What is your time worth?
It's easy to think that grocery shopping, laundry, and cleaning don't really take up that much time. But when you add up the 2-3 hours going from store to store, the 6-10 hours of laundry time, and anywhere from 1 (if you are a man) and 4 (if you're a woman) hours cleaning- you've just lost 9-17 hours per week of time on chores. Easily the equivalent of a part time job, or three days of vacation!
What is your time worth? Catherine Rampell's New York Times article Outsource Your Way to Success shines a light on the best kept secret of highly productive people:
One of the oldest, if not entirely intuitive, principles in economics is comparative advantage, developed by the British economist David Ricardo in the early 19th century. As introductory econ students all learn, it explains why countries and companies ought to outsource the production of lower-value goods and services, even if they can produce them more efficiently themselves.
Even if you’re faster and more effective than everyone else at a given task — fighting with the cable company, say, or folding your socks just so — you still might be better off if you pay someone else to do it for you. Why? Because there is an opportunity cost for every hour consumed by these tedious, nonproductive tasks; there exists some higher-value activity you could be spending your time on instead.
So, how will you spend your extra free time?
