The Value of Time
I’ve struggled a lot lately with trying to decide what time is worth and how to spend it. I’ve looked at the MSN calculator and discovered (as depressing as it was) that with the time I put in outside of standard work hours, I made about $8/hour last year.
The additional time was a combination of overtime (unpaid, of course, since I’m an exempt employee) and the time spent trying to get my creditials so that I can keep my job. Now that I have a new job, I have very little overtime requirement (if any) but I still have to study – which works out to an additiona 15-20 hours a week, year round.
Eventually all the additional studying will pay off; I realize that. But for right now, it’s frustrating to have the very helpful calculator tell me that I could be making more working at Target. Of course, the calculator isn’t taking into account that there are future rewards built into the additional time I put in now, and that as soon as I stop studying, I’ll be putting in 1/3 less time on the average week.
Between Brian and I, we have roughly 5 jobs. We both work normal full time jobs, a partner and I have a wedding photography business, Brian teaches two nights a week at a community college (although this one is over in a couple of months) and then he manages money for a couple of his friends.
Which leaves just enough time in the day to play with our son for a couple of hours in th evening and get about 7 hours of sleep at night. We’re busy.
Not to say that there aren’t hours that are wasted – we still find plenty of time to get our money’s worth out of our netflix subscription. I still manage to lose a little money every week playing poker, and Brian still manages to keep up on most major sporting events.
In the end, we’re really just trying to reach our employment goals. We’d both love to be self-employed (separately – we’ve tried working together before). I’d love to find a job that I can mainly do from home. We’re trying to remember that though the we might not be making a lot on an hourly basis right now, we’re building a good foundation for later.
