Is time really money

Catch 22 - Time is Money | News.com.au Squanderlust Blog

nna Warwick
Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 10:19am


Is time really money? Being fond of a sleep-in (and having an inner clock that seems to be completely on its own tangent), I often experience the price of time… in the form of cabs to work (20 mins saved = $20).

But I don’t like to place a value on my time, because it stops me from enjoying the moment. When I charge clients by the hour, I feel guilty for grabbing a coffee or answering a personal call (or looking up my horoscope or staring out the window or reading blogs...). When I charge a set price for a project, I feel calm about the job and I tend to focus better and enjoy every minute of the work.

Where did the cliche “time is money” come from? In 1784*, Benjamin Franklin composed a satire, Essay on Daylight Saving, proposing that by getting up an hour earlier in summer, Parisians would save a fortune on candles at night. In the same year Franklin made the statement: time is money.

According to Stefan Klein, author of The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity - “Franklin meant this only as a gentle reminder not to ‘sit idle’ for half the day.”

But we took Franklin’s suggestion literally. Five minutes of daydreaming is cash down the drain in today’s world.

Says Klein: “the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal — or very little.”

AHA!

According to neuroscience, says Klein, time - or “heightened activity” - is measured in the brain centres which control muscular movement, thus inner time can run faster or slower depending upon how we move our bodies “as any Tai Chi master knows” (ditto for anyone who has to sit still for eight hours a day).

“The brain’s inclination to distort time is one reason we so often feel we have too little of it” Klein explains: “Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash. Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out.”

So believing that time is money is a no-win situation. And there’s no point worrying about being idle, either.

Look at the bigger picture: In a single second we are being hurtled between 29 and 30 kilometres through space, courtesy of planet Earth. Woohooo!

Look at the smaller picture: Our bodies contain nearly one trillion cells each. In each cell there are a mind boggling number of molecules, containing trillions and trillions of atoms. At the centre of each atom, a proton sits, creating (every nanosecond) a magical flash of gluon – the very stuff which holds the substance of the world together. We are very productive little organisms.

Klein suggests that the remedy for time anxiety is to liberate ourselves from Franklin’s equation. “Time is not money”, he says, “but ‘the element in which we exist,’ as Joyce Carol Oates put it more than two decades ago (in a relatively leisurely era). ‘We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.’”

I’m enjoying being borne along, thank you very much.

* 1780’s - Industrial Revolution, US constitution formed, Britain madly colonising Southern Hemisphere, penal colony of NSW established, The French make hot air balloons and gas balloons and have a revolution.