Do You Really Know How Much Your Time Is Worth?
Every now and then, everybody could encounter a question like:
Do you even know how much my time costs?
How much is your single hour worth?
Why do this yourself when you can delegate it so someone else? Your time is more expensive, after all!
Whenever I get asked “How much does your hour cost?” I always respond with a counter-question: “What kind of hour?”. Hours aren’t created equal – one could be worth a lot of money while another could hold no value at all.
It’s especially funny to look at an estimated hourly cost as a deciding factor to whether should one do a task by themselves or tell somebody else to do it.
— My hour is worth $100!
— Are you sure about that?
— Absolutely. No, actually it costs even more.
— OK, let’s check this, shall we? I’ll set the timer for 1 hour, and when it ends, you’ll show me that you’ve become hundred bucks richer. Are you ready?
…
No one (well, almost no one) sells their time separately. Usually, if one does sell their time, they do it in bulk, and as a part of some product or service at that. And it often appears that a person’s single hour is worth completely nothing on its own…