Time is Money

I find anything that motivates me to be of value. We sometimes hear the phrase "Time is money" to get us moving. So if time is money, how is that calculated? Does the value of each minute go up based on your market value? Or do you assess your entire net worth and divide it up into minutes? You can run on the same hamster wheel or your life, but what does that get you? It's as if we've taken an apple cut it into thin slices, each one resembling a minute, and assessed the value for each. Perhaps the value of each minute is not so clear-cut, or linear, for that matter.

If you prepare properly, make the right decisions, find the right people, have the right connections, and get some investors to buy your idea, eventually you can delegate most of your tasks. This would throw a wrench into your calculation, as your productivity becomes hard to predict for anything beyond the near future if your business experiences growth in the midst of market forces. But you do have to ask what you are producing, and if it is beneficial to yourself and to society as a whole, in order to assess the true cost and worth of your actions. And then there's the offshoots of what you produce, which can become completely unpredictable down the line. Just ask Albert Einstein.

Is there a danger to assigning monetary value to time? I've been considering this as of late, during my meditation. Feeling like you owe each minute something might be a mindless way to live out your life. Albert Einstein said that "the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." The story of your life seems like one broad stroke on a canvas, unique at each point and interacting with the other colors on the painting. The present is but one point along that stroke. Perhaps if you really become in touch with that present moment you can experience the entire brush stroke, how each part of it is connected to the rest.

It's interesting that as I've been thinking about this I came across this article in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.co...