If it’s not worth your time, change what you do

I’ve worked a number of  contract jobs.  Once on contract, with open ended duty hours, each hour I work makes another hour of income.

It’s very hard to stop working and go home! After all, when I get home, I’ll probably just clean the garage, pay some bills, maybe enjoy some time with family. None of these activities seem worth the hourly rate my contract job would pay.  Why go home and “relax reading the paper” when I could stay on the job and make another chunk of change?

It’s not that I enjoy always working, but there’s a very real economic cost that if I go home and read the paper, I am paying my own hourly wage for that priviledge (by not earning what I could have).  Suddenly I realize I don’t want to read the paper if I have to pay that much to do so!  Similar employee feelings were posted in a previously blog entry called “Slave to the Round Dial”.

And then I realized, the problem is not that I have a propensity to work too much, but rather my homefront activities are not that valuable.  I need to change what I do at home!  I need to find activities that are worth my own hourly salary.  Let’s see how to apply that…

• Maybe throw out the damaged tool and buy a new one, ’cause it’s not worth the time to fix it.
• When I work to make something, realize its inherent value by virtue of the labor involved; don’t make items not worth this value.
• When I go camping or recreating, costs seem high.  No they aren’t–compared to my own hourly rate for being there.

Instead of being tempted to work more making more, instead change what you do at home to make it worth while!