Time, Value, and the Problem with Expectations
April 28, 2025•1,603 words
The Cost of Efficiency
I've noticed something recently in how my friend and I communicate through text messaging. Specifically, the idea of time investment and clear and considerate time-modeling.
This isn't a critique of him or myself. It's more a reflection of how people tend to view the world. I'm not saying that one way is better than the other. Different lives lead to different modes of thought, and that alone is interesting.
I've often mentioned to people that if you break down my life into total hours per year, I make roughly $0.50 per minute, 24-hours/day. This is true year-round. It's a rough blend of my salary income, online passive income, side income, and some returns from my investments. The investment side gets far less weight because of its volatility.
I tell people that this math does two things:
- I make $30/hour every single hour, even when I'm asleep.
- I can now make cost-decisions about whether something is worth my time.
Keep in mind - I make significantly more than $30/hour at my actual job. This $30/hour is the average across all time, working or not. It's my baseline income against the full span of existence, not just while I'm "on the clock."
Why map all earnings across all times - including sleep?
There must be some net-loss in value of our lives. If we only calculate based on alternative action opportunity, it creates a sense of false economy. Consider that businesses don't just calculate their end-of-year metrics by calculating when they could work. They have to amortize that three week blizzard that led to downtime. By incorporating sleep schedules and other non-negotiables, you get a more realistic sense of value. Instead of $45/hour you have $30. And when considering your time like company metrics, this lets you determine the better value of a maid service than had you artificially inflated that number based on discounting things you cannot control for.
Worse, this can lead to false expectations or bad decision making. Steve might think, well then, I need more opportunity, so I'll sleep 4-hours a night. The issue here is that now his overall cognitive power will be reduced, and it will create a different cost that can't be quantified - all because he is trying to maximize opportunity in terms of availability instead of maximizing on a self-restrained, reasonable cost of practical application on limitations.
When I think about doing something like cleaning the house, which might take 3 hours every Saturday, that's a cost of $90. I'd rather hire a maid service for $65/week - because that saves me $25 - and it frees up three hours to apply myself somewhere else more meaningfully.
Same idea when it comes to smaller things. If a friend wants to meet up at a restaurant and they're 15 minutes late - that is a $6.50 cost to me. Not a massive deal if it happens once, but if it becomes a pattern, it tells me something. Either I should find friends who are more time-conscious or I should recalibrate my own expectations and show up late myself.
In my relationship with my friend, I tend to communicate time pretty transparently:
- I will be on in about an hour or two - I will dedicate my time to you fully then.
- I have to take care of something - it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes.
- I'm dealing with something - 20 minutes? Sorry!
That's me trying to model his experience - to offset the cost he might otherwise incur from uncertainty or wasted waiting.
He tends to communicate differently:
- Hey, how are you?
- Thirty minutes later - Oh yeah, how are things going on that project?
And again - this is not a flaw. This is not a complaint about him. It simply costs me $15 to sit there waiting if I thought we were about to have a conversation and it gets delayed unexpectedly. It's not about blame. It's about the fact that different operating modes are often invisible - until you really look.
You might ask - you can do other things while waiting on your friend to respond, so why the cost?
Because if you are going to take out X time to do Y, then even doing something other than Y while waiting, you end up with a "different type of thing" you can be doing.
Consider - you might watch YouTube or Instagram Reels. But had you not taken a pre-block of one hour to talk to your friend, you might have fixed that toilet you've been putting off. And this is important, because opportunity is often constricted to blocks that are framed around the expectation of what should occur, rather than what would be framed had the expectation never occurred at all.
It’s not enough that you can go watch YouTube or check emails while your friend delays - because without the framing that "we're supposed to talk soon," you might have committed to a fundamentally different action path, one that needs uninterrupted blocks, deeper focus, or different energy levels. Thus, the "cost" isn't about raw clock-watching - it's about path-constraint and activity channeling - which is harder to measure but real.
And that's why I'm writing about this at all. It's not about who's right or wrong. It's about how depending on the world you live in - your job, your lifestyle, your priorities - you can end up building very different time models. Over years, those models shape how you move through the world without even realizing it.
The True Cost of Entertainment
This way of thinking about time also leads to something else - the real cost of entertainment.
You see people online who have played 350 hours of a game - and then leave a one-star review because it didn't meet their expectations. They say things like, "Don't buy this until it's on sale" or "Wait until it's $5."
But think about this from a time cost analysis.
If you invest 350 hours into a game, a few things are obviously true:
- It was entertaining enough that you had a greater emotional reward playing it than doing something else - or else you wouldn't have stuck with it.
- If you say you only played it because you had already sunk 5 hours into it, that's irrational. That's not sound economic thinking.
- If we value your time at even $12/hour - you generated $4,200 worth of emotional return - minus the $60 you paid - meaning you had a $4,140 net gain in value.
Why? Because any experience that generates pleasure, fulfillment, or meaning is a positive return on time.
- Taking out the trash? Probably not a positive return.
- Walking down the street holding the hand of someone you love? Definitely a positive return.
You might ask - doesn't your end opinion matter for whether the game was worth it?
You cannot ever assign a net value of time cost unless you earn money above and beyond your normal earnings over time. This means anything and everything is a cost. But that isn't a valuable distinction is it? Because now it inflates "job" or "money" as the only net positive in your life. So if we look at anything that creates a net positive experience hour-by-hour - then we can say it adds to the value. Instead of a cost, we invert it. Not as earnings, but the perceived value of our time spent. That is, instead of costing me $12 per hour to watch this movie, I can see it as earning a value of $12 in time. Not value in dollars.
Even if at the end of playing the game, you decide the value wasn't worth it because you didn't like the ending (See Mass Effect 3), that doesn't mean the time itself didn't have value. You are talking about the psychological or emotional value after the fact. Not the journey itself. And this is important. The reviewer then might say: From a value perspective, I feel that I more than earned my time in value for the game. But was the overall experience worth it? Probably not. But it was worth it from a monetary and value perspective on the time I spent playing it.
So when reviewers say the game wasn't worth it - despite 350 hours of entertainment - what they're really saying is that emotional returns only count if the experience is perfect by their expectations.
But that's not how value actually works.
In business, even a $0.01 profit is still a profit. It’s still positive. It only becomes a bad decision when better options exist at the same cost. But isolated on its own - a positive return is positive. The reviewer who got hundreds of hours of engagement for $60 already achieved a better deal than almost any other form of entertainment offers - and yet, because of the framing of expectation versus experience, they treat it as a loss.
There’s something bigger here - the idea that time should be measured by the return it generates, not just by whether it perfectly matches expectations.
Once you start thinking like that - a lot of things that feel disappointing suddenly aren't. They are investments that paid off - maybe not perfectly, maybe not at the top 1% of all possibilities - but still meaningfully.
And if you don't build that model consciously, you end up misjudging not just games, not just cleaning the house - but your whole life.