What is the value of our time?

On the mistake of making money the measure of time, and other misadventures from my past

“We can’t thank you enough for your time. We know you have more important things to do.”

Do I though? This had to be the third or fourth time the staff at the Orbispace Initiative had thanked me. I was teaching a session on AI during their Future of Female Leadership Forum. Girls from all across New South Wales had travelled for hours from their rural homes to learn about STEM. Students shuffled between networking lunches and learning sessions diving into engineering, all while getting practical tips on running a business or understanding the art of networking. A substantial feat for the organisers. All I had to do was show up and repeat the same material.

Anna, the founder, got me a bouquet of chrysanthemums and a handwritten card as thanks. The ivory and blush petals, delicate in their wrapping. From train to bus, I wondered if my rush home would ultimately damage them before I could sit them in a black vase I had waiting to be filled. I knew I couldn’t read the card in public. I was feeling sensitive; from the heartwarming thud I felt seeing the girls lighting up at their creations, from the uncomfortable feeling of praise, from the guilt of not devoting more time to causes like this. It spilled over when I finally opened the card to read. I sat there, staring at the words, “June 25th, the day you empowered the next generation.”

A day, really only six hours of my time, that could impact a new generation. I honestly can’t think of a meeting or day of work in any of my roles that would have such an impact. I would gladly give twelve, twenty-four hours more if it meant it was having an impact on someone’s life. In this case, maybe a girl in a rural community gets excited about STEM in the same way I did decades ago when I was futzing around on Geocities.

So my mind was reeling with the question: did I actually have more important things to do than this? Sure, my work has scale–240 million people use the tool I help build, I’ve got a team counting on me. But this felt different. I had important things to do that day, yes, but this was more important, somehow. How would I even explain that? I needed to sit down and write it out. It’s something that has only solidified for me over recent years. Something that finally makes sense now with words.

I don’t assign value or worth to time. My time is my time. It’s entirely up to me on how I want to spend it. And because of this, I don’t believe my time is more or less valuable than the next person’s.

When I lived in the US, all I did was think about how time equals money. Starting in my freelancing career, I thought about nothing but my worth in daily, weekly and monthly rates. As my experience and clientele ticked up, so did my rates. But this thinking had some unintended consequences on my personal life as well: all my time was quantified. I started viewing my free time as needing worth too. Any hobby or downtime had to tie back to boosting my career in some form or manner. Photos had to demonstrate my eye. Social media had to demonstrate my wit. Writing had to demonstrate my range. Everything had to demonstrate something to the unseen hirer.

Not only was my concept of creativity destroyed by this kind of thinking, but also my concept of community. I was an early streamer on Twitch, and even though I found a great group of people to chat and play games with every night, I could not escape the dreadful need to tie this back to my career. I needed to write blog posts about game UI to tie it back to being a designer, I had to be professional in all my videos in case a company saw it. So much worry about growing my following that I ended up ghosting everything I had done, everyone I had befriended and retreating from one of my most beloved hobbies: video games.

Even when I had my hobbies outside of a digital medium, like rug making, I could not stop myself from figuring out some way to monetise it. Surely if I was putting this much time and effort into something, it needed to mean something. And by something, I mean money. The more I climbed in my career, the less I tried new things. I just couldn’t justify spending my time being bad at something when I could be making money with my talents.

My body rebelled in many ways, I think trying to signal how wicked this line of thinking was for me. I’d end up collapsed on my couch or bed, with only the mental faculties to take in a mindless conversation or TV show. Or, even after a night of rest, I’d wake up head pounding, vision tunnelled with a migraine lasting an entire weekend. There’s more to life than work, my body was screaming at me, but I just didn’t want to hear it.

Essentially, my time was never really my own.

I didn’t have a profound realisation for change though. For many, this moment was the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world shut down and caused a reset. I worked like a dog during the pandemic, in fact, I think my thinking here got worse. I continued to grind myself down until I felt like a fine dust. Anything could blow me away into the wind. Instead, it trickled in through a number of ways once I moved to Australia.

One, for the first time in my life, I had actual work-life balance, despite working really hard. When someone saw me working late, they’d tell me to log off. People ended their work days at the time it was supposed to end, no late night messages. And if there was a late night message, it was explained with shifting hours (I took the morning off, so I’m working now). Sick leave, annual leave, all of that meant do not disturb and do not expect a reply. Never in my life as a working adult had I felt like I had the reins on my life, the feeling that I could control my time.

I was also surrounded by a culture that seemed to enjoy parts of life that didn’t need to justify their existence outside of the hustle. People playing in a footy league…just for fun? Taking time out of the day to have a coffee and sit down…just to chat? My husband had hounded me about this for years, the importance of relaxing or as he calls it “lepak”. No meaning, no agenda, just being and connecting.

With this time to breathe, I reflected on my past couple of years of work (I know, it’s always about work. This is where the astrology girlies would point to my Capricorn placements). I had spent a lot of my career building marketplaces: digital spaces where essentially people had traded their time for money. And in many ways, these people were trading a lot of their time and labor for not a lot of money. Everything revolved around quantifying people’s time for money.

There are some people that work on marketplaces for life, and I understand why, there’s a thrill in the economics of it. It built my career but something had always felt off for me. I talked with pet sitters, with such care and compassion for animals, trying to justify their hourly rates to others. I rode with aunties and uncles who spent their days whipped by wind and dust to deliver their packages, people or otherwise, only to be worried about being undercut by another competitor.

They were working hard, so does time really equal money? And when my physical and mental health was getting worse and worse working all the time, I somehow justified that as being worth the money I was receiving. Was my physical body, the thoughts in my mind really worth that? A value made up by some other system entirely?

My years of notions were crumbling around me. I needed to take care of myself. I needed to take care of others. I needed the support of community, despite being a hermit. Slowly, unraveling, I started realising my time is not worth money. In fact, my time is just time. There aren’t dollars and cents to it, just what I want to do with it.

And since it is mine, I can assign whatever value or justification to it. Time for myself is prioritised above everything else, which sounds incredibly selfish. But the older I get, the more I realise selfish can be good, even liberating.

If I want to spend four hours getting my nails done, so be it. If I want to spend a whole day building a spreadsheet admiring my perfume collection, it is time well-spent. If I want to spend hours at an event one month and not the next, that’s fine. None of these decisions are time in, money out. Instead, it’s:

• Does this bring me joy?

• Will this have a positive impact on others?

• Will this help myself or others grow?

• Is this a moment to be a little silly?

Of course, this can have its own issues with this approach. I know I write this with a billion unread messages and emails. It’s not that I don’t think the sender’s time is valuable; in fact, it eats me up inside when I’ve left someone hanging. But I also need to consider everything around me. Do I want to spend hours in the evenings and weekends on my screen replying or do I want to spend time outside with my husband and my two cats? I’ll almost always pick the latter, as harsh as it may sound.

The chrysanthemums sit on my shelf now. A beautiful reminder when I’m checking those unread emails: my time isn’t actually up for negotiation. Sure, people will assume they know what’s important to me, what my hours should be worth. They might even assume my intentions, that I’m ignoring them, that I’m being political. But I know my intentions and what’s in my head.

Your time doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. Not your boss, not your family, not the productivity gurus all around the web. You can spend four hours at a coffee shop reading a book that won’t help your career. You can choose the thing that brings you joy over the thing that brings you money. It’s nice to explain your choices sometimes, but you don’t have to. You can disappoint people by prioritising yourself. And you don’t have to justify any of it.

✌️CJ