Time, projects and the sparking of joy

I had a big realisation the other day. The most important currency in my life, right now, is time.

The value of time

We had already reached the point in this household where it was worthwhile for us to pay a cleaner, because we both really hate cleaning. Now we are thinking about a gardener. It is worth paying $6 worth of courier fee to mail order something even when it is 10 or 15 minutes drive away, because the time cost of getting in the car and going there is worth more than $6 (before you consider petrol or parking). Provided, of course, the item can be readily found and confirmed on the supplier’s website (insert rant about crap online shopping sites here).

Chatting with a colleague the other day he mentioned feeling similarly, but there are chores he gets value from doing. He really loves mowing his lawn… OK, his wife said, then we won’t pay someone to do it, but that’s your project to keep on top of.

There are not enough hours in the day (week) (month) (year) to achieve everything I want to. Now I must qualify that statement; I do lose a noticeable chunk of time by not having the energy to achieve more, and some more by procrastination. Sometimes after work I have zero oomph to do, well, very much at all. Maybe there’s some neurodivergence effect in there that confounds.

I have too many personal projects I want to do (let alone spending money on tools or toys I’ll hardly use, which is a side grumble in of itself). So it becomes imperative to choose which projects live, and which must suffocate. But is it a death of a project, or merely parking it indefinitely? Practically speaking there isn’t much difference from the project’s point of view. From my POV it is better to not feel overwhelmed by my to-don’t list, lest it become a source of doom and make-work, so I prefer to park things sufficiently far out of sight & mind that they might as well be dead.

I used to try to prioritise things in terms of an Eisenhower matrix. Maybe I should again, but it somehow seems lacking. The urgent and important stuff gets done; the hard part is figuring out how to rank the importance of the non-urgent projects. The value, perhaps; but it’s tough to quantify.

The value points scale

Somewhat idly, I propose the value points scale. These are akin to story points, for those who practice various flavours of agile. These aren’t absolute dollar values; they are relative. Start with Marie Kondo-style thinking of whether completing this project will bring joy, or some other emotion that you find valuable. If you find the term value points confusing, maybe call them Kondo points? There is no direct correlation between value and the effort required, though there will likely be some.

• Fixing a light switch or tidying the garden is mostly a chore but brings me a little joy at the feeling of a job well done, so perhaps call that one kondo.
• Making something out of wood - say, a table - is a big project that will give me some pride, perhaps quite a lot of pride if it involved new techniques or tools. I could maybe see that being 8 or 13 kondos.
• Doing something worthwhile for a good cause you really care about might fill you with warm fuzzies. How many?
• For those of us who love to write software, a personal passion project might come with a raft of kondos.
• Art? Writing? Videography? These won’t all spark joy for everyone, so see if you can calibrate your own relative scale.

Like story points, use a modified Fibonacci scale for the allowable numbers of points. 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100. Maybe a ½ point for the really small stuff. But don’t overthink it. This is supposed to be a lightweight gut-feel metric. As you complete projects you may find your calibration improves.

Agile practitioners talk of a definition of done; with these projects you will have your own idea of what done means, how good a job you need to do to satisfy yourself and cash in the joy. But beware of creeping perfectionism… don’t let that 40 kondo project expand to take infinite time.

Then, you have to decide how to spend your available time. If you have only 1 spare hour in a week that may not be enough for big projects, so consider the quick wins: projects that won’t take long but which will bring some joy. If you are fortunate to have lots of time and energy in a day or a week, you might carve up your time to balance a reward from completing short projects, and progressing longer ones.

With larger projects the joy may not all come at once. You may find some joy at the milestone points. Only you can figure out whether this is part of your own calculus; you are your own project-joy-owner.

Cover image by vectorjuice on Freepik