105 hours: Buy your chores time back

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

Some of those hours are pre-committed to chores. We have to cook, clean, and do the laundry.

Or at least, somebody's got to.

Auto-lunch

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, restaurants suffered some of the worst effects. They weren't allowed to open for weeks. They had to open at lower capacity later, which didn't matter because nobody was going out for dinner anyway.

Many of my favorite restaurants closed. Around that time, I struck one of my favorite deals on buying back time.

Like every restaurant around here, this german restaurant was adapting by doing deliveries. We reached out to them with the following proposal:

"We know you're now doing deliveries, and we want to help. What if we pre-paid a week's worth of deliveries, you texted us a couple of options for lunch in the morning, and you delivered it to us daily at 11:30 am?"

They thought it was an excellent idea for them, a relatively low-effort way to plan meals and get guaranteed weekly deliveries, which would often go for months at a time.

For us, it meant getting a text early in the day with 2-3 delicious options to choose from and getting a doorbell ring at 11:30 am with a meal without worrying about anything else.

For me, it also meant buying back anywhere between five and ten hours a week.

Buying our time back

There's no way around it. Many chores are human labor, and if they're gonna be done, some human's gotta do it. If it's not us, it's somebody else, and they'll often want to be paid for it.

Our chores, in short, are money we save by spending our own time.

Reducing chores, in turn, means time we buy back by spending our money.

The freedom not to spend time on chores costs money, and it can cost a lot of money to free ourselves from all chores because the market puts such a premium on them.

Especially cooking.

For cooking, my wife and I now eat out or buy take-out every day. Where we live, that's more affordable than the priciest places in the US, and it is cheaper still because I'm a vegan, but it's pretty expensive.

But this money difference between buying groceries versus eating out makes up for the time difference of not having to buy groceries, cook anything, or clean up.

It's an exchange of money for time. I'm buying my time back.

Naval Ravikant talks about a similar idea when discussing time and outsourcing in general (although I should note that he does cook) in a book about him called Naval Ravikant's Almanak:

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.

Jorgenson, Eric. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness (p. 36). Magrathea Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Money is time

There's a life-long limit on how much time we're given in a week to spend: 105 hours. There's no such limit on money.

Even if we don't have the money to buy back all of our time from chores, we should evaluate the opportunities we get and then deliberately decide whether to buy time back or not.

Many chores can be drudgery work, so being able to choose not to do them is an essential factor in living a good life. It can help us make time to spend with our family, on leisure, on becoming better, or on work we care about.

But even financially, it can sometimes be better to buy our time back than to spend it on chores.

The things that will increase our income through life all require us to invest time in them. If we don't have time to do them today but are spending our time on chores, we could be making a bad trade.

I assume I will almost always be better off paying for chores with money than with time.

Buy what is for sale

Of course, if I wanted to spend my time cooking (and grocery shopping, and doing dishes), I could. I choose not to so I can use my limited time elsewhere.

Cooking comes up so often as an example of a chore we spend time on that Laura Vanderkam's book 168 hours has a chapter on chores named "Don't do your own laundry" that reports on someone who, after tracking time, found out they were spending 15 hours a week on cooking activities:

Recently, Sid Savara made a surprising discovery for a thirty-year-old single man: “I was spending a lot of time cooking,” he says.

He didn’t mean to be spending a lot of time cooking; [..] he realized that, in an attempt to avoid unhealthy take-out food, he was spending as much as 15 hours per week on food-related tasks. He’d get in the car and battle after-work traffic to go to the grocery store because he didn’t have anything in the house. He’d spend half an hour picking out items for the next day and waiting in line. At home, his failure to plan ahead meant he’d find himself waiting for the chicken to defrost or discovering midway through a recipe that he was missing a key ingredient. Then there was the active cooking time: chopping veggies, tending the stove, doing the dishes.

If he enjoyed shopping and chopping, this would be one thing. But he didn’t. The lost hours were also particularly galling because they fell during that valuable postwork window when he could have been relaxing or doing something fun with family and friends. The only chunk of his food-chore time that he enjoyed was the eating.

Vanderkam, Laura. 168 Hours (pp. 155-156). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Sid Savara goes on to find a cook to prepare meals for him, saving him about 10 hours a week, which he uses to practice the guitar and write.

There are only a few ways to buy back such a big chunk of time. Buying chores is not only a great opportunity but also a unique one.

After all, if we did like Sid Savara above and bought our chores time back, what could we do with an extra 10 hours in the week?