The One Resource You Cannot Earn Back
I've been thinking about the value of time lately, especially while writing about reciprocity, boundaries, community, and the different ways we give to other people. We say things like “it'll only take an hour” as though an hour is a relatively insignificant thing to ask for. Sometimes it is. Sometimes I will happily give someone an hour, an afternoon, or an entire day because what we're doing together matters to me.
But that doesn't make the time free.
Money is renewable, at least theoretically. If I spend $100, I can earn another $100. If something I own breaks, I may be able to replace it. Time doesn't work that way. Once I've spent Tuesday afternoon doing something, there is no way for me to earn Tuesday afternoon back.
That doesn't mean I shouldn't have spent it. It simply means my time had value, whether anyone paid me for it or not.
Price and Value Aren't the Same Thing
We understand the monetary value of time perfectly well in certain situations. An employer pays for an employee's time. A massage client pays for a portion of my schedule along with my knowledge, experience, and labor. A plumber, mechanic, attorney, house cleaner, babysitter, consultant, or dog walker charges for their services, and part of what we're purchasing is the time required to provide them.
Outside of paid work, though, our understanding of time gets strangely fuzzy.
If I spend three hours helping a friend move, perhaps I don't want to be paid. I might be genuinely happy to spend my afternoon helping someone I care about. That doesn't mean those three hours had no value. It means I decided my friend was worth spending them on.
The same applies to volunteering, caregiving, making dinner for someone, listening to a friend who's struggling, tending a garden, creating art, learning something, or spending an afternoon with someone we love.
Something doesn't need to have a price to have value. And free isn't the same as worthless.
We can see this very clearly when economists attempt to put a dollar value on unpaid labor. AARP's 2023 estimate found that family caregivers in the United States provided approximately 36 billion hours of unpaid care in 2021, with an estimated economic value of about $600 billion. That estimate isn't suggesting families should begin invoicing one another. It demonstrates something much simpler: labor doesn't become economically insignificant merely because nobody receives a paycheck for doing it.
Every Yes Quietly Contains a No
Economics gives us another useful concept for thinking about time: opportunity cost. Whenever we choose one use for a limited resource, we give up the opportunity to use it for something else.
Time makes this especially easy to understand. If I spend two hours helping someone with an errand, those aren't simply “two hours.” They're two hours I cannot simultaneously spend working, studying, sleeping, exercising, making pottery, cleaning my house, spending time with my family, walking outside, or sitting on the couch doing absolutely nothing.
Again, that doesn't mean the errand wasn't worth doing. It means there was a cost.
That's why I think one of the most useful questions we can ask ourselves when we're overwhelmed isn't simply, “Do I have time to do this?” It's “What am I saying no to when I say yes to this?”
Sometimes the answer makes the decision easy. I'll gladly give up two hours of cleaning to spend them with a friend I haven't seen in six months. Other times I realize that saying yes to another person's request means saying no to something I desperately need myself.
The value of time isn't just about how much we have. It's also about having some ability to decide where it goes.
Sometimes Money Can Buy Time
Interestingly, researchers have studied what happens when people deliberately spend money to get some of their time back.
In a series of studies involving more than 6,000 people in several countries, researchers found that people who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction. In an experiment, working adults were given money to spend on two different weekends. Spending it on a time-saving purchase produced greater positive affect than spending the same amount on a material purchase. The researchers concluded that using money to reduce time pressure may sometimes support wellbeing.
I like this research because it turns our usual understanding of money and time around. We work and exchange our time for money. Then sometimes it makes sense to exchange some of that money to get our time back.
Paying someone to clean the house, mow the lawn, deliver groceries, repair something, or handle another task isn't necessarily an indulgence. If we can afford it, we may simply be deciding that the hours we recover are worth more to us than the money we're spending.
Sometimes putting a price on your time protects it. Sometimes paying someone else protects your time. And sometimes giving your time away freely is exactly how you want to spend it. The important part is recognizing that a choice is being made.
Valuing Your Time Doesn't Mean Monetizing Every Minute
There's a trap here that I very much want to avoid. “Your time is valuable” can quickly turn into another version of productivity culture where every hour must be optimized, monetized, scheduled, tracked, or used for self-improvement.
I don't think that's valuing time at all.
Rest is a valid use of time. Play is a valid use of time. Reading something simply because you're interested in it is a valid use of time. Sitting outside drinking coffee and watching birds accomplish absolutely nothing is a perfectly legitimate way to spend twenty minutes of the only life you get.
Research on discretionary time actually suggests that the relationship between free time and wellbeing is more complicated than “more is always better.” In two large datasets involving more than 35,000 Americans, having very little discretionary time was associated with lower subjective wellbeing, largely through greater stress. But wellbeing didn't continue increasing indefinitely as free time increased. Very large amounts of discretionary time could also be associated with somewhat lower wellbeing, particularly when people lacked a sense of productivity or purpose. How people used that time mattered.
The goal, then, probably isn't to hoard every available hour. It's to have enough agency over our time that we can spend some of it in ways that actually matter to us.
You Get to Decide What It's Worth Spending It On
Some of the most meaningful hours of our lives will probably be completely unproductive by conventional standards. Some will be spent helping other people. Some will be spent working toward things that matter deeply to us. Some will be spent resting because we're exhausted. Some will disappear into conversations that run much longer than we intended because neither person particularly wants to leave.
Those hours aren't wasted simply because they didn't produce anything measurable.
Valuing your time doesn't mean refusing to give it away. It means remembering what you're actually giving.
There will hopefully be more paychecks, more possessions, more opportunities, and more Saturday afternoons. But there will never be that particular Saturday afternoon again.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't spend it helping someone move. Maybe that's exactly where you want to be. Maybe twenty years from now you'll be glad you were there.
Just don't tell yourself the afternoon was free.
Your time was valuable. You decided they were worth spending it on.
Sources & Further Reading
Sharif, M. A., Mogilner, C., & Hershfield, H. E. (2021). “Having Too Little or Too Much Time Is Linked to Lower Subjective Well-Being.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(4), 933–947.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34498892/
Whillans, A. V., Dunn, E. W., Smeets, P., Bekkers, R., & Norton, M. I. (2017). “Buying Time Promotes Happiness.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(32), 8523–8527.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5559044/
Reinhard, S. C., Caldera, S., Houser, A., & Choula, R. B. (2023). Valuing the Invaluable: 2023 Update — Strengthening Supports for Family Caregivers. AARP Public Policy Institute.