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In recent weeks, I’ve talked about being more selective in what you take on your plate as well as the opportunity costs associated with medicine. The former directly related to time and the latter had a significant portion discussing time.
This week’s post continues this trend of looking at our relationship with time. Specifically, we will examine how you can place a value on your time.
Prioritize
In life, there are always priorities competing for your time and you need to decide what’s most important to you.
For example, do you want to build or strengthen your relationships, create more freedom, earn more money, or contribute more to society?
I’m not here to tell you which of these you should focus on. Instead, I want you to decide where your attention goes and for how long in order to accomplish your goals.
You Can Have It All
You can have or do everything you want, just not all at the same time.
Perhaps for the next few years you want to design a more flexible career that will provide you more freedom. Later you have ambitions to contribute in a different way to society like in some philanthropic manner. (For the record, being a physician is more than enough and already is a contribution to the betterment of those around us).
These goals require the strategic allocation of time and attention especially in light of competing priorities like family and your day job.
You can free up more time by optimizing productivity, time management, and decision making. I’ve explored these topics in prior posts that are all linked to at the top of this post.
I Like Ike
I’d like to spend just a moment specifically calling attention to the Eisenhower Matrix in helping you organize tasks by their importance and urgency. We want to spend the most time in our zone of genius, which is working on non-urgent, important material.
We too often allow the urgent to usurp the important, and thus despite spinning our wheels in a frenzy, we feel like we get no traction or don’t make progress on big goals.
Finding ways to delegate work is a critical piece of avoiding this trap. Most of us don’t have an army of minions at our beck and call.
Speak for yourself!
Therefore, we must trade something else to free up our time. You’ve probably guessed that that something else is money.
The One Tool to Rule Them All
Money is a tool, that’s it. It’s provided in exchange for value rendered. It’s not inherently good or bad. It’s neutral. Like any tool, it can be wielded to do good or bad.
A hammer can be used to build a home, but it can also be used to hurt a person. Similarly, money can be used to pay physicians to heal others or it can be used to pay a hitman to take someone out. (There’s a Tonya Harding reference in there somewhere).
We know that money is a transactional tool. Many think that as such money is only useful for buying things─homes, cars, the latest gadgets, children (I threw that in there to make sure you are paying attention). But the real power of money is buying back your time.
Calculate Your Hourly Rate
It comes as no surprise then that the first way I want to look at valuing time is looking at how much time is worth in terms of money.
The easiest and most common way to assess this is to calculate your hourly rate. To do so, you can simply tally the total amount of money you make and divide it by the total number of hours worked over some meaningful timeframe (like one month to one year). I don’t think looking at just a single day, for example, would be as useful given day-to-day variability.
So if you make $250,000 per year and work 50 hours/week for 50 weeks/year (assuming 2 weeks vacation [hopefully it’s more than that, but it makes the math easy!]), then your hourly rate is 250,000/2500 (50 x 50) = $100/hour.
If you work those same hours and weeks but your income is $375,000, then your rate is $150/hour.
I’ve seen physician hourly rates as low as $60/hour (think Peds in desirable urban areas) all the way up to $500-600/hour (think Ortho in rural N. Dakota). By the way, if you’re getting paid $60/hour, find a new job!
I'll Take What's Behind Door Number...
So now that you’ve calculated your rate, you can evaluate things based on cost and time.
Let’s say there’s a $50 watch you want to buy. You spent one hour researching watches and settled on this particular one only to discover that you’d have to pay $50 to have it shipped to you!
You search again for it online and learn that you can purchase it in person at a store one hour away. Oh, and your hourly rate is $100/hour.
What do you do?
- Order it online and pay the shipping
- Drive to the store and purchase in person
- Screw it — try to find another watch
Option 1 involves paying $100 to have the watch delivered. You also spent an hour researching (sunk cost), so all-in-all you “spent” $200.
Option 2 involves paying $50 for the watch, but driving two hours there and back plus an hour researching for an all-in cost of $350.
Option 3 means you lost $100 in researching only to have to start over—so $100 in and no current prospect. We have no idea how long it’d take you to find an alternative watch and then determine how/where to purchase it, but that time in addition to the cost of the watch is almost certainly going to push you above $200.
Despite your hesitation and frustration at the $50 shipping cost on a $50 watch, it’s the cheapest option and best use of your time & money.
Use in Moderation
Now you can take this further and avoid any activities that don’t generate income at your hourly rate. So, for example, to free up an hour of your time, it can be very worth the money to pay a neighbor’s kid to mow your lawn for $30 if your rate is $100/hour.
Some rationalize that they could use that time to earn more at their higher rate. If I spend that hour working for $100 while the neighbor’s kid mows my lawn, then I’m net positive $70!
Even my neighbor’s kid is excited for me!
This can be a slippery slope, and folks can sometimes delude themselves in one of two ways:
- They assume that any time saved outsourcing is time they’ll spend working, which is often not the case. This is only problematic if they over-do it and outsource everything in the setting of not working enough hours. So they have a $500/hour rate but only work two hours/week without other income coming in. Obviously, there’s a mismatch there that is not sustainable.
- They use this construct to fuel their workaholism due to the allure of each additional hour of productivity. Rest, recreation, and volunteering fall by the wayside. This is not healthy.
Freeing Up My Time
I still often use the above construct to determine what I can outsource.
In regards to my entrepreneurial pursuits, I’ve hired help for my program launches for some of the tech stuff as well as Facebook advertising. I could do the former readily, but it would take me hours to do what a pro could do in an hour. The latter I’d have to spend time learning and doing; that’s just not a good use of my time.
More recently, I hired a virtual assistant (VA) to help me with some of the repetitive and mundane tasks like copying over this blog post, formatting it, and setting up the email to go out to you about the post!
This allows me more time to work ON the business rather than just IN it, which means I can focus my efforts on increasing my impact and helping more physicians.
A Different Approach
However, I’ve been shifting more and more to judging the use of my time by the value it brings me—not in a monetary sense, but in an intrinsic value sense.
Umm…not quite.
For me this bucket of things I value includes family, friends, travel (limited in the COVID era), and various pursuits like coaching, creating businesses, helping others, drumming, visiting zoos and museums, and personal development.
These are desirable to me because they bring me joy and enrich my life, no matter the monetary cost. Therefore, I am willing to pay more of a premium if something can free up my time to allow me to do these things I value.
Let me give you an example. At the beginning of 2021, I dropped my work hours from 1.0 full-time equivalent (FTE) to 0.8 FTE.
I cut back because my time is too valuable to me to spend too much of it working clinically and not spending more of it doing other things that truly bring me joy.
Decreasing my work hours did come at a “price”—a 20% drop in pay—but I haven’t looked back.
I’d be remiss not to point out that I enjoy seeing patients and plan to continue doing so. But I want to do it on my terms, and I just don’t want to do as much of it as is expected at a 1.0 FTE 
.
Non-Negotiable Free Time
In addition to the intrinsic value construct, everyone should have what James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, calls “non-negotiable free time.”
Non-negotiable free time is time on which you don’t place a dollar value.
It’s time you spend on leisure activities and focusing on your wellbeing and connections. You don’t eschew these life-fulfilling activities to work more or earn more, so don’t even factor them into such calculations.
After all, the whole point of doing this exercise is to determine how much your time is worth to enable you to spend more of your time as you choose in a way that aligns with your values and priorities.
Operationalizing Everything
I encourage all of you to do the exercise of calculating your hourly rate. Then take a look at all the tasks you have to get done and assign a best guess estimate for how much it would cost to outsource each task.
Compare those estimates to your hourly rate. How do you stack up?
Next, use the Eisenhower Matrix and assign each task to the appropriate quadrant. Now you have an idea of the cost of all your activities arranged by urgency and importance.
From here you can see if you can delegate or outsource more than just what occupies the Delegate quadrant. After all, if the cost is low enough, then perhaps you can offload even the important tasks that you thought had to be done by you.
Time > Money
Now pause and reflect on the question that started this post: How much IS your time worth to you?
We only have a certain amount of time on this world so make sure how you use it aligns with your values and priorities.
I also challenge you to ponder what specific actions you can take to best accomplish this.
Helping physicians reclaim their time away from work for themselves and their priorities is of utmost importance. It’s why I created Charting Conquered—click here to learn more.
I hope you come away from this post with a new or better understanding of the relationship between money and time and how you can use it to better value your time.
So what’s your time worth? Let me know in the comments section below.
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