Time is Money: Re-evaluating How We Spend Our Most Precious Resource

We’ve borrowed economic speech to talk about our relationship with time — we spend it, save it, waste it, invest it, as if time were a currency laid up in a bank account. This metaphor influences our thinking about everyday decision-making, life planning and basis of value. But time is not money, it isn’t something we can gain back in the future or exchange between various accounts. Looking at time in terms of currency demonstrates that there are significant pros and cons to making what many consider to be our most finite resource a matter of exchange.

The Economics of Time

This is how capitalism shapes our understanding of time: Every minute carries latent economic value, and every second should be treated with the respect it deserves. This system has practical advantages — it promotes efficiency, guides our decisions and gives us quantifiable means to compare choices. Opportunity cost thinking enables us to think about what we’re giving up when we choose one activity over another, which can lead to more mindful decision-making.

But economic models of time typically imply that faster is better and all time should be productive. This view can also turn rest, relationships and reflection into “time costs” rather than rewarding experiences in their own right. Just as an online casino computes the varying values of risk and reward underpinning the different bets it offers, so too can our culture cause us to feel compelled to wager with our time for maximum value — whatever that is — even if it comes at a cost in terms of presence and meaning.

Cultural Variations in Time Value

Various cultures think of the currency of Time vastly differently from each other, corresponding to our currency metaphor’s cultural specificity:

• Monochronic vs. Polychronic: It’s a cultural thing – some cultures value being on time and controlling the schedule, while others value relationships and the need to-do things according to natural rhythm rather than clock time
• Linear vs. Cyclical: Western linear time is a series of discrete points that we consume and can never get back while much of spiritual/cultural indigenous belief is that time is cyclical, something that renews itself.
• Personal Time vs. Communal Time: Some people in some cultures only care to keep track for their own personal time, others rather like to look at the clock with the idea of knowing how much communal time it still is and not as much being aware that it’s just some amount of seconds/minutes past/before a certain hour.
• Sacred vs. Secular: Religious traditions draw a contrast between profane and holy times, complicating economic valuations per se

The Limitations of Time Currency

Time is money. Putting time into the equation makes a number of problematic assumptions: But time is fundamentally unlike money, because there’s no way to stockpile it — we can’t work 15 hours today and get more time off next week in any literal sense. The currency metaphor as well debunks the reality that not all time has equivalent value – depending on our energy at the time, our life stage or circumstances we can do more or less with it in its embodied form.

And most significantly, this economic model of time can produce what author Craig Lambert calls temporal anxiety: the perpetual unease that we aren’t getting our money’s worth out of time invested, that we’re “wasting” valuable seconds and minutes and hours, or that we’re falling behind in some unseen race against external measures of passing time.

Alternative Frameworks for Time

Instead of simply seeing time as currency, we might try on other metaphors instead: time as garden (to be cultivated and waited for), time as river with its rhythms of ebb and flow, or time as gift to receive rather than maximize, an opportunity to savor rather than wield.

Wrapping Up

While this metaphor has some utility in terms of decision-making and prioritization, it should not be our sole means of understanding time. As we acknowledge the distinctive character of time — its unidirectionality, experiential variability and intimate relationship to what matters and whom we care about — it suggests a more textured way of actually accounting for our days. The target isn’t withdrawal from time-Power, but rather increasingly perfect ratios of efficiency and presence, products and process, optimized production and acceptance of the mystery-bound nature of time.