I’ve seen the time-money tradeoff reach some pretty extreme, scope-insensitive conclusions. People correctly recognize that it’s not worth 30 minutes of time at a multi-organizer meeting to try to shave $10 off a food order, but they extrapolate this to it not being worth a few hours of solo organizer time to save thousands of dollars. I think people should probably adopt some kind of heuristic about how many EA dollars their EA time is worth and stick to it, even when it produces the unpleasant/unflattering conclusion that you should spend time to save money.
Also want to highlight “For example, we should avoid the framing of ‘people with money want to pay for you to do X’ and replace this with an explanation of why X matters a lot and why we don’t want anyone to be deterred from doing X if the costs are prohibitive” as what I think is the most clearly correct and actionable suggestion here.
I agree we should be careful with the “spend money to save time” guideline. It can be self-serving because spending time to save money can be unpleasant.
Also, there is the danger that you get used to the luxury of spending money to save time. If your situation changes, or need to update your estimate of the value of your time to a lower value, you should be willing to spend the time and not the money! (I hope this does not happen to you, but it may happen e.g. you need to move to your career plan B/C/Z)
Man, I find it so difficult (on, like, an emotional level) to think clearly about the dollar value of an hour of my time (I feel like it is overvalued?? because so many people make so much less money than me, a North American???) but I agree that adopting some kind of clear heuristic here is good, and that I should more frequently be doing explicit trades of “I will spend up to 2 hours on trying to find a cheaper option, because I think in expectation that’s worth $60”.
I think it’s worth doing once (and repeating when your circumstances change, e.g. new job), then just using that as a general heuristic to make time-money tradeoffs, rather than deliberating every time.
I’ve seen the time-money tradeoff reach some pretty extreme, scope-insensitive conclusions. People correctly recognize that it’s not worth 30 minutes of time at a multi-organizer meeting to try to shave $10 off a food order, but they extrapolate this to it not being worth a few hours of solo organizer time to save thousands of dollars. I think people should probably adopt some kind of heuristic about how many EA dollars their EA time is worth and stick to it, even when it produces the unpleasant/unflattering conclusion that you should spend time to save money.
Also want to highlight “For example, we should avoid the framing of ‘people with money want to pay for you to do X’ and replace this with an explanation of why X matters a lot and why we don’t want anyone to be deterred from doing X if the costs are prohibitive” as what I think is the most clearly correct and actionable suggestion here.
I agree we should be careful with the “spend money to save time” guideline. It can be self-serving because spending time to save money can be unpleasant.
Also, there is the danger that you get used to the luxury of spending money to save time. If your situation changes, or need to update your estimate of the value of your time to a lower value, you should be willing to spend the time and not the money! (I hope this does not happen to you, but it may happen e.g. you need to move to your career plan B/C/Z)
This also applies to other luxuries.
This is a valuable point.
Man, I find it so difficult (on, like, an emotional level) to think clearly about the dollar value of an hour of my time (I feel like it is overvalued?? because so many people make so much less money than me, a North American???) but I agree that adopting some kind of clear heuristic here is good, and that I should more frequently be doing explicit trades of “I will spend up to 2 hours on trying to find a cheaper option, because I think in expectation that’s worth $60”.
You might be aware of this but for others reading - there’s a calculator to help you work out the value of your time.
I think it’s worth doing once (and repeating when your circumstances change, e.g. new job), then just using that as a general heuristic to make time-money tradeoffs, rather than deliberating every time.