How to Earn $10000 in One Hour

How to Earn $10,000 in One Hour

November 9th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina           Email this article to a friend
Many books on time management recommend the practice of thinking of each hour of your time as being worth a specific quantity of money. It’s an extension of the “time is money” concept. First you figure out what your hourly rate is, and then you use that as a guide to determine where you should spend your time. If you want to earn more money, then you must first mentally raise your hourly rate, so you can start doing activities that are worth more. For example, if you currently earn $50/hour and want to earn $75/hour, then you have to do less and less $50/hour work as you shift to doing $75/hour work. Brian Tracy advocates this type of thinking in his time management programs, as do many other time management experts. I’ve used this model myself in the past.
I’ve spent a lot of time considering this paradigm, and at present I have only one problem with it.
It’s stupid!
It’s possibly the stupidest paradigm you can use for income generation.
While it seems enticing on the surface, in the long run it will hurt you more than help you. Let’s take a look under the hood…
The Good
On the positive side, if you tell yourself that your time is worth $50/hour, then that can help you focus. It can make you aware of those activities that clearly aren’t worth $50/hour that you might still be doing, especially if you track your time usage with a time log. Once you become aware that you’re wasting time on low payoff activities, then you can begin reducing, eliminating, or outsourcing those low payoff tasks. For example, you could recruit a part-time personal assistant to offload much of the $10/hour and $20/hour work. My wife runs an online vegetarian magazine, and she has a staff of people working for her including an assistant, editors, and writers to offload much of the work that can be done at a lower hourly rate than her own. It works great.
This seems like good common sense if you want to improve your productivity. If you can earn $50/hour, then you should spend as much as your work time as possible doing $50+/hour work, shouldn’t you? Recruit others to do any work that pays less. The benefits of this particular optimization may be hidden in a large corporate environment where personal productivity isn’t strongly linked to pay, but it’s very noticeable if you’re self-employed.