How much is a work hour really worth?
Studies show that
employees spend about 31 hours per month in meetings, and spend less
than 60 percent of time actually working productively.
Having gone to work for a major public relations firm right out of
college, I came to understand the value of an hour very early on in my
career. While I made far less than my billable rate, clients paid just
over $100 an hour for time I spent working on their account. For each
15-minute increment I billed, I had to justify the work I did. If a
project gave me difficulty, or I was just having a particularly
unproductive day, I’d adjust my hours accordingly.
Though I no longer have to enter my time and match it up with billing
codes at the end of the day, the mindset has served me exceptionally
well. I’ve found that it’s incredibly helpful in any workplace -- even
in the nonprofit sector, where making money isn’t even part of the
objective. The hours of the day are finite and intrinsically valuable,
and the most successful managers and entrepreneurs are those who not
only properly manage their own time, but the time of others.
I’ve since left the world of public relations firms, but I continue
to assign a dollar amount to my hours, and I recommend that anyone else
who regularly juggles tasks do the same. If you look at the first hour
of the day as, say, $100 instead of 9 to 10 a.m. on your calendar, it
becomes easier to prioritize important tasks by planning your hours,
days and weeks around major objectives. It can also help you cut back on
time-sucking activities that you might have thought were worth your
time, but in a new light, simply aren’t worth the money.
As a manager, it’s equally important to place a value on the time of
your colleagues and employees. My time is worth more than my staff’s,
and their time is worth more than an intern’s. Everyone understands this
dynamic and plans accordingly. It helps them to decide whether a task
is better left to an intern or if it might be better to manage up and
ask me to take something off their plate. By determining the relative
importance -- and time-sensitivity -- of tasks, it makes it much easier
to assign and complete them in the most productive manner possible.
Assigning monetary value to both tasks and employees helps clear
schedules of time-sucking activities that drag on production. An
hour-long, 20-person meeting where only 10 people really need to be in
attendance translates to more than a full workday’s worth of wasted
time.
For workplace veterans, this line of thinking may be second nature,
but for young professionals, the value of an hour wasted doesn’t always
ring true. Regardless of whether the billable hour is on its way out as
a billing mechanism, it’s a valuable mental model to apply to almost
any career. If we all treated our minutes a little more like dollars,
there might be less time spent on Facebook and fantasy football and more
spent moving our organizations forward.
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