Collating widely available time/money trades

Collating the reccommendations:

$2/hr: buy an automatic dishwasher, assuming the dishwasher breaks down as soon as the warantee expires, and saves 30mins/day

$4/hr: buy a smartphone, assuming it costs $1/day and gives you 15 mins of useful time per day

$7/hr: getting laundry done professionally

$10/hr: eating dinner out

A link to the xkcd comic Working that was mentioned. Note that the comic also has bonus text in the image’s tooltip.

More suggestions here: http://80000hours.org/blog/128-save-time-through-smart-buying

The alternative to eating out is to hire a personal chef. There are multiple services for that in big cities. You can get something like 20 meals for $300. You save money on cooking (cost of groceries is often not included), as well as spending time to buy groceries or going out and waiting in line and for the food to be cooked . This options is also a lot healthier.

If you drink coffee, you could buy a fully automatic coffee maker ($800). Or if you do it just for the stimulation, you could use caffeine tablets instead.

Leaving your computer on or in standby mode is often better than turning it on and off. Laptops use about one watt in sleep mode, and desktops typically use no more than five (source). Even if you left your computer in sleep mode for 24 hours a day, the yearly electric bill would be pretty small. If your computer uses

• 1 watt: 4.3 kWh, $1.05
• 5 watts: well, it would be five times that, or $5.25

(with an electricity price of $0.12/kWh)

On the other hand, leaving your computer on all the time might shorten its lifespan.

I get my laundry washed and folded, and my shirts cleaned and pressed, by professional cleaners. I think this allows me to buy time at a rate of about $7/hr - this is so efficient that I can't understand why everyone doesn't do it.

I think that eating out allows me to buy time at a rate of $10 or maybe $12/hr, by saving time on cooking, grocery shopping, and doing dishes. I also think more people should purchase time in this way, but I accept that in this case there might be good reasons to be reluctant.

You could get laser hair removal instead of shaving. Calculations assume a discount rate of 10%.

Financial cost of hair removal

• $1,500 to $4,000 for initial treatment
• $300 a year for a touch-up treatment (PV ~ $3,000)

Total financial cost: $4,500 to $7,000

Time cost of hair removal

• six treatments at 1.5 hours per treatment (.5 hours for the treatment itself, plus commuting, scheduling, waiting, etc.): 9 hours
• annual touch-up treatments: 1.5 hours/year

Total time cost: 21 hours

Time cost of shaving

• .25 hours/week = 13 hours/year (PV ~ 130 hours)

Cost per hour: $41 to $64

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.

Time is not fungible (it's not like most people could decide to work 80 hours one week and 0 hours the following week -- they'd get burned out the first week and bored the second week; also, it's not like it's easy to find people to socialize with at 5 a.m.), so the value of x would depend on the time of the day, day of the week, how much stamina you have, and how bored you are, among other things. In certain cases it can even become negative (i.e. people willing to pay money for anything to keep them entertained while they're waiting for something and have nothing else to do).

Anyway...

An example that springs to mind is whether to drive, walk, cycle, or use public transportation (though how much money and time you need for each depends on where you are, you're trading off safety as well as time and money, and being able to comfortably study and/or sleep on buses/trains (not everybody can do that) can reduce the effective time cost of public transportation for long routes). Another one is whether to rent an expensive apartment near your workplace or a cheap one far away from it.

Modafinil is a highly regarded money for time exchange.

Audiobooks really effective money for time exchange (if you aren't pirating them).

Automatic dishwashers are really cheap per hour saved. The actual costs will vary widely (esp. in the US, where the cost of electricity is much lower than where I live), but our best estimate at the time of buying was $2/hour saved (based on halving the 30 minutes we need to do the dishes, and assuming it breaks the moment it's out of warranty - not entirely unreasonable, since we pretty much bought the cheapest option.) Locally, about half is depreciation of the dishwasher and half is electricity/washing powder/water (negligible).

(I've brought this up before: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9pk/rationality_quotes_february_2012/5tsb.)

If you wear glasses, you could get LASIK surgery. (I haven't done this.) According to these speculative calculations, the cost per hour of time saved is somewhere between less than zero (not having to get new glasses saves you money) and $55. But you can get the benefits only once, unfortunately.

Discount rate: 10%

Financial cost of glasses

• cost of a pair of glasses each year: $15–$400
• addional cost for updating prescription yearly: $50 (?)

total: $65–$450/year (PV ~ $650–$4500)

Time cost of glasses

• putting on and taking off glasses: 20s/day
• cleaning glasses: 20s/day
• looking for misplaced glasses: 20s/day
• updating prescription, shopping for glasses, ordering: 3 hours/year

total: 9 hours/year (PV ~ 90 hours)

Financial cost of LASIK

• cost of LASIK surgery and follow-up appointments: $2,000–$5,000

Time cost of LASIK

• scheduling, filling out paperwork, counseling, travel, etc. (pre-surgery): 3 hours
• surgery: .5 hours
• four checkups at 1.5 hours/checkup (including transit time)

total: 9.5 hours (PV ~ 9.5 hours)

total: $2,000–$5,000

net financial cost: -$2,500 to $4,350

net time savings: ~80 hours

per-hour cost: negative to ~$55/hour

A smartphone plan can vary in costs, but 1-2 dollars a day over the cost of a feature phone plan seems like a fair range of prices. For instance, my carrier's base data plan is 30 dollars a month, which is about 1 dollar a day, but this does vary depending on country. (Speed can also vary between country, with differences like 3G and 4G coverage.) If your time is worth 4 dollars an hour, and a smartphone can give you back even 15-30 minutes of time during a day, on average, then it is an approximately even trade. If your time is worth more, than a smart phone will need to give you back proportionately less time.

I find that my smartphone easily feels like it gives me back an average of 30 minutes a day, and baseline smartphones of the previous model, which from reviews is still quite good, appear to be available in my area(Maryland) at a cost of 1 dollar if you sign a two year contract. So it seems like unless you value your time very little, or live in an area with horrible data coverage, or live in an area with extortionate cell phone providers, it is worth it to get a smartphone. This was particularly notable to me because a large portion of the people who I knew had a smartphone and I had a very low grade feature phone, so I have some evidence this may be late adopter advice which a lot of other people have already taken.

But if for some reason you have a steady job, and have a phone upgrade/phone purchase coming up, and are planning on NOT getting a smartphone, I feel I should urge you to reconsider. They really do have a great deal of potential at a relatively low cost.

I also strongly recommend doing the following three things when you get home, to help keep costs low: Turn off In-app purchasing immediately. Installing some sort of data watching app immediately. Setting up your smartphone to use your Home Wifi (also set it for your Work Wifi, if your work has Wifi)

If you don't, you may have gotten rid of the surplus value in either data overages or in app purchases you did not fully consider. I thankfully avoided this. (Although it was close. I delayed somewhat on setting up Home Wifi for my wife, only to find out she had used two thirds of her data on her second day of having it, thinking "Oh look, a large assortment of free apps I can download.")

I really do feel a bit silly suggesting this since I feel I was a relatively late adopter to the technology, but I do still know some people who do not yet have smart phones, so I recommend doing this, keeping in mind the caveats above.

You could install a bidet on your toilet. Disclosure: I've never used a bidet.

Cost

• Bidet: $750
• Installation: $250 (a guess)

Total: $1,000

Time savings (assuming 1.5 bowel movements/day)

• Hand washing: 60s per day (40s/BM)
• Read a book or use your phone instead of wiping: 45s/day (30s/BM)
• Reduced need to clean backside when showering: 10s/day

Total: 6 hours/year (PV ~ 37 hours, assuming a 10% discount rate and a bidet lifetime of 10 years)

Cost per hour: $27

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

Even for a specific person at a specific point in their life, x isn't constant. Some days I might have more time than things I need to do, others less. Being able to easily convert between money and time as days required would be really handy.

Randall Munroe takes this idea and runs with it.

Here are some free options that I sometime practise:

• Preparing large quantities of food when I prepare food so that I can eat for a while without cooking or buying food that does not require much preparation.
• Buying many groceries at the same time so that I will save time by not taking more trips to the store.
• Audiobooks save me incredible amounts of time.

Also, Modafinil is a great money for time exchange. I hear.

I generally value my time between $10 and $30 per hour, depending on how much work I have and at what rate I have it.

estimates in $/hr for potential ways to work or buy free time

I've wondered about such an estimate for modafinil (yes, I blame gwern). Seems like only cents per hour of free/productive time bought.

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.