Time, like money, is a resource that we can either fritter away bit-by-bit on activities that give us no real return on our investment, or use wisely now in order to reap the benefits in the future. Pushing the economic metaphor further what if, like money, you could invest time so that it grew with interest and displayed compounding-like effects?
A post over at Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week describes the possibilities of such a lifestyle economics. And while I think the post brings up some interesting possibilities, it appears to me to be based on the false premise that time can be compounded. It cannot. For each of us time is fixed (we just don’t know how much of it we’ve got). But what is possible is to telescope the amount of time we spend on work-related tasks to free up the (fixed) amount of time we have for other things. Such task-time telescoping allows us to engage in more important/worthy activities thereby increasing the value of that time, however we cannot say that time itself increases or grows as a consequence.
The question then becomes this: Read the rest of this entry »
