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.