An average person spends, cumulatively, whole months of their life standing in line – at the store, at the counter, in traffic. If you look at time as a resource with value, exactly the way you look at money, an interesting question emerges: what does an hour spent waiting actually “cost”?
The answer depends on what you could have done instead – and that’s where things get subjective. For some, an hour in line means an hour of lost income. For others, it’s an hour of free time, just as valuable, only not measured in money.
The idea of “time = money” isn’t meant to turn every minute into an obsessive accounting exercise, but to offer a simple perspective: sometimes it’s worth paying a little extra to save time, other times it’s the exact opposite – worth spending time to save money.
It just depends on which one you have less of at the moment.
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