Sat 13 Oct 2007
Are we getting the best value for our time?
This is a question more typically asked about money. You want to expend money in places and situations that will produce the best value for you. Sometimes this manifests as comparison shopping, if you want to acquire a specific item. Sometimes it’s a matter of weighing questions such as “Should I buy that new gadget or put the money into my retirement fund?” You want to decide where the money is best spent.
But increasingly, I’ve been thinking about where my time is spent. Consider this thought experiment:
Alice works as a cashier at the local 7-11. She earns minimum wage for her trouble, which is currently $5.85 per hour. Her gross income per 40-hour workweek is $234.00.
Betty has collected a college degree or two and now commands a higher wage in her position as a phlebotomist with the Red Cross. The median rate for this position in California is $15.02. Betty therefore has a gross weekly income of $600.80.
Assume that Alice and Betty have the same life situations. To keep it simple, they both are single and childless; they live in the same city; Betty does not have any debt from her college studies left. Effectively, their base living costs are the same.
Betty actually has an interesting choice here:
- Work 40 hours per week and enjoy the use of an extra $366.80 in disposable income.
- Reduce her hours to 16 per week and enjoy the use of three extra days of “disposable time”.
Everyone I personally know has chosen option 1. Why? Inertia? Habit? Cultural norm? Why is it that the investment in degrees and credentials is most often seen as paying off in terms of dollars, not time?
It is so easy to let your base living costs creep upward to match whatever your salary currently is. But then you’re running and running but not getting anywhere in terms of a better living experience; you’re still working 40 hours a week and you’re still making ends meet at about the same level that you were.
Leaving grad school and getting a “real” job was one time that this really hit me. One year, I was subsisting on a microscopic annual income (just above minimum wage); the next year, my income had more than quintupled. Did I have 5x the financial needs? No. Grad school had forced me to keep my living expenses gratingly low, so I did. With the additional income, I began to live much more comfortably, and even save for what ultimately became the down payment for my house. But at some point — at this point — I’m starting to wonder: would I be willing to trade income for time? “Disposable time” would permit me to do volunteer work or travel or hike or make crafts or do anything I wanted that didn’t require that I be earning money. I’m starting to lean in this direction more and more strongly. After all, do I live to work? Or do I live to live?
I’d love to hear the Salon’s thoughts on this.
9 Responses to “Getting your time’s worth”
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October 13th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
I think that you do an amazing amount of very difficult work. I don’t see how you have time to do it all. I think you should relax more. Anytime you want to take time off on the East coast…
I think that most people don’t think about it. They work 40(,50, 60) hours because that is what their employer asks of them. I do think that this is cuturally ingrained. If someone proposed a limit of 35 hours weekly work time as in France; Americans would be apalled. Clearly part of that comes from having dependents. If I had children I would be more concerned about financial security.
The income bump from student is something. Since first hiring on with IBM, my gross income has doubled. So, the shock of having disposable income has been replaced by being inured to many expenses. Things that I used to think were prohibitively expensive I now do without thinking.
For my part, I don’t think I keep working for the money. Although since I keep expenses down with a few notable exceptions (Sports Car; Eating out). I like to think that I am trading off toward future financial independence.
What deply concerns me it that that financial independence is hollow without happiness, and finding, and _doing_ what makes me happy is a challenge. Especially when I allow work to be a crutch.
I’d love to hear the Salon’s thoughts too :)
October 13th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
That’s exactly it. I’d assumed that my work *was* what made me happy, so the fact that it consumed most of my working hours was acceptable. And it isn’t the case that I hate my job, not by a long shot. It’s just that I’m seeing value in a lot of other things, which my job precludes due to how much time it (normally) consumes. I think I started thinking about this when I learned how easy it was to drop my hours. (I’m working 28 hours instead of 40, to permit me to teach CS 203 on the side.) My boss agreed to this without blinking. I know that not all jobs let you arbitrarily set your hours, but on seeing how easy it was at my work, I thought: Aha! So it’s actually possible to tailor this commitment; it’s not set in stone that I must deliver 40 hours. With flexibility comes the act of considering options you hadn’t realized were options. :)
October 13th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
What a wonderful, thought-provoking post, Kiri.
For me, the value of my education is not so much the potential for more income as the chance to pursue work that makes me happy (in light of my last post, the word “pursue” is key, but I believe! It’s just around the corner!), thus having a “better living experience.” I think the old saw that “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” has a lot of truth to it, although a life for work alone is clearly not balanced even if the work is very good. For my part, I think a 40-hour work week at a job I really enjoyed would still leave me enough free time to pursue other interests to my satisfaction. Conversely, if the work is very bad, there’s no work week short enough to coax me to stick with it for the long haul! The greatest gift my education has given me is that I wouldn’t have to. The saddest thing to me about minimum wage jobs is not that people work for small pay, but that people work at suck jobs for small pay. No fun. [An interesting related salon question would be, "would you do your job for minimum wage?" or if not, "can you imagine a job so enjoyable that you'd do it for minimum wage?"]
From the Reality Desk, I have to point out that most jobs do not allow you to cut your hours in half. This may be highly variable between professions. I think part of the reason women with children have had so much trouble breaking in to the law is that flexible hours are so rarely on the table. The Groom noted another small flaw in the half-time plan: if any of the hobbies you are taking up in the newly-free time cost money, you now can’t afford to do them. However, I think both of these problems could be worked around with some creativity and perseverance.
I’m going to be giving this a lot more thought — it brings to mind Socrates’ view that the unexamined life is not worth living. Thank you for reminding me to examine my life in ways that make the living better.
October 14th, 2007 at 12:14 am
That’s what I’ve believed for a long time. But somehow, that’s not quite the case anymore. Maybe I have too short an attention span; maybe I need more variety than a single job provides; maybe I’m just simply selfish and want to be able to do what takes my fancy sometimes, rather than some set-in-stone occupation. I’m still trying to figure it out. :)
Yes, isn’t that odd? It’s certainly true that for employers, there’s an additional overhead per human being they employ, regardless of the hours they work. But that aside (if it can be set aside), is there any real detriment to permitting employees to work the number of hours they’re interested in? This seems *especially* true for minimum-wage jobs, where it’s not the case that you need a certain person’s expert knowledge to get the job done. Those jobs should provide even more flexibility hour-wise. Yet curiously, it seems to be the opposite (at least in my small sample size).
Salonniers, I’m curious: which of your jobs would permit you to call the shots in terms of how many hours you’re currently working?
October 14th, 2007 at 11:21 am
An honorary salonnier, one Henry David Thoreau, contributes the following:
October 14th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Can we put Thoreau’s honoray membership to a vote? I mean, he bought someone’s house and turned it into floorboards. Then he wrote a book about it. Then I had to read the first half of said book, before throwing it at the wall.
OK. it is an appropriate, and nicely worded quote.
I think the only thing I ever enjoyed enough to do for minimum wage was teaching CS. I suppose Math would be fun too. Teaching the disinterested seems much harder!
I like working on side programming projects… but it is hard to go to work, code, some home and code something else.
I pretty much set my own hours, which is bad because I could be much more efficient. I note that because of the vast discrepencies in programmer efficiency, most managers have no concept of how specific tasks ‘ought’ to take. (Sizing programs is complex). If I wanted to go permanently part time however, I think it would take something special however. My plan is not to ask for that. My plan is to ask to work full time from some place other than Poughkeepsie.
In summary, I suspect that 28 Kiri hours = 56 most people hours?
October 15th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
I really like this line of thought. It keeps coming up… What annoys me is that my comments are so messy. Clearly careful thought is required.
October 16th, 2007 at 1:49 am
I have my quibbles with Thoreau, but I have to say that at this point I quite respect him as a thinker. :) And he likes to argue, so I think he’d fit right in with the Salon.
I wish I were as efficient as you seem to think I am! It continues to astound me how long *grading* takes. Even moving at top speed, it’s still taking me 2-3 hours to grade 22 submissions… and there’s a new homework to write, assign, and grade every Tuesday and Thursday. That’s on top of lecture preparation. Tomorrow on the plane I’ll be drafting a midterm exam.
By the way, I’m headed out to Florida to give a talk at the Women in Machine Learning workshop. And guess what? David Liben-Nowell will be there!
October 19th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
One good thing about my job is that I do have some flexibility, hence my ability to go back to work half-time at first after maternity leave. I love my job, but I wouldn’t do it for minimum wage, at least not for more than a few hours a week. Too many pain in the ass clients and bitey animals to make it worth my while. Vets are underpaid anyway, when compared to dentists, which is the closest “human” parallel in terms of amount of schooling required.