Geoff Chesshire, November 21, 2003

Today I had a strange conversation about time, which took about five minutes. Actually, two people had the conversation, one of them being myself, so the conversation took ten minutes, five of hers and five of mine. Also, it was not the conversation that took the time; it was we who spent our time in conversation. I consider that I spent my time well, because I learned from it something valuable to me about time. I am not so sure that she spent her valuable time wisely, because she spent it all in explaining that she had no free time. I discovered that there is no free time, and that all of our time is valuable, mine as well as hers. We spend our time wisely in activities that are more valuable to us than time itself. This is true even of our time spent in sleep or in hanging out with friends. Therefore, it would be an insult to ask someone if they have some free time to spare. It would be much better to ask them to share their most valuable time doing something more valuable to them than time itself. We have no choice whether or not to spend our time; we can choose only how to spend it. We cannot hoard time, nor save it as in a bank account. We spend it at a constant rate, no matter whether wisely or wastefully.

Time shared with someone else is not a transaction wherein one gives and the other receives. We each either benefit or lose by our own attitude and our own choice of how to spend our time. I cannot waste your time, and you cannot waste mine. When we share our time together, we each spend only our own time. If I felt that mine was wasted, I would have only myself to blame. We often benefit more from time shared than from time spent alone, especially when we each appreciate something about the other or help each other to achieve more than we could on our own. It would be misguided for me to say that my time is worth $50 per hour and yours is worth $40, and demand therefore that you pay me $10 per hour for the time we spend together. Rather (and if we insist on analyzing it in dollar terms), if we both choose to share the time together, it must be because I estimate this opportunity to be worth more than $50 per hour to me, and you estimate it to be worth more than $40 to you.

My time is very valuable, the more so when I share it freely with you. You might consider my time to have no value, because you would pay me nothing for it. However, you would ignore the value to you of what we achieve together. That in itself is of great value to me, or I would not spend my time to achieve it. I hope my time will benefit you, and not cost you; I certainly would not measure its value according to its cost. You might consider the value of your time to be the hourly wage that you receive in exchange for it. You might try to maximize the number of “billable hours” in each day, in order to maximize the total value of your time. However, this is only the value of your time to someone else, not its value to you. You spend this time in exchange for money, but you can never use the money to buy back time for things that are more important to you. In fact, by this approach, you minimize the time available to spend doing something more valuable to you than time itself. If I spend my time encouraging you to use your time wisely, to share it with others in activities that benefit everyone including yourself, then I consider my time well spent, and we each begin to receive more than the value of our time. “For it is in giving, that we receive.”