Time is Money: How I Reclaimed My Low-Quality Leisure Time

July 2020

Henry David Thoreau was a transcendentalist perhaps best known for his book Walden, a work that dove into the merits of simple living and self-reliance.

Thoreau was on a quest for spiritual self-discovery before modern-day wellness trends made it… well, trendy.

One of Thoreau’s contributions to the way we think today is that time is money. It’s believed that Thoreau was the first to assign an economic value to time, declaring that the true cost of something is the amount of life you have to surrender in order to get it.

By that measure, the cost of your salary is the amount of life you have to hand over to your employer to earn it.

(For a quick and only mildly demoralizing exercise, take your salary, shave off the zeroes, and divide it by half. That’s how much you’re worth per hour, according to The Man™. E.g., someone who makes $80,000/year is “worth” $40/hour.)

Of course, this perspective is, on the surface, a little too simple. You need your salary to survive (though Thoreau would argue you could probably get by on a mere fraction of it, thereby buying back most of your own time), and bartering back a few hours here and there per week isn’t exactly standard operating procedure for most HR departments (though I’ve heard FI success stories in which people negotiated accepting half the money in exchange for only working half the time).

But what about your downtime?

This is where the calculation gets hairier. Sure, your employer may deem that your waking hours from 9 to 5 are worth some sum (in our previous example with an $80,000 salary, your working day is worth $320), but what about the remaining 16 hours of the day?

It’s easy to forget sometimes that two-thirds of the day belongs to you and you alone. The majority!

How much value do you assign to your own time?

If my screen time a month ago was any indication, I didn’t value mine much.

At its peak, my daily screen time was cresting the 3-hour mark – meaning that the breakdown of my day somehow netted out to look like this:

Sleep: 8 hours

Work: 8 hours

Everything else: 8 hours – [3 hours of phone time] = 5 hours for “actual living” every day

I’m not sure why it took the help of multiple books (read: Untamed by Glennon Doyle, Digital Minimalism and Deep Work by Cal Newport) to help me see the light, but I finally looked up from the blue-backlit screen long enough to realize, Shit, I’m giving away a lot of my day – for free – to this super low-value activity.

Especially when I consider that the “work” portion of my day more or less extends closer to 10 or 11 hours when you factor in my side hustles, I was leaving myself a whopping 3 hours to devote to the business of actual living.

This isn’t a manifesto on the virtues (or lack thereof) of social media.

Instead of publishing yet another article on the internet about why the internet is terrible, I’d rather take the perspective that your time is valuable and should be treated as such. If you find Instagram valuable, then theoretically, that’s a high-value activity for you.

But even as someone who routinely and consistently made real money from social media, I can still confidently say – after going mostly off the grid for three weeks – that I’ve derived more value from a life without social media in the form of mental health benefits, productivity, and quality time with people in real life than any brand partnership was offering me.

Of course, if your full-time job is “influencer,” your social media use can and should qualify for the aforementioned 8 hours of daily work.

Most of us, though, are surrendering vast quantities of our time to creations that are barely old enough to be our younger siblings and believing (with only fleeting bouts of skepticism) that this is normal, acceptable, and “the way it is.”

Not all leisure activities are valued equally.

That is to say, we lump browsing our phones and binging Netflix into the same category as we do things like reading, taking walks, and spending time with loved ones.

My friends, it’s just not so.

Reclaiming your low-quality leisure time doesn’t mean that everything you do has to establish an ROI. I’m not suggesting you monetize your bedtime routine. Instead, I’m considering that we, collectively, may have allowed a few nefarious players to sneak into our sacred “relaxation” grab bag.

These programs and products masquerade innocently enough as services to help us unwind in our downtime, but their omnipresence is pervasive. After all, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. You are not a customer of Facebook. Advertisers are the customers of Facebook. Facebook isn’t selling relaxation – they’re selling your attention to the highest bidder, and we’ve all been donating free of charge, to the tune of hours per day.

Some leisure activities leave you feeling refreshed, energized, or otherwise better off.

Others leave you feeling inexplicably more fatigued, anxious, or stressed.

It’s up to you to determine which, from the list above, belongs in each category for you.

Screen time doesn’t lie.

And while this article is a slight oversimplification for the sake of brevity, I’m using screen time as a proxy for time wasted – truly wasted. Squandered for no good reason, instead of utilized and savored and wrung for every drop of value and joy and meaning it could’ve, should’ve and would’ve delivered otherwise. Even if some of the foregone value was merely experiencing the emotion of boredom without immediately reaching into our pocket to manipulate the nature of the moment to something more tantalizing.

My biggest personal realization was that I believed my iPhone use was something to fill those useless gaps in my day when I’d otherwise be doing something equally valueless, or nothing at all – waiting in line, sitting at a stoplight, slumped in my desk chair between meetings.

But those 3 hours were coming from somewhere.

I started to consider what those 3 hours were really worth to me – 21 hours per week. Almost an entire day.

And then, in a burst of brutal honesty and Millennial irony, I deleted every app from my phone that tempted me to mindlessly click, scroll, compare, and drain.

Honestly, I expected it to be more difficult than it was.

I’m not living in a cabin in the woods, but life without Instagram makes it feel that way sometimes.

Hey, maybe your biggest time-waster is Reddit. Or maybe you’re a sucker for Twitter. The bottom line is, this takes a lot of different forms – and maybe social media isn’t your siren song at all. Maybe it’s the Hulu Premium membership and its infinite scroll of high-production value, neon content that sends you into the time-bending vortex.

Whatever it is, I’m not anti-technology – I’m pro-humanity. Pro-intentionality. Pro-actually deciding for yourself how you want to spend the next 45 minutes of your time rather than tripping and falling into an algorithm-driven slot machine disguised as a way to connect with friends. And hey, if you want to spend those 45 minutes on Instagram, that’s OK, too – but decide first. I can’t think of a single instance in which I’d sit down with my phone and choose to spend 45 minutes scrolling through Stories, but I know I did it – on a near-daily basis.

Funny enough, one of the things that I’ve used all my newfound time for is actually seeing my friends in real life.

This isn’t even a plea to stop using a phone or delete social media – it’s a reminder that your time has value.

Those precious, wild, beautiful 24 hours. You sell 8 (or more) of them to the underwriter of your paychecks every day.

Do you really want to give away 3 more to the 34-year-old software engineers modifying the intermittent reward structure of your Likes and Comments in Silicon Valley?

Because here’s what I found happened when I walked away: At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, my day felt like mine again.

The quality of my morning walk and stale peanut butter toast was no longer relative to the morning of an acquaintance on Instagram who went to an artisanal bagel shop and meditated by a koi pond.

The fun of my weekend was no longer determined only in relation (and diminished in comparison) to the trip that a friend of a friend of a friend went on to Palm Springs.

I felt myself making actual decisions about what was going to come next in my day and stumbling into open blocks of space where ordinarily I’d just stumble back into an app. No more What have I missed in the 16 minutes since I last opened this?

The open blocks of space allowed for free-flowing and unprompted thoughts that usually morphed into calls to friends, ideas for posts, new projects for work, or simply a found hour by the pool of reading in quiet.

And how do I really know that I’ve reclaimed my time? Specifically before my three-week social sabbatical and more broadly before Coronavirus, I was probably reading 3 books per year, if we’re being generous.

In the last month alone, I’ve read 6. COVID made me a reader again – and, actually, the reading is what sent me down this path in earnest. Now that’s a high-quality leisure activity with a solid return – an activity that helped me earn back 3 hours of my time every day.

Your time is valuable. Be the boss of it.

More or less, your autonomy over the 8 working hours of your day early in your career is somewhat minimal. You work on what you’re told to work on, you attend the meetings that require your presence, and the problems you solve are typically someone else’s.

Even the 8 hours you spend sleeping are yours but not really, since you’re unconscious for them.

The remaining 8 hours arguably make or break the quality of your life.

Realistically, that’s probably the 3 hours before work (the time from 6-9 a.m.) and the 5 hours after work (the time from 5-10 p.m.) – plenty of time to get into all sorts of hobbies or real, quality relaxation activities that will leave you feeling better, not psychologically bloated, at the end.

After all, you have the hours. They’re just hiding in your screen time report.