“Time Is Money” is quite a famous idiom in many languages and cultures. This idiom is not exclusive to English and the countries where English is being spoken. The French and the Japanese have it as well (respectively, “Le temps c’est de l’argent” and “時は金なり”). As for its definition, The Free Dictionary tells us the following:
Time is a valuable commodity, so we should be as quick or expeditious as possible.
While I completely agree with this definition and the idea it carries, I would like to introduce a different way to see the relation between money and time.
Let us start with the basics: what is money? Wordnik tells us the following:
A medium that can be exchanged for goods and services and is used as a measure of their values on the market, including among its forms a commodity such as gold, an officially issued coin or note, or a deposit in a checking account or other readily liquefiable account.
In the context of this article, the interesting part of the definition is “a medium that can be exchanged for goods and services”. When reading this definition, what do most people think about? Something like this maybe?
True, I can use my $10 and exchange them for a sandwich at the supermarket.
It would be an exchange for a good. People can also exchange money for a service; $50 can be exchanged for a haircut or with a cab ride for example.
In these two examples, you are the one giving up money for something. The opposite — where you receive money — happens as well. If you sell goods or services, you are (hopefully) making trades every day and you see money coming in daily. If you do not have any commercial activities, chances are that you go to work a few days a week. In that case, you are trading the time you spend working in exchange for the salary you get at the end of the month. In both cases, the money you own at a given point in time is nothing else than the representation of the time you sacrificed in the past. Things get a little more complex if you think about things such as trading or inflation, but considering how it is being acquired in our society, money is, at its core, a thing you get in exchange for doing something, and that something often is spending time, directly or indirectly.
Although the above is probably not ground-breaking for most people, many tend to forget it when they make decisions and tend to be overly protective when it comes to using money. Let me illustrate that with an example.
According to ZipRecruiter, the average hourly wage in the United States of America is between $25 and $35. Let us say I make $30 per hour. Now let us say I need to go somewhere and I have two options:
- take a local train that would cost me $5 and take me to my destination in 90 minutes
- take an express train that would cost me 20$ and take me to my destination in 40 minutes
I decide to go with the local train because although the express train is 4 times more expensive, it is not 4 times faster.
But, let me resonate differently. When thinking about cost, let us use time instead of money as the unit. Doing some conversions:
- $30 = 1 hour (my hourly wage — this is our reference)
- $5 = 10 minutes (10 minutes x 6 = 1 hour; $5 x 6 = $30)
- $20 = 40 minutes (40 minutes x 1.5 = 1 hour; $20 x 1.5 = $30)
Now, let us revisit how much time the local and express trains cost:
- local train: 10 minutes ($5) + 90 minutes (travel time) => 100 minutes
- express train: 40 minutes ($20) + 40 minutes (travel time) => 80 minutes
If I think about money as the time I invested in the past, the express train is actually a cheaper option.
Of course, the above highly depends on my income. The time we spend is not valued the same amount of money. It is important to accurately evaluate your hourly/daily/weekly income if you want to start making decisions based on the time factor instead of the money factor.
But why should one think in terms of time over money? I have two main arguments to support that.
I already explained the first one: money is nothing else than a representation of time spent somewhere in the past. What we are actually trading every day is not money, it is time.
Secondly, time is infinitely more valuable than money. If you want to make more money, there are ways for that. You can work more, you can invest, you can change your job for one that pays more, etc. I am not saying that everyone can afford it, but there are ways to get there. On the other hand, there is no way to get more time. Every single second spent is gone forever.
Re-using the previous example of riding a local or an express train, I can go with the express train and somehow make up for the financial difference of $15. However, if I decide to take the local train, I have no way to make up for the 20 minutes I will be losing.
Thinking in terms of time is not something natural because it is not obvious. If you go with the express train, you will see $20 disappearing from your wallet whereas only $5 would have disappeared if you had used the local train. And your brain will focus on that. You will not immediately think about the time you invested in the past in exchange for the $5 and the 90 minutes you are going to sacrifice during the local train ride. Our brains are wired to only see immediate losses for reasons related to survival (giving more details about this would deserve its own article). But as we saw, it is not the most rational way of thinking.
Guillaume Hansali wrote about the topic of human being not being rational: Born Irrational; I recommend it.
To conclude, I would add one important thing. Even if you managed to rewire yourself so you think about cost in terms of time and not money, it is important to note that cost is not the only factor to take into account when making decisions.
Let us use an example once again. Based on my income and how much it costs (in time) to get food delivery and cooking myself, getting a delivery is much cheaper. But if I like cooking and/or if I think cooking is an important skill to have, I should probably cook most of the time.
Another example: although taking the train to go to the next station is cheaper in terms of time, maybe I should just walk because taking some fresh air and walking are things good for my health.
These factors are hard to quantify, and thus they are difficult to add to the equation when making decisions. But I believe it is important to understand that cost is not the only thing to consider.
