[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.