David Brady Helps

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What is the value of an hour?

I have used up about 53% of the hours I may have left to live; there may be 300k+ hours remaining for me. How will I allocate the scarce resource that is time?

In order to answer that question, I thought about the value of time. How do you assign a value to an hour?

  • Financial value — an hourly wage.

  • Emotional value — a sense of fulfillment.

  • Long-term impact — my life or health span are materially changed by that hour.

I then assign a balance factor — some type of prioritization/weighting — to the emotional and long-term impact scores because I want to prioritize certain types of activity. Example: exercise, or time by myself to study.

When I combine it all together I get the value of an hour. Then, I consider, if I am doing one activity, what is the cost of that activity? I look at opportunity costs.

If I am working as a musician, I assign the value of 27, then I am not spending time at home with my family, value of 30. I have to increase the hourly wage of working as a musician so that the difference between the value of an hour as a musician and the cost of leaving home is greater than 0.

Why do this?

Because time is scarce.

Because prioritizing and doing what matters, matters.