[quaffapint]

I will say I would never hire anyone to do work I can accomplish myself - I don't care if it makes sense or not, I just couldn't do it. Why? Because I and I would say most people that hire people to take care of their lawns and clean their toilets aren't then using their time more wisely or getting that oh so amazing hour of family time they could never have. They just don't feel like doing the task.

[joelrunyon]

> Because I and I would say most people that hire people to take care of their lawns and clean their toilets aren't then using their time more wisely or getting that oh so amazing hour of family time they could never have. They just don't feel like doing the task.

This is an emotional response to the economic mindset that the article purposes. In the article - the entire point is that it doesn't matter what you do with that extra time, but if you value your time at $100/hour and you do a task that you can pay someone to do for $10/hour, it's not an efficient use of your resources. That's the economic theory - whether or not you do anything with that extra time is up to you.

[_delirium]

How do you value your time at $100/hour, though? If it's because you subjectively place $100 value on that hour of doing nothing, then that's fine, and it's true that you should in that case pay someone to do the hour of work. But if it's because you earn $100/hour when you're working, and therefore infer that your time is generally worth $100/hr, that is a somewhat questionable inference unless you are actually going to do paid work in that hour, i.e. you will actually incur an opportunity cost of $100 by mowing your lawn instead of doing an hour of contract work.

If it's not displacing paid work, then it becomes a matter of subjective valuation of your time, which depends not only on the time, but the task and what you would do instead. In that case, you really have to place a subjective value on how much you like or dislike mowing the lawn, and how much you like or dislike what you would do instead. Since you're just displacing one kind of unpaid time for another kind of unpaid time, there's no objective economic basis for determining what the delta value between "sitting in a chair" and "mowing the lawn" is. I personally put it fairly low, because I don't mind mowing the lawn (plus it's exercise, something I'd have to find time to do anyway).

[ryusage]

I think you're right that it's more complicated than just assuming every hour of your life is worth whatever your day job pays you per hour. The point in the article was that what you do in your non-work time still has an affect on your work, and that's where the opportunity cost comes in. If mowing the lawn is stressing you out, then you're going to perform worse at your job and potentially impact your career in the long term. Or if you could instead be researching or practicing something that would make you a little bit better at your job, then you're missing out on potential future earnings as well.

Of course, the question then is how do you value that time? I don't think there's any objective answer to that, but it's probably more than zero.

EDIT: Of course, I just re-read your comment and see this is basically what you just said. I'll admit I got distracted and misunderstood your point the first time I read it.

[hackula1]

This seems like a bit of a puritanical viewpoint. Taking a nap for an hour can be more productive than raking leaves, if rest is what you need most.

[quaffapint]

But there you use the word 'need'. If you have been working 48 hours straight and want to hire the neighbors kid to mow the lawn that's now a foot high, fine.

It's just my viewpoint, I know how much time I waste (heck I'm wasting it right now) and how much time I have to take care of the lawn, etc. I don't need to add to the waste because I don't feel like doing it.

[jeza]

If you don't do anything physical at work then raking leaves might actually be good for you. It's exercise, fresh air and I find these kind of chores somewhat tranquillising to the mind. Same with other chores, but I'm sure there are ones I hate more than others. If there are physiological and psychological benefits of doing these chores, then it might be costing you more than the $10/hr of hiring someone else to do them. Sure you might be able to get some of the benefits by say going to the gym, but paying someone to do your gardening while you go to the gym to get the exercise you missed from doing the gardening seems a bit insane.

[ghaff]

> They just don't feel like doing the task.

Why is there something inherently wrong with that?

The reality is that pretty much everyone outsources some tasks that they could in principle do themselves. Could I learn to be a passable car mechanic? Probably but I don't care to make that investment of time. On the flip side, could I eat out more? Sure. But I generally enjoy cooking.

[VLM]

"Could I learn to be a passable car mechanic? Probably but I don't care to make that investment of time."

I would take minor issue with that advice because "we" live in a downwardly mobile society where the median is poorer every year, and upward economic mobility is immensely less likely than downward economic mobility. Its much easier to learn how to change your oil when you can trivially afford substantial backup labor from tow drivers and pro mechanics if it all goes bad, up to and including simply buying another car, than trying to learn how to change your oil after you've been downsized and ageism means you'll never work above $10/hr again, medical induced bankruptcy and job loss, etc etc. Also its easier to learn "poor people skills" at 25 than 50 or 75.

Yes, yes, it only happens to other people, not people like me, or us, because I / we are special. Sure. Culturally, poor americans consider themselves merely temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. Anyway, learning/maintaining skills is exactly like buying insurance when you might need those skills.

There is also an aspect of management where learning/maintaining skills makes you a better consumer. How do you intend to manage your relationship with your mechanic if you intentionally have no idea what you've hired him to do for you? Oddly enough business relationships based on unidirectional blind trust never work out very fairly.

This doesn't mean you have to do everything. Last time my thermostat failed (open, thankfully) I learned how to replace it and whats involved and basically threw away $200 on labor to have a mechanic do it, because I can easily afford it and there was no way I'm doing this in six inches of snow and slush in February. If I couldn't afford to throw around $200 like pocket change, and maybe some time in the future I won't be able to, I could have done it. May have ended up with frostbite or pneumonia but I could have done it. On a nice sunny 70 degree day in May I'd probably have done it myself for fun.

[quaffapint]

If you have a truly busy life and just really need a break, I've got no issue with that. I just surmise from my own observations that it's not how much time people have to do nothing, it's that they are getting more and more sucked into that mindset of doing nothing. Think Wall-E :-).