How to tell if your time is being wasted

It's 9am and you find yourself in a business meeting, a lecture, surfing Facebook, or standing there while your girlfriend tries on dresses. How do you know if this is a good use of your time or, as you secretly suspect, a colossal waste of energy that could be better spent on angry birds?

What's your time worth anyway?

It's a bit harder to figure out the value of the thing you're doing, and that changes depending on the activity, so let's start with the baseline. How much, exactly, is your time worth?

First, let's look at something called opportunity cost. Economists use this to figure out hidden costs beyond "This activity costs $100 to attend."

Economic
This is pretty easy to figure out. How much do you make per hour while at work? (Let's say $10 because that math is easy!) Thus, if the activity is two hours long, you've lost the potential to make $20. But wait! You also have to figure out the maximum amount of time you're willing/allowed to work a week - if your schedule already calls for 40 hours and you are not permitted overtime, you can't apply that $10 an hour lost opportunity.

Social
People, as a whole, tend to enjoy spending time with people. So, when you're at a lame ass meeting, you're not spending time with associates or friends being rad. This is a bit harder, and a lot more abstract, to put a value on but is just as important. Even if you're jobless, homeless, and mostly braindead, there's a certain point where you go "Fuck this bullshit, I'm out!"

Health / Personal Development

This part involves some hard truths. Do you actually spend your time bettering yourself? Be it with exercise, agriculture, inventing home health serums... Or do you spend your free time smoking, drinking, eating dorritos and sitting on the couch in your underwear? Either way, there's a value (positive or negative) on your time reflected in potential years of life. Something to also consider is how much time do you spend learning of your own volition? An hour watching Cosmos with Niel Degrasse Tyson is time better spent than looking at pictures of kitties on Tumblr.

So, with this, you can figure out what your average day is worth - say: $80, three hours socializing, and (assuming each cigarette shortens your life by 11 minutes), -1 hour of life. Then, you can divide that by whatever interval your activity in question is.

What's the value of the thing you're doing?

There are a lot of variables out there. Networking, opportunity for growth, prerequisite for a degree... The important part is figuring out those variables, and then also applying them to the value of your "average" day. You can't, as they say, compare apples and oranges, so make sure you're contrasting like terms.

Economic

Figure out the cost of your activity! Are you paying to be there (class), being paid to be there (time share seminar), or being paid to be there but also expected to make up the time (work meeting)?

In any case, I find the easiest way is just bust out a calculator and figure out how much, per hour, it's costing/giving you. For example, if a class is $2,500 you figure out it costs $156 per class and $63 per hour. At the end of an hour, did you feel like you would have paid $63 for that with full disclosure of the contents? If you really want to go deeper, apply that per minute. If, in that 2.5 hour class, you spend two hours on facebook, you just paid $126 to do what you do at home for free. Not looking good for the analysis!

Social

So you just spent $126 to do what you could have done at home. But! While browsing facebook, were you talking to other people in the class? This can be called networking - setting up connections with people that may be valuable later. Using the classroom example, that's just over $2000 spent on facebook. (Wow that's depressing.) But! If there's 13 people, each person needs only to provide $168 worth of value at some point before you die for the class to be worth it - if even one of those is able to help you in a significant way, even years down the line, you've broke even.

Health / Personal Development

Classroom example! That class is part of getting a degree - what's the value of that degree? What potential revenue will be brought in? In that way, you look at the $2,500 value of the class as an investment to future profit. If you manage to get a job in the field of study (50/50 in today's economy!) you'll probably see good return on investment... though it's pretty depressing to believe at that point you're just paying for the degree.

That fills personal development, what about health as a whole? Well, it's probably time you're not spending smoking/drinking/working out, so you have to compare that to what your normal day brings you.

So. There's a lot of variables, but if you look deep you might find hidden value in something you'd otherwise write off as a waste. Or, you might confirm your suspicions... in which case, stop it!