Figuring the Value of Your Time

How do you decide which is the best way for you? Some figuring about what your time is worth is helpful. I’ve spent some time thinking about this and have come up with a sweetly reasonable method for figuring the value of an earned “discretionary” hour. It is most illuminating, and worthy of an article on its own. Here goes.

First, add up what you spend a year (food, housing, clothes, education, taxes, etc.). It’s probably a little more than your income.

Second,

• estimate how many hours you work for the year (I call these “pro hours”), and
• how many hours you spend doing necessary things that are not considered work (like commuting, paying bills, going to the doctor, cooking dinner, etc.). I call these “personal hours.”
• Third, estimate the time you spend sleeping. I suggest you consider allocating 8 hours a day to this as a minimum, because if you don’t you’ll pay in the long run for health-related reasons.

The time left over is discretionary, or “free” time, that is yours to use as you see fit for anything you want. Keep in mind, you’ve EARNED it! Calculate the amount of such time you have in a year, by subtracting sleep time (2920 hours), work time and personal time from the total number of hours in a year (8760 hours). I personally came up with about 1400 hours in 1994, the year I wrote this.

Now, divide your annual expenses by your earned free time. The result is the cost per hour of earned free time, which is time to use as you would like.

If each free hour costs you more than $40, I’d suggest you not waste the time, but spend the money.

Think about it: if you use up an extra hour a week at $40/hr trying to nursemaid a single computer, your annual cost will be Two Grand, enough for another computer!

When you waste a day trying to fix some stupid software conflict, it costs you $320! Interesting, eh?

I’ve included a table with various incomes and work profiles to give you a feel for this (I’ve updated these numbers for 2005). My apologies for the casual and arbitrary definitions of rich, poor and middle class, as well as busy and laid back. Feel free to use your own numbers.

	Expenses	Pro hrs/wk	Personal hrs/wk	Sleep Hrs/Night	Free Hours per year	Cost of a Free Hour	Annual cost of losing a Free Hour per week
Rich & Busy	$150,000	80	20	8	960	$156	$8,125
Rich & Laid Back	$150,000	40	30	8	2360	$64	$3,305
Middle Class & Busy	$70,000	80	20	8	960	$73	$3,792
Middle Class & Laid Back	$70,000	40	30	8	2360	$30	$1,452
Poor & Busy	$30,000	80	20	8	960	$31	$1,625
Poor & Laid Back	$30,000	40	30	8	2360	$13	$661

I find these numbers fascinating and quite revealing! Free time is expensive! It is particularly expensive is you are scrambling hard to live your life and make your particular ends meet. To me, it explains a lot about things like road rage, stress, and irritation with telemarketers. Think of it: if you are a busy middle-class person, time is costing you approximately $1.10 per minute! Some smarmy telemarketer that drags you to the phone during your hard-earned leisure moments costs you somewhere around $3 in wasted time by the time you get back to your leisure state. Don’t even think about what a traffic light costs!

But I digress! As far as computers are concerned, try to avoid spending your hard-earned leisure hours on them unnecessarily. It really runs up the cost of the computers!

The second thing you may want to consider is taking organized economic action. I generally don’t care for economic interest groups, but here’s a situation where one may make sense. An independent group of musician/computer users that sets some performance standards that satisfy its members’ needs and has a strong enough membership (complete with legal representation) to actually get the attention of the software publishers and hardware manufacturers (some of whom seem to desire good PR), might be an effective way to improve the situation.

I know it’s not just me. I’ve talked to enough colleagues who suffer through the same lunacy that I’ve endured, and I’ve heard enough rumblings about irresponsible software and incompetent hardware that I think the ground swell of discontent may be both general and significant.

Keep in mind, it’s not all bad. Much of the time things work fine. If 50% of all users experience Computer Hell, that suggests that the other 50% don’t, and are at least doing OK (which may be the equivalent of Computer Heaven!). Further, I don’t think many of us would go back to life without computers. And while I can have a little fun riffing on programmers’ stereotypical behavior, the reality of what happens when humans write Special Instructions for computers is richer, more complex, multifaceted, and, well, human than I’ve described. There’s no evil empire at work here, and it’s important to keep that in mind.

So, in summary, computers are generalized pieces of hardware with Special Instructions that incorporate personal and idiosyncratic value systems. At present, beta-testing is generally inadequate, and compatibility standards seem to be at best only partially effective. One size definitely doesn’t fit all.

Meanwhile, us professional music users, if only to help us face our clients day after day, really do need crash-proof operating systems, absolute compatibility, and robust and reliable Special Instructions. Whatever the reasons, we haven’t got ‘em today.

Special thanks to Mark Parsons of Parsons Audio, Wellesley, MA and David Musial, One World Media, Jersey City, NJ for their advice and assistance.

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