Professional Development


A peculiar resource
Time is a resource we must manage according to appropriate economic criteria.
This may sound surprising, but it is not if you think of economy as a science that studies the allocation of scarce resources to alternative options.
Time is an atypical resource, because it is exact, inflexible, essential, irreplaceable and unforgiving. Time flows, it cannot be stored. On the other hand, we can do nothing without it. The great paradox of time is that we are all given the same amount: all of it!
However, is time an economic resource? In first place, is it scarce? Would we face the same time problems if, instead, a day had 48 or 100 hours? Yes, I believe so. The problem would still be the same; therefore, it is not a matter of quantity. Anyway, let's remember that we have all the time there is.
How much is time worth? The answer to this question varies from person to person. How much do you think one hour of your work is worth?
Use the spreadsheets we gave you to help you calculate.
Determine your gross annual income - include social security costs, although it is a cost borne by the employer. Then divide the result by the total number of hours you work per year. For example, suppose that you earn $45,000 per year and that the social security cost borne by the employer is $15,000 per year. The total number of hours worked in one year is 2,000. If you feel 2,000 hours is a low number, remember that contracts usually stipulate anywhere between 1,700 and 1,900 working man hours per year. Therefore, you can calculate how much one hour of your work is worth by dividing $60,000 by 2,000, which equals $30 per hour.
Let's ask another question: whom does time belong to? We are talking about our time, your time. If your time costs $30 per hour, would you do the same with it, if, for every hour that passed, you had to pay someone $30? Would you let time go by exactly the same way as you do now?
Whatever the case, we all have to ask ourselves, "What do I sell?" It is obvious that we do not sell time, but, on the other hand, we cannot sell anything if there is no time. We, as professionals, work using time.