Time is Money: The Most Critical Commodity

What is your time worth? Let's say you make a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and spend only 25 hours a week at work; your weekly pay would amount to roughly $181.25. Now imagine this, you go out and buy a new phone of your choice, of course, and the bill comes out to, let’s say, about $1,000. That would be 140 hours of your time. You are probably thinking, “well, when you put it that way it that way, that new phone does not seem as enticing as it once was before.” In theory, time is money, but how valuable is your time? In college, we learn the value of education but very seldom the value of time in the workplace. In the Tedtalk below, Will Jenkins explains the importance of understanding that your time is valuable and a commodity. We have read what a commodity is, but if you are feeling a little rusty, let us review it again: a commodity, in short, is a useful thing of value that is sold in return for money. So when you give away your time in return for money, it is important to note how valuable your time is. Likewise, looking at the amount of time people have or are willing to spend is crucial. Your time could be significantly inflicted if you go to school and work a job. More so, Will Jenkins states in the below video: The most precious commodity of all?: that the most precious resource we have is time, but it is limited because we only have a specific amount of time and can never get it back. He explains that our wants and needs are classified by what makes us happy. To lighten the mood, Jenkins goes on to add that one might feel happy spending their time eating a Vietnamese pork roll. Likewise, we try to avoid situations that would leave us feeling negative emotions in hopes of saving time. Interestingly enough, Jenkins gives a visual of what life and our time spent would be like if we had no help from technology. He adds that our mornings would be significantly more complex; for example, we would have to get up earlier to heat water over a fire and have a hot shower. Briefly, our mornings would be more impaired than our everyday mornings, where technology is only a click away, not to mention the fact that without technology, we would have to walk to our places of work and/or school. When we think about a world without technology, we realize that technology is one of our most incredible resources for saving precious time. Likely, technology may rarely be a pain in the neck, but as a society, we fail to realize that time and technology are one of our most significant commodities.