TAIU

Tool 57 · Develop yourself

What am I trading, and at what rate?

This exercise does not assume time matters more than money. Sometimes earning more is the right answer, and it should be able to say so.

A woman leaving an office building at dusk while the windows above stay lit, a child waiting on the pavement

A guided 18 to 22 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.

  1. 01

    Copy

    Take the TAIU prompt.

  2. 02

    Paste

    Open ChatGPT.

  3. 03

    Talk

    One question at a time.

Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.

You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.

What would another twenty per cent actually buy you?

If the answer takes more than a sentence, the hours are being paid against something nobody has looked at in years.

Money is mostly recoverable. Some of the time is not.

What you'll explore

  1. 01What the money is for
  2. 02The hours
  3. 03Who else pays
  4. 04How long

A note from Mark

Mark Eve, founder of TAIU

I have never found the phrase work life balance useful. It suggests two things on a set of scales, which is not what is happening. What is happening is a trade, at a rate, with terms, and most people have never read the terms.

Start with what the money is for. If somebody can tell me precisely what it secures or makes possible, the hours usually make sense and I would not interfere. If they cannot, then we have found something, because the hours are being paid against a figure whose origin nobody can remember.

Read my full view ↓

The part I would not compromise on is unrecoverable time. Money is largely recoverable. You can earn it later, and people do. Some time is not like that. A child is eight once. A parent is well once. It is not sentimental to price that properly, it is simply accurate.

And be honest about the end date. Almost every demanding period is described as temporary. The ones that really are have a date, a condition or an event attached to them. The ones that are not have a story instead.

What you'll get

You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.

  1. 01

    The real exchange rate

  2. 02

    Unrecoverable time

  3. 03

    Who else pays

  4. 04

    Temporary or structural

  5. +

    Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.

See everything included ↓
  • 01What you came here with
  • 02What the money is actually for
  • 03What the time is actually buying
  • 04What is unrecoverable
  • 05Who else is paying
  • 06Temporary or structural
  • 07The point of diminishing return
  • 08The rival reading
  • 09What deserves protecting
  • 10What remains unresolved
  • 11Where this goes next

What now?

  1. 01 · Save it

    What the money is actually for.

  2. 02 · Test it

    Ask the person who gets the remainder of your week what they would choose.

Explore this further ↓

What I would do

  1. 01

    Say what the money is for, out loud, in a sentence.

  2. 02

    Work out what more of it would actually buy.

  3. 03

    Notice which time is unrecoverable and treat it differently.

  4. 04

    Ask the person carrying the cost what they think.

  5. 05

    Decide whether this arrangement has an end date, or only a story about one.

Test it

  1. 01

    What is the money for?

  2. 02

    What would another twenty per cent actually change?

  3. 03

    Which of these hours will you not get back?

The alternative

The expected conclusion is that you should work less. Two alternatives usually produce more. Working hard now may be exactly right, because the money is doing something specific with an end in sight, and the exercise should say so rather than manufacture a problem. Or the reverse may be true in an unfamiliar way: earning noticeably less might improve things disproportionately, because the marginal money is buying almost nothing while the marginal hour is buying a great deal, and nobody has ever done that arithmetic.

Think about this

  • What the money is actually for.
  • What another twenty per cent would genuinely change.
  • Which of the hours you would not get back.
  • Who else is paying the time cost.
  • When this started, and what was supposed to end it.

Take this to Ask Mark

You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.

Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Finished the exercise?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

A man in his forties in hospital scrubs eating a sandwich on a stairwell step during a night shift

Next tool

What is this job costing me?

If the cost is coming from the job rather than the hours

Continue →What does money mean to me? →

Further thinking

  • Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved

    Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers

  • The Productivity of Working Hours

    John Pencavel

  • Long Working Hours and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke

    Mika Kivimäki and colleagues

Explore the thinking ↓

Article

Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved

Matthew Killingsworth, Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Mellers

Two researchers who had published opposite findings sat down together to work out who was right. The answer was both, in different populations: for most people happiness continues to rise with income, while for an unhappy minority it flattens once real hardship is behind them. It is the most honest available answer to the question of whether more money would help, and it refuses to give you a slogan in either direction.

Article

The Productivity of Working Hours

John Pencavel

Output per hour falls sharply after a threshold, so the extra hours are frequently bought at full price and delivered at a discount.

Article

Long Working Hours and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke

Mika Kivimäki and colleagues

A meta analysis across more than half a million people. It puts a number on something usually discussed as a feeling.

Book

Four Thousand Weeks

Oliver Burkeman

The title comes from a simple observation. An average human life is surprisingly short when expressed in weeks. Burkeman challenges the idea that becoming more productive will eventually create enough time for everything. It won't.