Here's an interesting article by Jack Groetzinger, making a relatively elaborate argument for how to value one's time.
Every person at every company has an implicit hourly rate of value they create for the business. Perhaps Bob, our traveling salesman, provides $150 of value for every hour that he's working [1]. If Bob catches the flu and is forced to spend a day hunched over a toilet rather on the road selling, then the DCF of future SeatGeek earnings decreases by $1,500 [2].
However, Jack then rightly undermines this point later (though doesn't go far enough in getting rid of it):
The rate at which you value your time value your time is not static; it's constantly changing. If I'm stuck on a plane with no internet, the rate at which I'm creating value for SeatGeek is low. On the other hand, suppose it's 3am in the morning and I'm feverishly working on a presentation for a massive client. The presentation will take place in five hours. Here, the rate at which I'm creating value quite high. If two hours magically disappeared from the clock, it could destroy a meaningful amount of SeatGeek's enterprise value. So I feel justified in, say, asking my girlfriend to get me a Diet Coke so that I don't have to break my concentration (thankfully she's an economics student, so she understands).
Jack then continues with a comparison of the value of someone's time to the company and their wage, but I'll stop here for an important tangent to a point which I think is crucial to the discussion.
Time is worthless
Time is the most valuable thing in the world, and yet by itself it is worthless. Time well used is valuable. As John Gruber said of Jobs in this article:
Late last night, long hours after the news broke that he was gone, my thoughts returned to those grass stains on his shoes back in June. I realize only now why they caught my eye. Those grass stained sneakers were the product of limited time, well spent.
We all have limited time, and we can't buy more of it, so philosophically, we might say it's all priceless. So why do I say it's worthless? Because unless you spend it well, that time does not have any intrinsic value to your business (though it is probably still worth something to you personally).
I believe and have believed for a while that time is not the right thing to measure or preserve. Buying a $700 computer instead of spending an hour searching for an equivalent $640 computer (the example Jack uses) is a valid trade-off, but not because of the time being saved.
What makes the trade-off valid is the energy, the attention that's being saved.
We each have a limited amount of attention and energy (two sides of the same coin) to spend on a vast number of potential attention sinks each day. We can only care about so many different things each day, every day, before our very ability to give a damn gives up and we just don't care anymore and can't bring ourselves to care.
Spending energy caring about saving $60 on the purchase of a new computer is not worth Jack's limited supply of energy.
Whenever you're about to engage in chasing down some rabbit-hole distraction, think of this - if there are only 10 things that you have space to properly care about today, should this be one of them?
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