Is your time worthy of $1,000 an hour?

“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

When I was eight and waiting for Hogan’s Heroes to come on while flipping through the channels, hearing this intro was straight garbage. Soap operas be damned, I needed to see nazis skillfully sabotaged amid tasteful comedic banter during my school break. Besides, who would make such a ridiculous hourglass CGI and expect anyone to be impressed? 

I hadn’t thought about that line until I read this piece this morning about how we value our time. The author has a lot to say about what we find important, how we measure our lives and how to be more productive and focused as a result of weighing what we spend ourselves on. It’s an excellent read, but one thing that stuck out to me was this bit at the end: 

“Take stock of the things you did this week. How many of them were worthy of $1,000/hour? How many activities were a true waste of time?”

There’s a strange dichotomy this line of thinking reveals about us I think most people don’t realize they are standing in the middle of. On the one hand, we readily break up our time into ice cube sized chunks; 15 minutes here, two hours there. Between calendars and inboxes and meetings and scheduling and smart-tech notifications and a thousand other ways our days are divided up and defined, we live and die by the hours we segment. 

And yet, at the same time, we are “busier” and more stressed and less connected than ever before. Many of us seem to exist in this space between spaces - where life seemingly overflows with things to do and people to see and new adventures to experience, but a large part of how we spend ourselves feels like a waste of the time and energy we have been given. 

Why is that? 

There’s a lot at play here. I could spend a lifetime writing volumes about this one subject and not flesh out all the ideas worth considering here. But since this is one blog, in one small bit of the internet and we have about...three minutes together...let’s hone in on one idea I'd like to explore with you for a moment.

Read the quote above again. Now, let us reframe the question a bit…

How many hours of your day/week/month are worthy of $1,000? 

Or to say it another way: how many hours are spent well? They could be spent in deep flowstate creating work of immense value, but this isn’t just a question about productivity and wealth-building. How much of your time, of your life, is spent well? 

Building meaningful connections with other people.

Resting deeply in ways which restore your soul. 

Pursuing the mission you have in your time here. 

Creating from genuine and vulnerable places of passion.

There so, so many ways to live well. But there are even more ways to live poorly; to piddle away the precious time we have here in pursuit of lesser distractions. So, if we took a catalog of your life for a month would you be happy with how it was spent? Or would you be disappointed, your soul longing for more than what you spent yourself on? 

I’m writing this as much for myself as anyone else. Wasting time on worthless choices is one of my greatest personal enemies in life. But also, hopefully, as an encouragement to you. 

You probably can’t crank work worth a thousand Washingtons an hour, even under ideal circumstances. But you can work with honesty and integrity to make the lives of the people your product or service helps that much better. 

I’m doubtful a hedge fund mogul with a penchant for hypothetical reward scenarios will show up at your door with a briefcase of cash to compensate you for weeknights spent making good choices. But you can spend tonight enjoying a sunset, calling up an old friend or crafting your art. 

No matter where you are in life, your time has immense value. In fact, it is priceless. But maybe this week as you are deciding what to do next in between ice cube sized blocks of time, you’ll find yourself asking:

“Would I still do this if someone was going to give me a $1,000 instead, or should I be doing something else right now?”

My hope for you today is not that you’ll find answers, but this week would be full of fresh questions for you. And maybe, as we come through Halloween week together, one or two of them will haunt you.