Originally Posted by Sydney Morning Herald
We're trading more of our hours for money - but at what personal cost writes Ross Gittins.
WHEN you remember how important it is to our lives, it's surprising how little attention we devote to the question of time. We obsess about money, but time is just as important.
I've been encouraged to think about time by the observations of Dr Michael Schluter, president of Britain's Relationships Foundation. He's coined the term "chronomics" for study of the laws governing the use of time.
At its most fundamental, time is the great leveller. Whether we're rich or poor we each get the same allocation - 24 hours a day, 168 hours a week. But it doesn't stay that simple. If you're rich enough, you can buy the time of other people.
Although we focus so much on money, time and money are closely related. Schluter says the language of money is readily applied to time: it is spent, saved, allocated, invested and wasted.
Both time and money have the same limitation: opportunity cost. Just as money that's spent on A can't be spent on B, so it is with the spending of time. An important difference, however, is that time can't be stored.
Most of us sell our time for money - though some of us get paid a lot more an hour than others do.
Why do we feel so rushed these days? Well, one answer is that we want a lot of money, so we sell off a lot of our time. Then we use a fair bit of that money paying other people to do for us the things we no longer have time to do for ourselves.
Whether we're better off on the deal financially turns mainly on whether our after-tax earnings per hour are higher than the cost per hour of the people we pay to do our cleaning, washing, child minding, food preparation, etc.
This is a consideration many working mothers have pondered. Many of them are not at all sure they're in front. But wives who don't work often don't do the opposite calculation: they're more conscious of their lack of a second income than they are of all the time they have to do things for themselves.
They're aware of the tax breaks they don't get because they don't do paid work - a second tax-free threshold, for instance - but forget that all the extra unpaid work they're able to do for themselves has the great advantage of being untaxed.
Much technological advancement, including the growing number of "mod cons" in the home, is intended to save time. But while it raises our productivity - the amount we're able to produce or get done in an hour - it rarely leaves us with time on our hands.
As much more can be produced within a unit of time, the value of time has increased. As a result, according to Schluter, an hour's work is reckoned to be worth 25 times more than in 1830.
It's our higher productivity - arising from our better educations and the better machines we work with - that causes time (an hour of labour) to be worth a lot more in developed economies than in developing economies. (Compare the cost of a haircut in America and China and you'll see my point.)
You'd think that as our time has become more valuable over the years - as hourly wage rates have risen so much in real terms - we'd be using the extra money to allow us to work fewer hours.
But it hasn't worked out that way. Indeed, for many of us the number of hours we work has increased even as hourly wage rates have risen.
That's partly because you and I have given higher priority to increasing our incomes than to increasing our leisure. We've been happy to trade more of our time for money.
But it's also because we measure and account for money more carefully than we do time. To some extent, Australia's greatly increased wealth over the past decade has arisen from us working longer and harder.
We've seen an intensification of work - we get less time to achieve a given amount of work. In other words, because everyone focuses on money - on cutting costs or increasing profits - it's time that gets squeezed to fit. We work at a faster pace or stay late to catch up.
When businesses "downsize" their staff, they don't cut the amount of work to be done commensurately. When governments use the assumption of annual "efficiency dividends" to cut their budgets, their unacknowledged assumption is that everyone will work a bit harder to make up.
When bosses introduce new forms of accountability - performance reviews or key performance indicators - they rarely hire extra workers to help with the extra paperwork. Where workers don't or can't make up the slack, the quality of the product or service suffers and the burden spills over to customers.
When I flew to New Zealand last week, I had to queue at the check-in for a full hour (I timed it). Qantas was saving the staff time it had to pay for by wasting the time of its customers - which it didn't have to pay for.
You can see a lot of that about if you're conscious of it. Doctors' waiting rooms, for instance, are about saving the doctors' time by wasting the patients' time.
But a more serious issue is the way the squeeze on our time - whether self-imposed or otherwise - damages the thing that ultimately matters most to us: our relationships with family and friends.
The maintenance of relationships - and the mutual enjoyment of relationships - requires time. Lots of it. New technology, such as mobile phones and email, allows us to keep up relations with many more people and with less expenditure of time.
But there's often a loss of quality. Modern communication methods are a poor substitute for face-to-face contact.
If we continue our heightened pursuit of money while ignoring the effects on our time, we'll continue feeling "income rich and time poor". But the highest price we pay won't be the feeling of being endlessly rushed, it will be the damage to our neglected relationships.
