What’s the Value of an Hour?
In Detroit, during the Great Recession of the late two-thousands, about a third of families experienced unemployment. One in three properties entered foreclosure. The State of Michigan offered financial assistance, but to get it people needed to fill out a form called the DHS-1171. This was the longest form of its kind in the country, the journalist Annie Lowrey writes, in her new book, “The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It,” and its questions were often unrelated to the provision of financial assistance. “The state queried applicants on their weight and hair color,” Lowrey reports. Many questions focussed on preventing fraud, treating “Michiganders in distress” as “potential criminals.” It all added up to a forty-page form with around a thousand questions printed in tiny type. Roughly a quarter of those who tackled the DHS-1171 failed to complete it.
In “The Time Tax,” Lowrey explores the disastrous consequences of the government’s complete disregard for citizens’ time. Few agencies or programs track how long it takes people to navigate their bureaucratic mazes. Instead, they prioritize “procedural” goals, such as the proper completion of forms. The result isn’t just inconvenience. If a bureaucratic process exhausts whatever time a citizen has available, then benefits are lost or rights are denied. In 2018, Lowrey writes, the State of Louisiana “disenrolled 15,689 children—children!—from its public health insurance program” because of “failure to comply” with paperwork requirements. She describes an entrepreneur who gave up on starting a business, and bereaved relatives unable to access their inheritances, because bureaucracies refuse to discipline themselves.
The point of Lowrey’s excellent book is to urge reform—and to show that reform is possible. (In 2018, the DHS-1171 “contained 80 percent fewer words.”) But government is only one participant in a much larger conspiracy to waste our time. Co-workers e-mail us with trivial requests. H.R. insists on endless online “training.” Insurance companies screw up our claims, then demand that we tell them what went wrong. Cashiers pester us to enroll in loyalty programs (unless we scan our own purchases). Traffic is bad, and housing is scarce, so we work far from home.
We’re part of the conspiracy, too. We fritter away our own time with social media, doomscrolling, video-gaming, and binge-watching, and we procrastinate and over-parent, making commitments that we can’t sustain. Surveys about how Americans experience their time basically show that there isn’t enough of it. Supposedly, we live in an age of convenience. “With a few swipes of my thumb,” Lowrey observes, she can order an Uber, or even “a closet’s worth of clothes for overnight delivery.” But many conveniences also have hidden time-wasting downsides. Instead of simply buying things, we often subscribe to them, and so we must manage our subscriptions. We wait while our smoke detectors or cars download their software updates. The other day, I bought movie tickets online, with reserved seats, and that was nice—but then I had to sit through twenty-five minutes of previews and commercials before the movie began. Those who giveth convenience taketh it, too.
A further irony is that we live in an analytical, financialized age. All around us, systems calculate, markets churn, and clever people find ways to monetize seemingly everything, from Pokémon cards to the likelihood of a U.S. invasion of Iran before 2027. (As of this writing, Polymarket has the odds at eighteen per cent.) You can look up the cost of real estate per square foot on a particular street half a world away; you can price a sentence of A.I.-generated thought. But your hours are thrown away and used up randomly. Time, our scarcest resource, feels beyond our reckoning.
We grapple with time, of course, finding ways to domesticate it. Professionals with hourly rates, for instance, value their time precisely. A typical hourly rate has a floor, determined by what clients will pay. If a would-be client makes a lowball offer—forty-five dollars an hour, say, instead of the usual sixty—it can be rejected in the certain knowledge that more can be made working for someone else. Economists describe this dynamic using a concept called opportunity cost. They say that, whatever you happen to be doing right now, you’re paying an opportunity cost equal to the best alternative thing you could be doing instead. The opportunity cost of working for forty-five dollars when you could be making sixty is fifteen dollars. The lowball offer is, quite literally, not worth your time.
Opportunity costs can be measured in dollars, but don’t have to be. You can decide on the “best” alternative use of your time however you’d like, and consider all sorts of candidates. Instead of reading this column, for example, you could be napping, working, strolling through the park, or browsing Hinge. Is one of those alternatives better? That depends on your goals. You might decide, given those goals, that a walk in the park would be preferable. Now another concept, switching cost, comes into play. Your opportunity cost (the value of a walk in the park) is lowered by your switching cost (the work of getting there). Bundling is a good way to diminish switching costs: if you read in the park, you get the best of both worlds.
Could we use opportunity cost as a general-purpose tool for valuing our time? Unfortunately, it’s most useful in context. At work, it’s easy to see that hours spent in meetings could be better deployed elsewhere. At the gym, you can reasonably conclude that you’re doing too much lifting and not enough stretching. But life, as a whole, is made of apples and oranges. The Sunday afternoon you spend filling out important forms might also be devoted to tending your garden. Two seasons of “Severance” account for nearly sixteen hours—enough time for you to learn how to play the piano at a rudimentary level. If you give up hours at work to spend time with your kids, you contribute less to their college fund. In these sorts of comparisons, opportunity cost is of little help. You have to make decisions intuitively, and are likely to end up distributing your time in an ad-hoc way.
You might respond by ascending in altitude, and seeking the broadest possible context—an existential, long-term view of the value of your time. In the book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” the writer Oliver Burkeman looks at our use of time from this perspective. Typically, people who do this argue for focussing on what really matters—leading “purpose-driven” lives. Yet Burkeman reaches a surprising conclusion, observing instead that life is finite, plans fail, and few endeavors are ever truly complete. “There’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things,’ or make time for everything that matters,” Burkeman writes. Accordingly, “the core challenge of managing our limited time” is figuring out “how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.” This approach almost inverts the logic of opportunity cost. Suppose there’s something else you think you ought to be doing. Why not simply decide not to do it? Enjoy “Severance.” Forget the piano! How good were you going to get, anyway? (Alternatively, you might plonk on the keyboard without worrying about whether you’ll ever achieve your musical goals.)
The fact that both of these approaches can be persuasive reflects how flexible we can be in valuing our own time. And, in fact, a lot of evidence suggests that we’re outrageously suggestible when it comes to our temporal attitudes. Decades ago, psychologists showed that we often judge the value of an experience by our impressions of two moments: the peak and the end. This suggests that a wasted day might be “rescued” if you can engineer a great final hour. Two business-school professors, Sanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer, have explored how the more we are primed to keep track of our time, the more we become “stingy” with it. (The habit of tracking your hours at work can make you less likely to volunteer outside of it.) Maybe it’s partly for this reason that we’re most temporally satisfied when we lose track of time. There’s not always a good answer to the question of whether we’re using time well—and so, ideally, we forget to ask.
A truly effective conspiracy involves not just people, but a climate of thought, a vibe. In a book called “The Harried Leisure Class,” from 1970, Staffan Burenstam Linder, a Swedish economist, proposed a theory of time-vibes. Why, Linder asked, despite a proliferation of convenience that promised to create “an increasing amount of ‘free time,’ ” did there appear to be an “increasing scarcity of time”? The problem, he argued, was simply that “time, unlike other resources, cannot be accumulated.” It was true that labor-saving devices, such as washing machines, made work easier, and that new technologies let us do more, more quickly. But all these gains in convenience and productivity had an unexpected effect: they endowed each hour with greater potential. They increased the opportunity cost of time.
In Linder’s view, modern life is characterized by a desire to bring “the yield on time in all other activities” into “parity with the yield on working time.” Suppose that you’re a professional who earns a healthy wage at work. What will you do when you’re at leisure? You’ll want your off time to be as valuable as your on time. One way to raise the value of your off time is “to increase the amount of consumer goods to be enjoyed per time unit.” So, instead of drinking a domestic beer on your deck after work, you might drink an imported beer. Instead of playing video games on your phone, you might play them on a state-of-the-art gaming console. Instead of cooking with your old pans, you might decide that you need new ones. An “acceleration of consumption” begins, in which your goal is to more fully realize the potential of each hour. And yet the overarching problem remains: there are only so many hours in a day. Increasing the value of any one hour increases the opportunity cost for all the rest.
In this sort of time regime, pointless, aimless time becomes a rarity, even a luxury—and an object of nostalgia. We recall with fondness the unjudged hours of our childhoods. And yet, oddly, the source of our time poverty is that, now, we have too many useful and rewarding ways to spend our time. The most valuable hours in our lives came when we couldn’t do anything with them.
Is there any connection between the “time tax” that Lowrey describes and the one we levy on ourselves, when we muddle through our use of time? The linking thread might be a horror of waste. A bureaucracy can overload its forms with questions meant to prevent fraud and abuse; in its determination not to get duped, it loses sight of its goals. A person, similarly, can obsess over not wasting time, cultivating a suspicion that every hour could be better spent. But this is its own form of waste. Real efficiency prizes momentum over perfection. It understands that acceptance is the price of progress. ♦