Time revisited

Introduction

I had written about the value of time a while back, and I’ve been meaning to revisit it again ever since I got back from London.  Here are some incidents that have made me question the value of my time:

• In London, I took Uber Pool a few times to save 1 GBP.  I think out of the 3 times we did it, 2 of the times we had to take a detour to pick up the new person.  That probably cost us an extra 15 minutes.  Even my wife said, “You couldn’t pay $1 to save 15 minutes?”  BOOM!  Being cheap and stubborn, I did take it 1 more time to go the airport, but I figured that was “dead” time so it wasn’t a big issue.  However, from now on, I’ll pay the extra $1 to get 15 minutes back.

• I spent AN HOUR last week researching LED lights for my stairs.  Should I just buy an incandescent light for $.50 that I have to replace every 6 months?  Will the LED lights emit a blue or yellow light?  Will this LED light fit?  Then when I found the one that would work, I spent probably 30 minutes afterwards trying to find a cheaper alternative.  Should I pay $2 for this bulb that may not fit or $3 for this bulb that looks like it will fit 100%?  I’m not angry about the time I spent researching; I’m angry that I spent the extra 30 minutes trying to save $1 per bulb (I only needed 6 of them).  In the end, I paid the extra $1 per bulb and they worked out great!

• I spent 30-60 minutes last week trying to find an $800 airline ticket to max out my Flexperks redemption.  I could have stopped at $790 and called it a day after 5 minutes, but trying to squeeze out that last $5 cost me 30+ minutes.

• Should I just pump gas here and pay an extra $.20 per gallon or drive 15 minutes out of my way to save the $.20?  This habit is hard to break, but I’ve consciously thought about it each time I’m low on gas.  If I don’t see myself going past a cheaper gas station before my gas tank runs out, I’ll just pay more.

Lessons Learned

You see, the point of this post is that as you get older and time becomes more valuable, you may want to rethink trying to maximize every deal.  It’s like trying to squeeze out the very last drop in those stupid Vita Coco coconut water cartons.  Just throw the damn thing away!  I realize this is similar to the 4 hour work week theory

Addendum – A reader shared with me the Pareto principle which basically says you’ll achieve 80% of the results in 20% of your time.  Any more than that is diminishing returns.  Like me trying to find a cheaper LED stair light.