The £3,236 Experiment
What I Learned When I Put a Price Tag on My Life
Last week I spent £947 on sleep and £260 on commuting. It might sound like an extravagant lifestyle until you realise that I'm actually talking about the cost of time, rather than actual cash.
After writing a recent post about how unscheduled time can so easily slip through your fingers I wanted to see how much difference scheduling my time made.
Over the last week I decided to track (almost) every minute of time I spent living life. I noted what I was doing either directly onto a spreadsheet or into my notebook to add to Excel later.
My new workflow is to sit down with my bullet journal each night and add all of my appointments and commitments during the day, and then add tasks around them so I am less likely to have a spontaneous nap or fall victim to unscheduled doomscrolling. For me if I have an open area on my calendar the possibilities are endless and the paradox of choice kicks in. I could do anything and yet I end up doing nothing.
I recently created an image that I thought was a good representation of what happens to some of the time that gets wasted.
The receipt made me think of this quote:
"Time is money" - Ben Franklin.
If time is money then not only am I wasting time by procrastinating or doing things which have no real value, I'm also wasting money. This made me consider just how much currency i spend on different things and how much a minute of my time is worth.
The Experiment
We all start each day with the same bankroll, 24 hours, or 1,440 minutes to spend as we see fit. We can never have more or less than anyone else, time is the only true level playing field. How we spend it might differ, we might not have as much choice as the next person but we must all spend each second of every day before the account is refilled at midnight.
Here is my hypothesis: If I treated my time like actual currency, watching it drain from my account with each mindless scroll, unnecessary meeting, or late night Netflix binge, would I make different choices? Would I schedule my time better? Would seeing a monetary value on the things I do force me away from the things I know don't add value to my life?
The methodology was simple, if maybe a bit obsessive:
Calculate my "cost per minute rate" (in my case, £0.32 per minute based on my salary).
Track every minute for seven days.
Calculate the "cost" of everything I do.
Face the existential dread of my findings.
So I started tracking. Sometimes I forgot and had to backdate things. Sometimes I didn't account for every single minute, but out of a total of 10,080 total minutes in the week, I only "lost" 95 of them and I think that's a solid effort.
The Balance Sheet of My Existence
Let me show you what a week of my life costs.
Total cost of my week: £3,236
Extrapolating that out over a full year that's an annual cost of living of £168,272. Some of what I spent my time on surprised me, some didn't but I did learn something, and that was the point of the experiment.
The Sleep Deficit
Let's start with the largest single expense, the big one: sleep. I spent 2,924 minutes (about 49 hours) unconscious last week, which cost me £947.59 in theoretical time-money. That's seven hours short of an ideal 8 hours of sleep each night. It's actually more than I thought I would get and perhaps doesn't tell the full story. It's a series of 5 and 6 hour nights supplemented by the odd nap here and there.
In monetary terms I'm saving £140 on sleep each week. Except we all know that's not how sleep works. I'm not saving anything; I'm taking out a high-interest loan against my future health and cognitive function. And like most loans I've taken in my life, I have absolutely no plan for repayment.
If I maintain this "sleep schedule" for another 40 years, I'll have robbed myself of 14,560 hours of sleep. That's nearly two entire years of extra consciousness, but the cost of that might well be that I don't see every one of those 40 years. Experiencing extra waking hours now could very well mean that I live ten years less, and the quality of those advancing years may well be marred by illness.
Is that really a good investment strategy? The bags under my eyes suggest otherwise.
Conclusion: Don't skimp on sleep. If there's ever anything to splash out and spend money on the deluxe option it is sleep.
The 17-Month Traffic Jam
The number that made me question my life choices was discovering I spend 805 minutes, over 13 hours, each week sat behind a steering wheel. That's £260.88 spent listening to podcasts, shouting at other drivers and pretending that audiobooks count as reading.
Extrapolating this over my 19-year career, I've spent roughly 17 MONTHS of my existence commuting to the workplace. That's approximately £228,000 worth of my life on the road.
I could have bought a house closer to work with that money. I could have written books, started businesses or claimed some of that sleep back and still had time to learn the guitar.
Instead, I've perfected the art of eating a sandwich without getting mayonnaise on my work clothes while navigating a roundabout.
Conclusion: Is the fact that I enjoy my job really worth the commute? I used to think it was, but now I am having major doubts.
The Economics of Family
Perhaps the most sobering figure was the 501 minutes, just 8.35 hours, that I spent actively engaging with my family. That's the people who, presumably, I wouldn't trade for anything and care most about in the world.
That's only 71 minutes a day. I spent nearly 50% more time driving.
In my defence, my shift pattern at work means there are days when I literally don't see my family at all, leaving before they wake and returning after they're asleep.
But is that really a defence or yet another reason to consider my career choice? After all my children aren't getting any younger.
Conclusion: Life happens and as children get older our mix and match schedules get in the way so it's even more essential to book in some facetime when you can.
The Writing Surprise
The one figure that shocked me in a positive way was how much time I spend writing (and I include reading, commenting and interacting on Substack in this figure). Pretty much a full day over this week, costing £471.85. Is this too much? Not enough? I have no objective standard for this.
What I do know is that it felt like the least some of the least wasted money of my week. It's where I can be most myself, getting my thoughts out of my head without worrying which mask I need to wear.
Conclusion: Writing isn’t just a hobby, it’s therapy, education and connection. If time is money, this felt like one of the wisest investments of my week.
Additional Observations: Grooming, Chores, and Exercise
I noticed something else interesting in my data: I spend significantly more time on personal grooming including showers, brushing teeth, toilet and getting dressed (349 minutes) than household chores, cleaning, shopping, tidying (104 minutes). In monetary terms, I'm spending £113.10 on my appearance versus £33.70 on my living environment. Is there an imbalance in our house on who does the chores?
I like to think it works all works itself out but I would hate to think my partner does more than her fair share.
Exercise was low at only 100 minutes weekly, £32.41 worth. None of that was actually spent in the gym, but it doubled up as family time. Going on a walk with my kids and their grandparents and playing football with my son. In contrast to this time last year I was spending 100 minutes on some days exercising.
One limitation in my experiment was tracking only the primary activity at any given time. This sometimes meant under-reporting family time that overlapped with cooking, eating, or exercise. Going forward, this has taught me the importance of intentional recording, recognising the value of activities serving multiple purposes simultaneously.
Practical Takeaways for Adjusting My Life’s Budget
Based on this experiment, here’s what I've learned:
Prioritise sleep: Quality rest is non-negotiable. It's the foundation for everything else. It's an investment, not an expense.
Intentional family scheduling: I need to ensure quality family moments are explicitly planned around our schedules and not just assume it will happen naturally.
Rethink the job and the commute: I'm not sure such a long commute is sustainable.
Protect my writing habit: Writing is another critical expense, not a luxury.
Be mindful of entertainment: I need to consciously choose leisure activities rather than mindlessly defaulting to distractions. Pair a podcast and a walk, rather than a film and the sofa.
Conclusions
The thing about time is that, unlike money, you can't earn more of it. But you can buy time back, if you've got the cash.
You can pay someone to clean your house, prep your meals and drive you to work. If I could afford to outsource some of those tasks, I probably would. But If I did buy that time back, would I actually use it wisely? Or would I just waste it on the same distractions, only with cleaner floors and better snacks?
I think most of us are better off learning how to spend the time we already have more wisely.
This week-long experiment has been enlightening, but it was also self-fulfilling. I knew I was tracking. I was hyper-aware. I didn’t doomscroll once because I was watching myself and I knew that might be something I would have to report on my timecard at the end of the experiment. I was the lab rat and the scientist at the same time. I’d love to audit past weeks of my life, where the results would be less tidy, but a lot more accurate.
The truth is that time is spent whether you're paying attention or not. But when you see the price tag attached to each minute, it suddenly becomes much harder to waste them.
This experiment was like checking my bank balance every hour after months of ignoring it.
I won't track every minute going forward but this is a practice I’ll revisit once or twice a year to recalibrate when I run off course.
I’m already rich in time. I just need to spend it like it matters.
Your Turn: The Mini-Experiment
I used my annual salary to work out my hourly rate, then my rate per minute. This way any monetary value I put on things is relevant to me. I could have used an arbitrary number for each day, but if it's too high or too low, it's not going to be as impactful to me.
What's your hourly rate and what are you spending it on?
Whatever you work it out as, once you have done that you can work out how much time you spend, picking your nose, daydreaming about what to do next or playing computer games. I wish I knew how much time I had spent choosing in the past. Deciding what to do, what to eat, what to watch, where to go.
posted this note recently:Spending 15 minutes deciding what to have to eat or 20 minutes deciding what to watch on TV is not time well spent.
If you could buy back an hour each day, what would you spend it on? Let me know in the comments, and if you found this interesting, consider tracking your own time for even just a day. The results might surprise you.
This post is an Experiment that is part of the Kaleidoscope Project Monthly Challenge. If you would like to take part it’s open to all and I would love to see what you come up with.
The Kaleidoscope Project: May Challenge
Welcome to May's edition of The Kaleidoscope Project Monthly Challenge, a collaborative writing adventure that invites anyone who wants to take part to look at the world from different perspectives each month.
An extra hour? Family, always.
This was great Mark! I too am trying to be more cognizant of my time purchases.🤑
That's so interesting, considering the thing I omitted from my reply to the Note you made about the time receipt was that when I did my time audit, I, too, was completely baffled by how much time I lose to driving. I only "go into the office" twice a week and still, all those trips to the grocery store, or to appointments, or to see other people... It was a hugely staggering "expense"! Great job on the article.