Personal Rate
How should you value your time?
There are two approaches to answering this question - one focused on the future, and one focused on the past:
- Set an aspirational hourly rate — how much do you want to make per hour?
- Calculate your Continuous or Effective Hourly Rate — how much do you actually make per hour?
Once you’ve decided on a number, plug it in below and the rest of the website will update to use your Personal Rate where applicable.
For example, the Keystrokes Per Second tool will update to reflect the “cost” of each buffer you type.
Unsure what to set as your rate? The default is set to $100/hour, with the assumption that this is a good starting point for most people. 1 That being said, the most successful people blow this number out of the water.2
Why is this important?
Knowing the value of your time provides an indispensable frame of reference for how you decide to allocate it.
Want to scroll through Instagram for 30 minutes? That’s fine, but it’s going to cost you
Is it worth it?
Footnotes
As of May 2023, the average hourly rate in the United States was $33.44. Tripling this (aspirational) gives us $100/hour: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm ↩
Early in his career, the co-founder of AngelList used to value his time at $5,000/hour: https://nav.al/hourly-rate ↩