Having an assistant might cost really little, and you can assign nearly anything that is boring to that person. I tried for a month, and had a great experience, planning on starting more seriously in february, when things get faster in the southern hemisphere, and lack of time becomes a more evil issue than it now is. For those of you living in a rich country that speaks english, get an indian VA. for those like me living in countries with a lot of people, get someone beggining a second college degree in secretariat who lived in New Zeland for $500,00 month, or find a similar deal.
Also, ask friends to read papers of topics they like or understand better than you. Assign smart people to write essays you know they could. Redirect potential partners (job partners, romance partners, friend partners) to other friends when you know they want that, because they will be happy (utilons hurray!) and will give you they geophysics expertise when you need it.
Also, there is this thing, they just found out. It's called the sex-tax. Every time you have sex, you pay a dollar to sex-tax. Then you get 7 points of counterfactual happiness on a 10-100 scale (Layard2005) twice, one instantly, and one after two years, total 14 points. (For comparison, divorce kills 12, death of a close one 8) You get reimbursed about a 2 thousand dollars per month after the second year (you still have to pay the dollar per sex though), and the happiness and money remain for 20 years, though the happiness fades along the way. Anyway, I was talking about the money part. what are you trading this money (dollar per sex) for? Well, you trade it for about 30-60 hours weekly in which you'd otherwise be doing something as boring as cleaning the house, for something as interesting as having an intelligent chat over lemonade with friends. It's a good deal...... I hope you have guessed by now that the name of the sex-tax is condom, and may your days always be fulfilled. As a final note, consider polyphasic sleep if you are crazy and if it works with your schedule. saves 1000 hours a year. Anything else is negligible compared to those three.. Sex-tax, assistant, polyphasic. Let us hope we come up with other great ones here!
Edit: Hilarious interpretations ensued. I was talking about a hipothetical person who used condoms instead of havin two children separated by two years between their births. The cleaning the house thing is one of the beeping happiness experiments. Spending time with your children is sometimes really awesome, but on average, it is like cleaning the house.
I am so confused by that second paragraph.
Then you get 7 points of counterfactual happiness on a 10-100 scale (Layard2005) twice, one instantly, and one after two years, total 14 points.
If the scale starts at 10, how to get to a 7? And where does the happiness come from? Does it come from having sex, or from not having a kid?
In the xkcd comic Working, a man is seen filling up his gas tank. "Why are you going here", says the observer, "Gas is ten cents a gallon cheaper at the station five minutes that way". He responds "Because a penny saved is a penny earned". Randal's pragmatically spirited caption says "If you spend nine minutes of your time to save a dollar, you're working for less than the minimum wage."
Our opportunities to convert time into money and vice versa, though not unlimited, are numerous.
We work (sell our free time) when we…
We buy free time when we…
How can we evaluate these trades? It seems like we ought to only purchase free time when it comes cheaper than a certain figure, $x/hr, and ought to only work if we can sell our free time for more than $x/hr. Indeed, comparing trades to this time/money exchange rate is the only unexploitable way to behave.
Most of the time, when we share our estimates of the value of these trades, our comments are too vague to be helpful. If my father, a doctor tells me, a student, that "subscribing to discount mailing lists is a waste of time", what does he mean? He might mean that these mailing lists are poor value for me, he might mean the much stronger statement that they are poor value for everyone, or the much weaker statement, that they are poor value just for him (his time is obviously worth the most). I have to try to get him to disentangle his estimation from his jugement. I have to ask him "What low value would a person have to place on their time for discount mailing lists to be worthwhile?"
The easiest way for all individuals with different time/money exchange rates to share their estimates will be to quantify them. e.g. being on a discount mailing lists only saves $x per hour spent. Out of my father and I, this might represent value to none, one or both of us.
When we share these quantitative estimates, it would be silly to discuss deals that are only available privately like job offers, that are so dependent on our particular skills and qualification. Instead,we will gain the most by listing time-money trades that are likely to apply across domains, such as repairing a car on the one hand or catching a cab on the other.
By doing so, we stand to learn that many of the trades we have been carrying out have represented poor value, and we should learn of new trades that we had not previously considered. Of course, there are associated costs, like the time spent gathering this information, and the risk of becoming unduly preocuppied with these decisions, but it still seems worth doing.
A last point of order is that it will be best to indicate how far we can expect each estimate to generalise. For example, the cost of something like melatonin will differ between states or between countries, and that is worth mentioning.
So in this thread, please share your estimates in $/hr for potential ways to work or buy free time.