The Calculating Guru: Time is More Valuable than You Think
I hate waiting for a table at restaurants. If a place has more than a 15 minute wait, I try to find another place. This limitation means I never go to the Cheesecake Factory on a busy night. Oh well, I think I can live without it.
Some of my friends think I’m eccentric for being so impatient. They tell me to wait it out because it’s just an hour. I can’t argue with that. An hour is an hour.
When they say “it’s just an hour,” I imagine they are thinking about time in the grand scheme of things. When you look at time scales, one hour is not much. It is about:
0.60 percent of a week
0.15 percent of a month
0.012 percent of a year
What’s the big deal of waiting for an hour when it’s less than a percent of a week?
A Better Sense of Time
It’s clear that the above argument has a flaw. Smart people know that time is too valuable to spend waiting around. Few restaurants are special enough to merit waiting around. But the numbers seem to say one hour is not that much, so let’s investigate further.
The above metric looked at one hour compared to the total hours of a week, month, or year. This is going to understate the value of time. This is because the total amount includes time we are pre-occupied, like when we’re sleeping, working, or commuting.
It turns out that an hour is a sizable amount—if you use the right metric.
I don’t think it is right to consider committed time since it is not really ours to do as we please. We need to look at the free time we have. This is the result of subtracting out commitments, or “sunk” time, from total time.
It’s a pretty easy exercise. I did this about a year ago when I worked as a consultant. Here is what I found out was “sunk” time on a weekday:
Hours spent per activity
8 sleeping
8 working
1 exercising
1 commuting
2 eating
1 personal hygiene (throughout the day)
1 phone calls
1 cooking
Total sunk time = 23 hours
I was spending 23 hours a day in activities I could not, or did not, want to change. This meant I had a mere 1 hour of free time on weekdays. I did a similar calculation for weekends and found I had about 4 hours of free time.
Adding the 5 hours of weekdays to the 8 hours on weekends yields a grand total of 13 hours.
That’s it. There were 13 free hours in a week, 52 in a month, and roughly 676 in a year.
Looking at free time, one hour is about:
7.69 percent of a week
1.92 percent of a month
0.15 percent of a year
Now the magnitude is more meaningful. Spending one hour waiting around is truly wasteful: it doesn’t make sense to spend 8 percent of a week’s free time waiting for a table.
I encourage you to figure out how much free time you have by estimating commitments from your weekday and weekend schedule. I bet you’ll find out that you have less than you think. It might make you rethink that hour you spend watching TV. (I have cut down to about 20 minutes on most days, but I make exceptions for sports).
I bet you will make better decisions. Most likely you will realize time is more valuable than you think.
9 Responses to “The Calculating Guru: Time is More Valuable than You Think”
Hey Presh, I’m curious what you do on the weekends that gives you so little free time.
By Huey on Feb 21, 2008
@Huey
I’d imagine his weekend schedule is pretty similar, just replace the 8 hours working with 8 hours of freetime…though, those there is that missing 1 hour for his commute he doesn’t need.
By RohoMech on Feb 21, 2008
@Huey and RohoMech: The weekend estimate was from a year ago. I was taking a class that wiped out 5-6 hours of studying time. I thought I’d have more time when the class ended, but it soon became filled with other obligations, like weekend office work. So 4 hours was about the average.
By Presh Talwalkar on Feb 21, 2008
I also hate to wait around, but I never analyzed why it bothers me so much. You hit the nail on the head here: it is truly a terrible waste of the little time we have. I don’t get upset when I do have to wait, but I do make conscious decisions to avoid waiting if at all possible.
This is also the reason why I rarely watch movies on television. I can’t stand spending 120 minutes in front of the TV if 40 minutes of that is spent on ads. If televised movies were my only source of movies then I wouldn’t watch any at all.
By Pat on Feb 21, 2008
@Pat: Glad you agree. It’s funny how we know certain things but can’t quantify them. When we do quantify them, it makes a lot of sense (another example is how it’s clear to people that companies are monopolies, but it takes legal experts to figure out why).
I like your movie and TV analogy. It is similar to how recorded sports games are more efficient, but in this case, the thrill is often lost if the event is not live.
By Presh Talwalkar on Feb 21, 2008
Doing this can be dangerous to your mental health if you have a busy schedule. I remember figuring out how much time I had during the week when I was a senior in high school, and, when sleep was added in, finding I had negative eight hours of free time that week. That’s a bit disconcerting if you’re already stressed.
By Christina on Feb 27, 2008
@Christina - Lol, so..no waiting around at restaurants for you!
By RohoMech on Feb 28, 2008
@Christina: Haha. That does sound dangerous to go into negative time. I hated how early high school started. College was much better.
By Presh Talwalkar on Feb 28, 2008