Time Is Money—But Thinking About That Will Make You Miserable

We’ve all heard the cliché that time is money—the aggravating reminder that if you’re not working, you’re just throwing away potential earnings. The United States was founded by people who believed that time and money were basically the same thing. Way back in 1748, Benjamin Franklin wrote in his essay “Advice to a Young Tradesman”:

These days the mantra is batted out by characters in Fast and Furious movies, barked at employees at family restaurants, and preached as gospel by venture capitalists. People seem to have bought into it, too: Everyone these days seems to have a hustle—and a side hustle and maybe a gig or two as well.

It’s important to be aware of the value of your time at work, of course. (If you’re not sure how much your time is worth, you can use this calculator to figure it out.) Understanding it keeps you from being taken advantage of at work and helps you make rational decisions about how to spend your time.

Studies have even shown that buying yourself some free time can make you happier. According to a 2017 study in PNAS, when people spend their hard-earned cash on time-saving services, it can make them feel better.

“What we found is that people who spend money on time-saving services like grocery delivery, housecleaning, sending a TaskRabbit to run some annoying errand, and skipping cooking for delivery reported greater overall life satisfaction than people who did not spend money on time-saving services,” explains the study’s author, Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans.

The problem arises when you can’t turn off that time-is-money mentality when you’re off-duty. That can make it impossible to relax, kick back, and enjoy life. While we’re all busy earning in the hopes of some day doing the Scrooge McDuck backstroke through our billions, a new study in the the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that if you really value your time as money, you may end up valuing nothing but money.

Researchers at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management conducted a few experiments on busy bees asking them to calculate the approximate hourly wage rate for their time, be it $15 an hour or $400 an hour. Once they had figured out exactly how much their time was worth and assigned it an actual dollar amount, a strange thing happened—they weren’t able to enjoy some of the nicer things in life.

“People weren’t as happy after listening to a beautiful piece of music,” explains Sanford DeVoe, the lead author of the study. “This was entirely explained by their impatience to get through the task as quickly as possible.”

When people know exactly how valuable their time is, they get stressed out when they feel that they are wasting it. Knowing the value of the time made it harder for them to be happy when they weren’t working. “These experiments showed it directly impeded people’s ability to enjoy a break,” says DeVoe, noting that treating time as money "can actually undermine your well-being.”

“This is one very powerful example of decades of research showing the psychological consequences of having a monetary value for time—it’s a blinder that focuses you on maximizing the economic value of your time and disregarding happiness,” he added

Of course, if you work for an hourly fee or you’re working as part of the gig economy, you can’t help but know the exact value of your time. But learning to Netflix and chill without thinking about all the gigs you’re missing while binging on Stranger Things is important, psychologically.

“Anything you can do to create a clear boundary around the time when you want to be off the clock is important, as well as pushing yourself to think about non-monetary aspects of time,” says DeVoe. “Research shows that can get you connected back with spending and experiencing time in ways that will optimize your happiness.”

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