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When I Started Putting A Dollar Value On My Time, It Cost Me More Than Money

My first university job paid $17 an hour, and I had the freedom to decide how many hours I wanted to work each week. The more hours I took on, the more responsibility came with them, but I didn’t really mind at the time. What I didn’t realise was that I had started putting a dollar value on almost every hour of my life, even when I wasn’t working.Eventually, time spent not working started to feel like time wasted. Whenever I had to choose between hanging out with a friend and picking up a shift, part of my brain would quietly calculate how much money I would be “losing” by going out instead. One hour was $17. Two hours was $34. Three hours was $51. Without realising it, I started judging invitations by whether the time I spent would be “worth it”.Before long, it began affecting how I spent time with my friends. I started showing up late, leaving early, or turning plans down altogether. It wasn’t because I was actually busy. I had simply decided that my time would be better spent working.I didn’t realise how much this had changed me until I noticed how much less relaxed I had become. I wasn’t as easygoing as I used to be, and I became more calculating and irritable, especially when I felt like someone was wasting my time. If a friend took too long to decide where to eat, or we spent ages figuring out what to do, I’d get irritated. It was almost as if I could see the dollars ticking away with every minute.That was when I realised I had been getting my priorities all wrong. I was so focused on how much an hour of my time was worth in money that I had forgotten what actually made that time valuable in the first place. The conversations with friends, the unplanned plans, the dinners that lasted longer than expected, and simply spending time with people I cared about were all part of what made an hour feel meaningful.Ironically, I had become so focused on making my time “worth more” that I had stopped enjoying it. I still work the same job today, still earning $17 an hour, but I’ve stopped putting a price on my free time. If a friend asks me to grab dinner or suddenly wants to do something, I no longer calculate how much I could have earned if I had chosen to work instead.Money can tell me how much I earn from an hour of work, but it was never meant to tell me how much an hour of my life is worth. I’m still learning to let time pass without feeling like I have to get something out of every hour. Now, I’m learning to enjoy my time again, instead of constantly thinking about how to “spend” it.This article is part of TSS Confessions, a weekly column where we delve into personal finance topics that are unscripted and real accounts from people.