“Time is priceless“. “I would pay anything, to get one hour back and use it wiser“. Would you? Will you? If I give you the address to a Time Store, will you actually go there and buy hours of your own time? Ok, I will do that for you.
First, you need to understand that the value you grant to your own time has nothing to do with your hourly paycheck. Your hourly rate, at work, is how much your employer values your time, based on different factors. For You, however, one single hour may value much more. Second, it’s got nothing to do with age, unless you’re making the mistake of taking things for granted. The only time you have for sure is the present.
How to buy
In order to buy hours from the Time Store, there are 5 steps you need to take:
Step 1: Describe your day
Take a piece of paper and make an honest list (for your eyes only), taking down every action you do within a day and the time spent on it. For example, your list may look something like this: 3h driving, 1h cooking, 6h sleeping, 1h social media, 1h Netflix, 8h job, 1h lunch + 20 other items or more.
Step 2: What do you want to buy?
1h to go to the gym? 30mins for studying a foreign language? 1h of extra sleep? You have to name it.
Step 3: What will you trade?
What item from the list at step 1 will you trade for an item on the wishlist at step 2? Name it. “I would happily trade 1h of cooking for 1h of reading“.
Step 4: Look for the price
Yes, check out how much it costs 1 hour you would like to give up. Let me help you a bit with that search.
FREE items – 1h of watching movies or 30′ of social media scrolling. Simply don’t do it.
Shopping for groceries online can save you between 30′ and 2h. You don’t have to drive there, you don’t get lost in the supermarket, there’s no waiting at the counter. The additional cost is the delivery fee or not even that. Cost: 0- 3 EUR/h
1h of cooking? You’re not hiring a 3* Michelin chef. Grandmas, in my opinion, cook the best food. Can you afford to pay a nice old lady to cook for you while you’re doing something else?
Do you spend 10′ a day washing dishes? That’s over 48h in a year.A compact dishwasher costs about 250EUR + let’s say another 50EUR in consumables. Cost: 6.25EUR/ h in year 1, then about 1 EUR/h in the next years.
Cleaning help? A driver to take your kids to school and back? Check out the cost in your area. You can also split the cost with another person or familly.
Step 5. Decide to buy, if you can afford the price.
One thing I can tell you for sure: you will never get back the moments you could’ve had today, but decided to do something else instead. The Time Store is not a brick and mortar shop, but in our digital era there are more items in this shop than ever.
How much is your time worth?
