2007 2:45 AM

True. If time were money, rich people could buy all the time they needed. Time is the great equalizer. Every person is affected *exactly the same* by time. Time is a lot like gravity in this respect.

Meanwhile, we do trade time for money quite often. It works pretty often. It fails sometimes. In some industries, it's best to pay for piecework, and this applies to books and articles as well as socks and underwear. In other cases, it makes more sense to pay a flat rate for time, irrespective of the work being done. In other cases, there is one rate for 'easy' work (e.g. stocking shelves) and another rate for 'hard' work (e.g. creating next weeks' work schedule). There really is no system that works all the time.

The thing is, there's stuff you want or need that you don't have. You need to trade stuff you do have - primarily skill and expertise - for the stuff you need. Money is just a medium of exchange that allows us to work out a way to trade "Creating a webpage" (or, in my case, "balancing a checkbook") for "Food, clothing and shelter".

Welcome to Economics. :-)

rachelann1977 on May. 18, 2007 4:13 AM

I'd say it's not time so much as effort that you buy when you buy prepared foods, or have a maid clean your house, or any such thing.

You hope that buy spending money to eliminate effort, you can exert more effort into doing things that have more value to YOU. You exchange money in the hopes of finding value, which seems pretty much like any transaction involving money to me.

eternalmaiden on May. 18, 2007 6:14 AM

I very heartily concur.

Real world example: Several times a week, my mate and I opt to go to the Ram's Horn next door instead of preparing our own meal, even sometimes when we can barely afford to. We usually spend about $20, with tip. This buys us usually an hour and a half we can spend together, relaxed and looking in each other's eyes instead of cooking and cleaning up.

I think we're gypping the restaurant, because I'd easily pay twice that for the same results.

eternalmaiden on May. 18, 2007 6:09 AM

Money is only ever worth what I get in exchange for it, compared to what I had to give up to get it. Two identical twenty dollars bills have different values in my mind.

I apply the same values to the time and effort I spend gaining money.

uplinktruck on May. 18, 2007 12:33 PM

Sadly many employers consider the wages they pay just as you described them: A penalty for not being efficient enough. The days of considering the wage in investment in the product or service offered are long gone.

atdt1991 on May. 18, 2007 2:10 PM

While I don't consider time and money to have any sort of simplistic equivalent, those times when I consider money to equate to time aren't about getting a particular service, for instance, or a product. It is about certain bills I have every month, and the potential to save up enough to, for instance, take a month's sabbatical where I do -not- have to work because I've got money to pay for those bills.

I suppose one could extend that idea into retirement. Money is time because I have debts to pay (or food to buy, or whatever) and those debts do not change altogether much, month-over-month. So if I make more money, I may at some point take a vacation and not earn money, thus gaining time I would otehrwise spend in the office.