What’s your time worth?

Coming from a self-employed standpoint this topic is rather important to me. Only I used to view this strictly in terms of income. I’ve been asked the question “How much are you paid per hour?” quite a lot but now I see the other side of the equation. Which isn’t all about work ether.

Now when I look at what’s my time worth it consists of

  • Am I using my time wisely – Take looking at comics, far too often I have other projects, or even homework to be doing. In this case I’m valuing the time to look at comics vs. what should be a priority. And by not doing work when I should be it’s similar to saying the comics are worth the time I could be working.
  • Will this be beneficial to me, or a time waste? – This I have been bad at and going back to comics I get a time waste, so long as I have other, more important tasks to attend to. I will also spend countless hours during a week doing tasks or sitting idle.
  • Am I going in with a plan, or doing it as I go – This isn’t so much about time, but when I do not make a plan first, I often spend time re-doing items that I didn’t get right the first time. So not only do I spend more time working on the project, but I get hit twice as it’s time I could be using to do other tasks.
  • If for money, is it worth my time? – What I mean by this is say I could do a website for minimum wage ($7.25/hr), will it be worth the effort and time to put in the project when I could be doing other income producing tasks such as marketing my business or doing side projects. Now to be honest I have done tasks for low pay when I run low on money.

So to me I’d rather spend my time doing tasks that will benefit me the most, and pay my bills, or get me closer to paying my bills such as doing my homework. Which in some side projects I do a fixed fee, so planning is essential in that case and with a proper plan will do both the planning and making it worth my time. It will also give me an incentive to work as fast as I can to get the project done right, doing it wrong means fixing errors and taking too long means I am not utilizing my time right and that what I could have been paid an hour goes down.