Money and time are closely related—you can usually spend money to save time. I believe that such trades should generally be made wherever possible. The way I suggest handling this is to have a subjective value for your time that reasonably reflects your life situation. For a long time, my subjective value of time was $100/hour, and my subjective value of administration time was $150/hour. If I could save an hour of time, I’d pay $100 to do it, and if I could save an hour of painful time, like doing paperwork or paying bills, I’d pay $150 for it.
The real trick in all this is to save time without adding complexity. For example, at various times, I’ve had a personal assistant. It is a no-brainer: If you can, hire someone at $25 an hour to do things like grocery shopping, cleaning, and errands, and save your time and energy for higher-value projects. However, adding a personal assistant has its own costs above the $25 an hour that you pay them; you lose privacy, you have to communicate exactly what you want, and they might make costly mistakes…
…I think that, when hiring professionals to complete tasks for you or to otherwise save you time, it’s reasonable to have a subjective value of your own time, and then hire people either when: a) you can’t do what they do, or b) the cost of hiring them, including the costs of organizing and communicating with them, is less than the subjective value of your own time.
As a degenerate, some of the things you absolutely hate are: rules, process, discipline, and routine. However, the value of all these things goes up in highly complex environments. And the world and your career environment are extraordinarily complex. Find a few personal organizational processes that work for you, and try to stick with them. As a degenerate, you need to be tight, organizationally, a small fraction of the time, so that you can be loose the majority of the time…
Want to read more? Check out my new book, Personal Organization for Degenerates.
