Best of times... worst of times... Time [Part 2]
Syed Nasir Ershad
It has become a well-established fact that while it is important to work hard for earning livelihood to meet the physical requirements, we need to satiate our inner souls too to live an honorable and blissful life. Because, the aim should not be only to live the life in its ordinary sense of the term but also to make the life fruitful and enjoyable
Now-a-days, most of us so called urban people spend a lot of our time working on the computer. Children are busy with iPad, Tab, etc. More time looking at the screen, less time we look at each other’s face. To realize our situation we should develop habit of measuring our time to record the amount of time we spend on each task. We should be able to group our time into specific areas like writing, reading, website design, marketing, and so on. This detailed breakdown is helpful. All we need is a reasonable estimate of the total amount of hours we spend to earn money each year.
It might be interesting to know how much money we earned during the time we spent working. This could be pretty simple. If we are an hourly worker or a salaried employee, just look at our latest salary bill and multiply that by the number of salaries we receive per year. If our pay has not changed much this year, we can also look at our tax return from last year and just use that number. We should also include money from side jobs and freelancing chores because the time we spent on those activities also added to my wallet.
The number we find most pertinent to calculate is our take-home pay. This is the amount of money we have left after deducting taxes. For some employees, taxes are withheld from our salary, so our take-home pay is basically what we get paid. If the person is a business owner, however, he should deduct taxes and business expenses from his top-line revenue. If you are also an entrepreneur, you may use yearly earnings for the calculations, because small business income can fluctuate (sometimes drastically) from month to month. Looking at your earnings over a longer time period helps to smooth out these inconsistencies and provide a more realistic value of your time.
You divide your total money earned by your total time spent. For example, let’s say you spend 2,500 hours per year earning money. If you make Taka 500,000 per year, your time is worth Taka 200 hundred per hour. If you make Taka 1,000,000 per year, your time is worth Taka 400 per hour. If you make Taka 2,000,000 per year, your time is worth Taka 800 per hour. So on and so forth. All of these numbers assume that you are working 2,500 hours per year. Obviously, the numbers will shift if you work more hours or fewer hours.
You would be surprised if you calculated these numbers. The value of an hour of your time would be much lower than what you thought it would be. If you look at the calculations with more concentration, you would find that you are only being paid a certain amount per hour for some of your hours, not all of your hours. When you divide your total income by the total time spent working, the value of each hour is much less than what they charge for a given hour of work with a client.
Furthermore, although you might know what we would charge per hour, you would rarely calculate how much time goes into earning money outside of your working hours. By accounting for all of the time you invest to earn money, you get a clearer picture of what your time is actually worth, and it is usually much less than what you would charge for an hour of work on your job.