Here's a post I wrote late last year, doctored a little bit to update time-sensitive phrasing.
One of the gems of popular wisdom in the modern age (and indeed in prior ages) is the idea that "time is money". But until recently, I hadn’t considered what that really means in any depth. I've been reading a lot about money lately, and it's brought me a deeper view on this particular cliché.
I always just assumed in the past that the phrase meant that wasted time could have been better spent earning money. But now I see a broader, deeper, more specific meaning. Money and time are, in fact, interchangeable.
Time is money. Time can be exchanged for money, as most of us do on a daily basis when we go to work and earn a paycheck. Likewise, money can be exchanged for time. When we buy food at a restaurant or a supermarket, we spend money to save the time of growing or preparing it. These two currencies are pretty much interchangeable, both ways. Really this means that they are the same thing. Your time and your money are a single pool of one resource available to you, which I'll refer to as temporal currency.
Let's start with money. Money can be wasted, spent, or invested. By these terms I mean that it can be used to purchase three kinds of things:
- something worthless, useless or unnecessary, impoverishing one (wasted)
- something valuable, useful, or necessary, converting one's monetary wealth into wealth of possessions and leaving one no richer or poorer than before (spent)
- something which will enrich one further (invested)
Now, proceeding with the idea that time is money, it follows that time may be used in any of these three ways as well. You can waste your time on things which provide no value to you. You can spend your time on things which provide value, but leave you no better off than before. Or you can invest your time in activities which improve your lot.
Having been both employed full-time and unemployed in my life, I've often noted that I rarely have both the time and the money to do the things I want to do. When I'm unemployed, I have all the time in the world, but I'm broke and can't afford to do anything. When I'm working, I'm much better able to afford things -- but I can no longer just take off and do what I want to do all day. Catch-22. It makes a lot more sense when you consider time and money to be a single resource. I simply don't have enough temporal currency to do what I want.
You can buy more time. In fact, you can buy almost your entire day back if you have enough income. Hire a maid, a personal shopper, a chef, whatever. It takes a lot of money to free up that much time, however. Keeping your life in order is a full-time job that doesn't leave much time for anything else.
The rich who hire servants, I believe, are not all as extravagant as they seem. They simply value their time enough to be willing to convert some of their money into time. A simple currency exchange. I want my time back. I don't like spending a large portion of my time working for someone else (my employer, the Internal Revenue Service, my credit card company) and then coming home and having to spend a lot of my remaining time on "upkeep" -- cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc. If I could buy back my time, I'm pretty sure I would.
