Life Experience

I Spent a Lot Of Time And This Is What I Bought

Understanding the time monopoly

How much is your time worth? Ever wondered?

Time is money, as they say, and it was never more apropos than on a television show, where a minute is worth about $200! — Dirk Benedict

As simple as that question sounds, If you try to answer it directly, chances are you won’t figure the right answer.

And To be Honest, Even I would struggle to answer a question like that. So instead, I decided to observe!

If time is money, then what I am spending it on?

And If I am spending it, then who is buying?

Across the internet, for example, Youtube would be paying its creators more money per view If the viewer’s click came from a heavily targeted country such as the US, compared to another low-income country such as India. Bearing in mind, both people — only living in different places — are watching the same ad in the same online video. But since the advertisement companies see a person living in America more of a potential customer, they are willing to pay more for that view. Interestingly, you can almost always apply the same concept to most methods of making money online.

In real life, in every profession according to your level of experience. You will be getting a different worth of each hour you work, and the money you make goes higher in accordance with your experience.

From these two examples, a simple conclusion is that your time will not be worth the same as anyone else’s most of the time unless both of you have had similar life pathways and experience.

But this brings a moral side up, who decides how much your time is worth? Advertisement companies? your Employer?

Surprisingly, It is no one but you.

How you choose to spend your time gives you its actual worth!

In simple terms, the value of your time comes from two combined values:

The first value depends on the experience you gain from whatever you spend your time on, which is what we call “experience”. The more experienced you are on what you do, the more money people will offer you to do it, naturally because they expect the work to be completed with higher skill.

The second value depends on how you perceive the benefit of your time, and explaining this can be a bit complex in a way but I’ll do my best.

For example, returning from work after your full-time day job. Your routine on most of the days is having dinner and watching your favorite Netflix series after.

Doing this implements the value of your time to be equivalent to the value of watching Netflix — how you spent it, What is the value of watching Netflix you may ask? Short term happiness, Watching Netflix in my example provides you with no long term benefits, no income, no bonding time with your family/kids (Unless you are watching something together), and no skill development. And this later on, with repetition, develops subconsciously into a fact that this is how much your time is worth. Did you get my point?

Time is money, but money can’t buy time.

You must have once heard a social media guru talking about one way or another to make money online. Explaining to you how he/she made millions of dollars over the internet. What none of them told you about is who is paying them that amount of money and for what.

How much money other people can make online from you spending time watching their online videos, listening to their podcasts, or being influenced by the products they are being sponsored by. People and advertisement companies are deeply interested in paying millions just for your time. Would that give you a slight idea of how much your time is worth?

At his point you might be saying, I already know this so how does that help.

I believe that once you understand this “Time Monopoly”, you would be able to have some insight on how you would be able to use it in your favor and turn the table around. I believe being aware of your time is one of the initial steps to increase its value.

The take-home message? Don’t waste your time knowingly as you will never get it back.