OK, I really like this.
Is that a feng shui remedy? 
problem:
Time keeps on slipping… into the future.
feng shui remedy:
Keep all banana peels securely away.
I over value time. I have suffered from chronic insomnia most of my life because I don’t want to sleep, I feel like I am loosing time. In reality I do nothing important with my time, I am retired and I basically just play. I stay very busy but just at play anymore.
xkcd: “Of the four dimensions I could have spent my life being pushed inexorably forward through, I guess ‘time’ isn’t the worst.”
In answer to the OP’s question, it’s been awhile since my wife and I realized we had more than enough money, but not nearly as much time as we’d like. So we trade money for time in a number of ways.
For instance, paying a cleaning lady once every two weeks beats having to make the beds, vacuum the house, clean the counters, sinks, and toilets, and all that. I don’t mind doing chores like that, but I did mind the chunk of my ‘free’ time that they used to eat up.
Thanks for the responses.
As mentioned, to me, my time is more valuable than any physical object one that one can create or sell.
Good point.
Obviously, the cleaning lady doesn’t mind using her time for that.
Time is important enough to me that I pay people to clean my house and cut my grass, I sometimes forfeit extracurricular activities because I’d rather have the free time, plus I won’t ever choose to live too far from my job (for my personal value of “too”).
However…
I don’t think time is so important that I can’t waste it (again, for my personal value of “waste”: I think it’s nearly impossible to objectively define it in this context). I also chose a career that often requires more than 40 hours a week, so in that regard money and professional fulfillment are more important to me than time.
Fruit flies like a banana.
From a Dylan/Band song on both Basement Tapes releases, called Odds and Ends.
Odds and ends,
Odds and ends,
Lost time is not found again
Our PDP-11 printer had a header for all jobs:
If time flies like an arrow, what do fruit flies like?
Clearly a banana, I see.
I don’t equate time to a monetary value, it creates a false dichotomy. Unless you would literally be making $X instead of picking up that penny, you have lost nothing (and gained $0.01). When I am at work I make $X per hour/day/year, but that doesn’t mean all of my time is worth that amount. When I am not at work I am likely not making money at all.
I count time as a quality of life issue. I can, in good concscience, spend or waste it as I see fit so long as I keep quality of life in balance (as much as possible). Not sure I articulated that very well, but I’m out of time!
That always seemed backwards to me. (Not that I should expect accuracy and precision from pop song lyrics, and doubly so for Steve Miller, but still.) We keep on slipping into the future; time slips into the past. August 18, 2015 is irretrievably out of reach, drifting away behind us.
Having enough spare time that I can ‘waste’ some of it without its being a big deal is one of the things I want more time for.
Like Doctor Jackson said, it’s a quality of life thing.
To a certain extent, one’s valuation of time is in relation to how much spare time that you have, and how much money you have.
I mean, when I was out of college and single, I had a lot of spare time. I could spend time doing things that were fun, but where the real payoff was way down the line. Stuff like building my own mountain bike from parts was fun, and informative, but ultimately I ended up trading money for time. Same thing before kids- I’d mow the yard myself; I didn’t like spending $$$ when in an hour’s worth of work and a little sweat, I could get the job done myself.
Now that I’m older, have kids, and have more money, the thought of spending hours putting a bike together sounds like a massive waste of time; I’ll just buy one and have it tweaked by a bike shop to have the parts that I want, and spend my limited spare time doing something else. I pay someone to mow for the same reason- the money’s less valuable to me than the time that I get back from not having to mow.
Not incidentally, I think the time crunch that seems to be thrust upon us as we get older and have families is a big component of why people don’t exercise so much. I mean, when I was 29 and single, I could get home from work at 6, meet my workout buddy at the gym at 7, and then get home by about 8:15, and still have 2 hours to do whatever I felt like doing, and do the dishes or whatever at 10:15 if necessary.
Now that I have kids, it’s more like get home at 5, play with the kids until about 5:45. Eat until about 6:30, give the kids baths, read to them, put them to bed. Usually done at about 7:30-7:45. So I could then go to the gym (15 min drive), work out for an hour, and then come home, which puts me at 9:15. I’d have half an hour before I would have to do the dishes/take out the trash (with kids those chores become mandatory daily events), and get ready for bed. So I don’t go work out, and I’m generally not willing to give up an hour of sleep in the morning either. The only real place that could cough up an hour is working time, and that’s never going to happen.
It’s gotten a lot worse.
When I first started working, in 1980, before kids, when I got home I had plenty of time. Even when I got a computer I could not log in to read my mail. No one called at home. Work was done. We had a limited number of channels to watch on the TV. No VCR, so no backlog of things to watch. We read. I wrote some. We walked to Princeton to get ice cream. It was very relaxed.
Today, post-kids, I look at work email. I’m involved in a lot of activities using my computer. We have DVDs from Netflix backed up, not to mention streaming potential. I hardly have time to read. And I work longer with a longer commute. And plenty of people have it worse.
I may be money richer than back then, but I’m a lot time poorer.
While time is very important to me, I often take a viewpoint that it’s the journey and not the destination and thus I make decisions that many people don’t agree with.
So I’ll work on home improvement projects and people say “For $100 you could rent something that would save you a day of work.” Usually I’m fine without that thing. It’s not just the value of money vs the value of time; it’s that I am typically happier working with the hand tools. Another example: while I own a leaf blower, many people are surprised to see me out raking in the fall. Nothing ruins a nice afternoon in the yard like the noise of a leaf blower.
I won’t hire a landscaper or a maid - I feel like even those kinds of menial tasks are things I need to slow down and enjoy the process of doing. If I can’t make myself take some pleasure from those tasks, I feel that the fault is with me and not with the task.
Admittedly, as I get older, I find myself getting more tired and more sore from these kinds of things, so I will probably start taking shortcuts for the sake of physical issues. But then part of the problem is that I could really use more exercise, not less, so solving the problem with money just creates a new problem and a new demand on my time.
TL;DR
Someone once said, “You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.”
I draw a distinction between what I think of as “projects”, and stuff that’s “maintenance” (yes, I’m an IT guy).
Project stuff around the house is fine- usually it’s somewhat interesting and there’s a opportunities to take pride in an innovative solution or a job well done.
I get annoyed at “maintenance” though; washing the dishes just sucks and is unrewarding. And I have to do it every damn night. So I tend to look at it as time gone down the toilet every night, and a task to be powered through as fast as I can, while still doing a good job.