The Opportunity Cost of Time: A Reflective Deep Dive

A capital we all possess, yet squander freely, represents a distinct form of wealth with its own set of economics. It offers exchange rates through ideas and yields dividends as personal and professional growth: Time.

In this article, I'll delve into my perspective on the economics of time—a resource that, unlike money, is nonrenewable, making its management crucial for both personal and professional growth.

The Opportunity Value of Time

Let's first explore the various ways that time can hold value intrinsically or extrinsically.

Exchange Value: Time spent earning money or other tangible benefits in exchange for time.

Literary Value: Time spent on self-improvement, learning, well roundedness, or building empathy, such as learning a new perspective from a book you've read.

Scarcity Value: The economic concept that something (time) is limited, thus making it more valuable.

Health Value: Time spent on well-being, mental health, or time spent injured or in pain.

Intrinsic Value: Time's inherent worth to oneself, how it’s spent, and how the deposits thereof affect the future value of time.

Legacy Value: The long-term impact and post-spend value of how you spent your time. We value this at an individual scale as a society – consider the naming rights of a building as a transactional legacy-for-sale vs investing time of your life into bettering an organization and having it memorialized instead.

Social Value: Time invested in social bonds, networking, and building connections with other humans.

I learned early on that using the right tool for the right job—be it learning Linux or choosing which log to split—makes all the difference. These concepts are not separate; they can work together to yield a higher value of time.

Ideas as Investments

Humans are idealistic; these ideas are like shares in a stock market. They all hold some level of potential for future yield – negative or positive. Yet, unlike stocks which are subject to impersonal calculus, our ideas are dynamically valued. They interact with the zeitgeist, our personal or professional growth, and even with other ideas to create an ecosystem of intellectual wealth. They are investments in a complex, interconnected marketplace where time is the currency. The question then becomes, are you diversifying your portfolio wisely, or are you stuck in the inertia of past investments?

I always knew technology was my calling (for better or worse) – an unquenchable thirst for knowledge combined with an ever changing field. This conviction led me, at 12, to laboriously split wood for local farms at $10 an hour. The immediate goal was a modern laptop, an upgrade from my hand-me-down 90s beige boxes, to launch my first business. Yet, as I pulled the lever over and over, I felt a haunting sense that I personally was wasting time that could be invested more wisely. Though, I've since realized the value of the time I spent doing log splitting meditation.

Some kids collected baseball cards, I spent my time collecting splinters, life lessons, and freely available open source software.

At long last, armed with a budget Asus laptop running free Linux, I dove into my next quest— googling “how do I use my money to make more money”. After six months of reading more tales of regret about the investments people didn't make versus the ones they did, I launched “[Podunk]’s Computer Doctor” and continued questioning how people discover inherent “value”, mostly focusing on hard capital.

As the storage space on my basic machine filled up, I found myself back at the farms, laboring for the next hardware upgrade. It was around that time a realization struck: the value of my investment was not solely in financial capital but more importantly, in the time I spent to get there. I redirected most of my focus in the following years to invest my time in learning economics, empathy, business, and Linux. No wonder I’m a Solutions Architect now.

Mike's Market of Time

In a theoretical “Stock Market of Time”, every idea you entertain is a calculated trade with the opportunity value of time as a measurement. You perform due diligence, investing hours in research and validation before buying in. If valuable and aligned with your time strategy, once committed, you pour time into nurturing your idea, while remaining aware of its volatility — subject to varying external criticisms and your own evolving judgments.

A well-executed idea pays dividends: a new skill, a new project or product, or even monetarily. Yet, wisdom also dictates when to sell, to cut your losses on an idea that's draining time without sufficient yield. A portfolio of ideas requires diversification through a strategy for time, a balanced blend of long-term investments and quick trades, moderated by indicators like peer feedback, achievement, and personal reflection. Through this lens, the question becomes glaringly relevant: How are you managing your portfolio in the stock market of time?

I found myself in a corporate call recently where a leader said “I think if you’re never failing it just means you’re not trying enough new things” and my teenage realization was yanked from the depth of my mind again. This message resonated with me as I see many people often too worried to take the next jump and try something innovative or different that puts them in a position where they could potentially fail.

In my role as a Solutions Architect at Red Hat, I find time management and failure tolerance increasingly critical. As an anecdote, I took a calculated risk early on by investing significant time in 2022 into learning and enabling others on Kubernetes-based Virtualization—a then-emerging technology. Several skeptics saw it as a gamble at best and a waste of time at worst, but time proved it was a well-placed bet.

Today, it's a cornerstone in several corporate Kubernetes strategies as well as several organizations virtualization modernization plans. Validating that the "currency" of time spent learning and advocating for it yielded high "returns".

Most investments, whether monetary or time based, will come with inflection points and criticism but having a framework to analyze your time investments and tools to know when to stand firm and when to relent are key.

Closing Time

In wrapping up, the essence of our discourse on time's economy boils down to a simple truth: time, our most precious resource, demands wise investment. My transition from a dorky log-splitting pre-teen to a Solutions Architect for Space Agencies at Red Hat exemplifies this. It's not just the financial gains but the holistic growth, relationships, and legacies we forge with each passing moment.

As we navigate our world which seems to operate in hyperspeed, the real question emerges: How are we leveraging our finite time to create meaningful change? In the end, the true wealth of time shows not in how much we have, but in how meaningfully we use what we're given.

P.S. Can someone use their time to finally rid the world of fax machines?