What’s the Value of an Hour?

A further irony is that we live in an analytical, financialized age. All around us, systems calculate, markets churn, and clever people find ways to monetize seemingly everything, from Pokémon cards to the likelihood of a U.S. invasion of Iran before 2027. (As of this writing, Polymarket has the odds at eighteen per cent.) You can look up the cost of real estate per square foot on a particular street half a world away; you can price a sentence of A.I.-generated thought. But your hours are thrown away and used up randomly. Time, our scarcest resource, feels beyond our reckoning.

We grapple with time, of course, finding ways to domesticate it. Professionals with hourly rates, for instance, value their time precisely. A typical hourly rate has a floor, determined by what clients will pay. If a would-be client makes a lowball offer—forty-five dollars an hour, say, instead of the usual sixty—it can be rejected in the certain knowledge that more can be made working for someone else. Economists describe this dynamic using a concept called opportunity cost. They say that, whatever you happen to be doing right now, you’re paying an opportunity cost equal to the best alternative thing you could be doing instead. The opportunity cost of working for forty-five dollars when you could be making sixty is fifteen dollars. The lowball offer is, quite literally, not worth your time.

Opportunity costs can be measured in dollars, but don’t have to be. You can decide on the “best” alternative use of your time however you’d like, and consider all sorts of candidates. Instead of reading this column, for example, you could be napping, working, strolling through the park, or browsing Hinge. Is one of those alternatives better? That depends on your goals. You might decide, given those goals, that a walk in the park would be preferable. Now another concept, switching cost, comes into play. Your opportunity cost (the value of a walk in the park) is lowered by your switching cost (the work of getting there). Bundling is a good way to diminish switching costs: if you read in the park, you get the best of both worlds.

Could we use opportunity cost as a general-purpose tool for valuing our time? Unfortunately, it’s most useful in context. At work, it’s easy to see that hours spent in meetings could be better deployed elsewhere. At the gym, you can reasonably conclude that you’re doing too much lifting and not enough stretching. But life, as a whole, is made of apples and oranges. The Sunday afternoon you spend filling out important forms might also be devoted to tending your garden. Two seasons of “Severance” account for nearly sixteen hours—enough time for you to learn how to play the piano at a rudimentary level. If you give up hours at work to spend time with your kids, you contribute less to their college fund. In these sorts of comparisons, opportunity cost is of little help. You have to make decisions intuitively, and are likely to end up distributing your time in an ad-hoc way.

You might respond by ascending in altitude, and seeking the broadest possible context—an existential, long-term view of the value of your time. In the book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” the writer Oliver Burkeman looks at our use of time from this perspective. Typically, people who do this argue for focussing on what really matters—leading “purpose-driven” lives. Yet Burkeman reaches a surprising conclusion, observing instead that life is finite, plans fail, and few endeavors are ever truly complete. “There’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters,” Burkeman writes. Accordingly, “the core challenge of managing our limited time” is figuring out “how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.” This approach almost inverts the logic of opportunity cost. Suppose there’s something else you think you ought to be doing. Why not simply decide not to do it? Enjoy “Severance.” Forget the piano! How good were you going to get, anyway? (Alternatively, you might plonk on the keyboard without worrying about whether you’ll ever achieve your musical goals.)