First, introduce yourselves!

Elisabeth: Wife, mom, biologist (and reluctant entrepreneur).

I manage a clean-tech research program developing commercial pheromone, essential oil, and bacterial products for insect pest management in forestry and agriculture.

I also manage day-to-day accounting and communication responsibilities for our consulting business. Though we try to split household and parenting tasks equitably, the math rarely works since John travels ~50% of the time.

Favorite things: adventuring with my family, being alone (especially after an adventure with said family), eating good food, writing on my personal blog, and reading.

John: Husband, father, technophile (and enthusiastic, life-long entrepreneur).

My three dreams growing up were to: be Superman (I had the costume to make that dream a reality), travel the world, and run my own business. I managed two out of the three.

I started by selling homemade “kites” when I was in Grade Two – just a wooden frame, mind you – no cloth. By my early teens I had established lawn mowing and snow removal businesses where I would bring on clients and then outsource the labor to my friends. I’d charge $25 for a lawn, and pay someone else $15 to cut it.

For most of my career, I’ve worked at the intersection of business, culture and technology; I’m currently the COO of a European tech company that specializes in sustainable infrastructure (roads, railways, etc.).

Favorite things: photography, adventuring with my family, refurbishing tech (and selling it for a profit), German automobiles.

Why did you first decide to launch a business together?

A bit of a disclaimer. The company we co-founded, Frostbyte Interactive, started in tech consulting, branched off (see below) and has essentially come full circle. It remains the vehicle through which we’ve launched all other endeavors.

The first of those that had “legs of its own” was a product we called AccessDeck.

While we were both in graduate school, one of our side hustles was proctoring exams for students with various learning challenges at a university. When we started in our role, less than 5% of the student population was registered with the Accessible Learning department. A little over a decade later, it had surpassed 25%. We discovered similar trends were playing out at other universities.

Existing scheduling and administrative processes were cumbersome, inefficient, and lacking relevant functionality. We developed a customized software package to address these issues, deploying it at a local university before selling the technology to other schools.

How did your entrepreneurial journey continue from there?

It took us too long to realize that our customers (academic institutions) had protracted sales cycles. All these years later we are proud of what we developed, but our focus should have leaned toward commercialization, not just the technical solutions.

Know that old adage to work smarter, not harder? When you’re starting your first business it’s challenging to work smarter because you’re typically starting with limited knowledge and few connections. So it requires a lot of hard work and sweat equity. We were committed to always operating in the black (in over a decade of entrepreneurship we’ve never taken out a single loan, electing to bootstrap things ourselves and pursue funding initiatives). In retrospect, the most valuable things we gained from those early years were connections that led to investment grants/awards and networking leads for future collaboration.

Second business (Aerhyve): We operated Frostbyte Interactive out of an incubation hub and one day John – who was fascinated with emerging aerial tech – told the office manager: “I need to find a way to get money to buy a drone.” Long story short, we got a drone (and then 7 more, all of which lived inside our tiny apartment with our young, growing family) and launched a second business in agricultural tech.

We focused on the leading edge of Artificial Intelligence (long before ChatGPT!), developing technologies that could identify specific crop deficiencies using a special type of Machine Learning. For example, agriculture producers could take an aerial picture of their crops and isolate patches of weeds that needed treatment; even more importantly, we could tell them what species of weed they were seeing – critical for selecting the appropriate response – without ever having to put a foot on the ground!

This AI technology was attractive enough that Aerhyve was soon part of an acqui-hire and John and our other employees joined an American tech company.

Are there upsides to being married to your co-founder?

We like to spend time together and when you’re founding a business you get to spend a lot of time around your partner!

We trusted each other implicitly and had shared motivations since we were working toward a common goal. The longer we’ve worked together, the more trust we’ve developed both personally and professionally.

Founding a business is a bit like entering a full-time relationship. It’s all consuming and can easily fracture a marriage because the business can come to represent an extramarital affair of sorts; in our case we were BOTH involved in this “relationship” so common issues with jealousy or lack of understanding about the investments of time and energy were fully understood by the other, since we were experiencing everything concurrently.

How about the challenges? I would imagine there are some personally, and professionally.

The early days were tough. We had our first child a few months after finishing graduate school. Neither of us had established careers and we had very (very) little money. We scrimped and saved and found a lot of creative ways to make ends meet.

Startup life is a rollercoaster and when you’re strapped in on the ride together it means you’re riding the same highs and lows. While this can pave the way for more empathy, it also means you don’t have a partner to even out your bad days. Usually you’ve faced the same challenged day at the office – which may just be the living room of your home. Which leads into…

It’s very hard to “turn off” work when you’re an entrepreneur. The lines of work/home almost always have to blur to get things off the ground. That’s inherently tough, especially when you’re trying to raise a young family.

2014 was an especially hard year; our daughter got seriously ill with pneumonia and our son was born after a complicated and stressful pregnancy. We had to work through all of those events with no real sick leave. The flexibility you get as your “own boss” is a bit of a misnomer. There was no one else to pick up the slack when we were going through personal crises…and bills still had to get paid.

Given that you were both working for the same company, how did you make decisions about the division of labor with the kids and the home?

Early on, division of labor with domestic work was very equitable. We shared cooking, cleaning, and parenting responsibilities. When we launched our agri-tech business it necessitated a lot of travel, almost exclusively by John. While he does the majority of paid work in our household these days, Elisabeth handles the majority of the domestic responsibilities.

Any advice you’d give to people thinking about doing this?

Make sure you have a rock-solid relationship. It’s like people struggling in marriage who think “We should have a baby! That will solve all our marital issues.” Um, nope. Babies are hard. So is co-founding a business.

The nature of business is not to make money but rather to make customers. This tenet still permeates everything we do today.

On that note, it really can’t ever be about “money.” In fact, you need to be prepared to have some lean years. The payoffs of entrepreneurship are rarely large (statistically, most businesses fail), and the sweat equity required can involve living on very limited funds while getting the business off the ground. Even with a sustainable business, it needs to be passion, autonomy, changing the world, etc. that provide the constant motivation.

Ensure that if one person is more drawn to entrepreneurship (in our case, John), that the other party knows there is a “kill switch” to walk away from the rigors of start-up life.

You need to like being around each other.

It’s critical you have the same approach to spending. If one person wants to take financial risks hoping for big rewards and the other partner is risk averse, this can be a major red flag.

Make sure you have a diversified combined skill set. While we worked together on everything, we had different approaches and strengths. In early days we were literally a team of two and had to divide up an entire gamut of roles.

Are there particular time management strategies that have helped with the entrepreneurial life?

Entrepreneurship is like running a marathon uphill. It’s important to pace yourself…

Favorite things to do together? How did/do you recharge?

We love to adventure as a family. Visiting lighthouses in Nova Scotia is one of our favorite activities.

We walk together. During early years, this was a major source of creative inspiration and relief from excess tension due to business challenges. Now we walk our children to school most mornings and then have at least 20 minutes of time together to talk on the way home.

At-home date nights. This is one of the best habits we’ve established in our marriage. Each week – at least once, often twice – we feed the kids separately, put them to bed, and John (never Elisabeth!) prepares a special meal we eat together while watching a movie (we don’t feel the need to gaze lovingly into each others eyes over candlelight because we spend a lot of time together since we both work from home). It’s relaxed but special.

Photo: In the early years…

Contrast this with labor markets. People are most definitely not the same. Historically, labor has been sold in one type of unit: to one organization, for roughly 40 hours a week, for a long period of time. There are variations (20 hours a week to one organization…self-employment where you have more flexibility over hours…) but the gist is a lot of friction. Finding a job requires effort and it is hard to choose your hours with limited commitment. Starting a business requires its own investment of time during the ramp-up period. Consequently, it is not easy to turn whatever available time you might have into money, whenever you need or want money.

Or at least it wasn’t easy. About 15 years ago, I wrote a few short pieces about the “Craigslist Economy.” Craigslist was (is) one of those gee-whiz concepts from the early internet. A marketplace for everything! Including short term gigs. I interviewed some folks who needed cash, and found things they could do for one weekend (park cars at a party, help someone move, etc.) No long term commitment required. Perhaps these “gigs” were the start of the frictionless labor market!

This phrase didn’t really take off (though you can read my take on the concept in my money book, All the Money in the World). Craigslist is still around, though the gig economy really came into its own when smart phones became popular, and apps like Uber or Door Dash enabled people to truly turn time into money with limited commitment. There’s no need to think up a business and market yourself. There’s no need to set hours. You can monetize your time and the asset of your car when you’d like. If your kids all make it to school successfully in the morning, you can turn on the Uber app and spend the day driving people to the airport. If someone winds up home sick, no problem. You just don’t turn it on. There are big problems with the gig economy, of course, but this flexibility has met a real need.

Anyway, this brings me to the newest iteration of this concept. Lots of people need (or want) to flexibly turn time into money. Door Dash and Uber allow you to monetize the asset of a car in order to turn time into money. But there are plenty of other assets one can monetize. AirBnB lets you monetize your guest room. Fame is an asset. Beyonce doesn’t need to turn bits of time into money, but much fame isn’t like that. You had a TV role a few years ago. You played a season in the NFL. Historically, to monetize that, you could start a related business (e.g. make-up or clothes with a model’s name on it), or write a book, or join the speaking circuit. All of these require a reasonable investment of time before they generate cash.

Which is why Cameo is one of the best business ideas I’ve ever heard of. (Yes, I see it launched in 2017, but I just heard about it…) Cameo allows you to buy “personalized videos from your favorite stars.” For a fee (from $20-$500 or so) you can get a short recorded message from one of these folks. There are a few household names like Magic Johnson, but the sweet spot is, say, a cast member from a recent season of The Bachelor. It makes a great gift for a Bachelor fan in your life. And someone who was on The Bachelor can make a quick $50. How awesome is that?

Anyway, I’m sure there are other assets that someone will figure out how to flexibly monetize, but I thought this one was really cool. And in the meantime, I’ve got a great new gift idea for the young Survivor fan in my household…

In this week’s episode of BOBW, I interview Kendra about some of my favorite Lazy Genius principles. How can we “Decide Once?” What does it mean to “Start Small”…and what has Kendra started small on? What exactly is the “Magic Question?”

We discuss our caveat to the Magic Question (it’s mostly magic but there are limits). Then Kendra shares her recent experience of being quarantined as Covid ripped through the whole family (they’re all doing fine now). She learned a lot about herself — such as the importance of articulating exactly how she was weak under stress. We should all identify how we’re weak under stress. It can help us not alienate everyone around us.

Please give the episode a listen! And check out The Lazy Genius podcast, and Kendra’s book, The Lazy Genius Way. She also has a new book, The Lazy Genius Kitchen, coming out this spring, so be sure to follow her on Instagram so you’ll be the first to get your copy.

Also: Last call for October’s BOBW online meet-up! Patreon community members can join us tonight (10/26) at 8 p.m. eastern on Zoom for our discussion of all things childcare. So if you’d like to participate, please join today!

There’s also a longer-term idea for advancing equity that I suspect some readers of this blog could do, but may not have thought about.

Starting a business tends to require capital. Sometimes people get bank loans, and sometimes they open businesses with the help of family and friends. Starting something larger tends to require capital from investors — either venture capital (pooled money invested by pros) or money from “angel investors.” These are folks who invest as individuals in early stage companies in the hope of achieving a return.

Patterns of wealth being what they are, it’s probably not surprising that most angel investors are white men. And since people tend to invest in people they know, most angel and venture capital goes to businesses founded by white men. Depending on the source of the figures and the year, somewhere between 3-8 percent of early stage capital goes to women-founded businesses, and less than 1 percent of venture capital goes to businesses with African American founders. It’s unlikely that white men have almost all the good business ideas. Over time, these gaps contribute to perpetuating disparities.

Investing in start-up companies is, of course, risky, which is why there are rules in the US and many other countries about who can do so. You need to be an “accredited investor” — wealthy enough to know what you’re doing and to be OK with losing money. But what this means in practice is that you, as an individual, have made at least $200,000 a year for the past two years, and expect to keep doing so, or that you’re part of a couple taking in at least $300,000 a year. (You can also qualify by having at least $1 million in assets excluding a primary residence.)

I suspect that a non-zero proportion of readers here would qualify, or could view qualifying as a reasonable financial goal over time. But most people with high incomes don’t think of angel investing as a possibility. Many angels tend to be start-up founders themselves who’ve cashed out. They’re more comfortable with the idea. Even so, most angel investments aren’t in the millions. The median investment (according to that linked report) is about $25,000, which means there are plenty that are more in the $10,000 range.

One way to invest in a different world is to help change the face of investing and who receives investments. There are lots of investment groups that help bring together angel investors and founders. (Here’s one list with some resources) People who are actively looking to invest in companies with more diverse founders will help change the ecosystem. They affect who is invited to pitch, and which pitches get funded. Money can be a tool to build a different world, and investing is one way to do that.

In other news: My recent article in City Journal covered teaching entrepreneurship in schools.

We finally got the power back on this weekend after Wednesday’s storm. The portable generator turned out to be a good buy. It didn’t do anything about the 86 degree heat, but it powered the garage freezer so the milk stash made it through.

The key upside, as Sara Sutton of FlexJobs told us, is that the gig economy allows people to turn time into money, flexibly, and without long-term commitments. Entrepreneurs have always had some control over their schedules, but coming up with a money-making business idea takes time. (I’d note, as a self-employed writer/speaker/podcaster that building up enough of a reputation to make money takes a lot of time too!) Gigs let you make money on your own schedule without you having to come up with something genius, and without you having to build your personal brand. As she notes, this is a chronic need in the labor market, and gigs fill it.

Of course, you might not make too much money. We write about some of the downsides — unpaid waiting time, uncertain income, etc. These downsides are behind some of the recent attempts to regulate the gig economy.

Anyway, please give it a read! And if you are a frequent customer or worker of the gig economy, I’d love to hear about it too. We’ve just started using Instacart, which I have found fascinating.

Boomerang, an email app that allows you to schedule and manage messages, analyzed thousands of messages sent to twenty different online communities. While some people have their own unique closers, certain phrases appear far more often than others: best, sincerely, cheers, regards, thanks, etc.

The average email in the sample got a 47.5% response rate. Those that used the phrase “thanks in advance,” though, got a 65.7% response rate. Other variations on this theme also did well: “thanks” got responses 63.0% of the time, and “thank you” got a response rate of 57.9%. “Best,” by comparison, came in at 51.2%.

One probably doesn’t want to read too much into such things. Maybe emails that end with an expression of thanks are more likely to about things that specifically need a response, whereas a “best” or “regards” email might be more informational (though Boomerang’s use of online communities, where people were often posting to ask for help or advice, meant that a high proportion of messages were probably written in hopes of a reply). But perhaps, a prior expression of gratitude for a requested response — that is, “thanks in advance” — triggers a feeling of obligation in the part of the recipient. I’ve already been thanked, so now I need to do this thing.

Maybe “thanks” turns out to be a magic word after all.

How do you end your emails? I sign my newsletters “All the best,” but those usually aren’t requesting anything. Maybe if I send emails asking people to do something, I’ll switch to “thanks in advance.” It’s worth a try!

It is a different version of the old adage tossed at students: Sleep, study, socialize. You may pick 2. I have lost track of how many people have said to me, in a tone that implies this is supposed to be profound, “You can have it all, just not at the same time.”

But is this refreshingly honest? I am not so sure.

If we can truly only pick 3, then all these categories should take roughly the same quantity of time. That is clearly not the case, so I assume the point of the entrepreneurial dilemma is that perhaps our entrepreneur will be able to build a company, and sleep (being human and all), and see his/her family, but everything else is going to have to go. Given that many people think you cannot even sleep and see your family if you want to succeed in business, I appreciate this slightly more abundant perspective on time.

That said, I still think the dilemma is overly gloomy. You can pick all 5 if you want.

Here is why. “Staying fit” is inherently a limited category. When I was studying time logs for I Know How She Does It, I saw that one of my subjects was a distance runner who had recorded her 168 hours when she was 3 weeks out from the Boston Marathon. That is pretty much the peak of training time before the taper, and people who qualify for Boston are very serious runners. This woman was devoting 10 hours a week to physical activity. Merely staying fit requires nowhere near that. Perhaps you cannot be right at the peak before the taper continuously while building a great company, but could you run 30 minutes 5 times per week on your basement (or hotel) treadmill? Probably. That is 2.5 hours.

Then we look at maintaining friendships. This means different things to different people, but if we are going to focus on “maintaining” (rather than trying to meet 10 new friends weekly, or scheduling frequent weekend-long friend excursions), let us assume our entrepreneur has 6 very close friends he/she would like to have play a role in his/her life. Would spending an hour every other week with each of these people do that? That could be combined in a thoughtful way — a 3 hour dinner with 3 of the friends, perhaps, or a weekly long run with 2 of them (which would mean we could double up on the fitness front!). Human beings have to eat anyway, so our mindful entrepreneur could definitely aim to have breakfast or lunch with one friend a week. Those who are also very busy might be called while our entrepreneur is in a taxi on the way to the airport, or out walking his dog. I think devoting 3 hours per week (or even more!) to friendship maintenance seems possible.

So if we devote 2.5 hours to staying fit, and 3 hours to maintaining friendships, this is 5.5 hours per week. Let us say our entrepreneur plans to sleep 7.5 hours per night, or 52.5 hours per week. Add on the friendships and exercise and you get to 58 hours. There are 168 hours in a week, so this leaves 110 hours for some combination of work and family, and life maintenance. If our entrepreneur planned to work 65 hours, that would leave 45 hours for other things. This obviously presumes that someone else is available for lots of the family matters (e.g. if you have young kids) but let us presume that is true. There is still quite a bit of time.

How much time do you devote to maintaining friendships? Where do you fit this in?

Photo: Must we only pick one?

In other news: Do you want to receive my blog posts by email? Just follow this link to adjust your subscription preferences (you can sign up for weekly time tips here too). Click on the blog posts by email button, and they will start coming to you!

Here are some realities. Middle-class incomes have been stagnant (if not declining) for a while. It’s hard for most families to live decently on one income. However, childcare is incredibly expensive. I’ve blogged before about the economics of this: if you have two young kids in a good quality daycare center, you generally need to earn more than $50,000 to break even. Given that the average woman working full-time earns less than $40,000 a year, this doesn’t exactly work. To be sure, many people do make it work, through family care, home-based daycares that may have more flexibility and lower costs, shifting schedules so parents work at different hours, etc. But it’s not easy.

So if families need the second income, but can’t afford childcare, what can be done? The answer for many is to seek out work-at-home gigs. These are seen as the best of all possible options — in theory, earning money without having to shell out big bucks for childcare! — and so desirable that half the ads online tout how you’ll “make $8000 a month working from home!” They don’t even say what kind of work you’ll be doing. The fact that it can be done at home is the major selling point.

The vast majority of this is scam. The first hard truth about working from home is that no one is hunting around for people to pay large quantities of cash to in exchange for them doing low-skilled work at home while the baby naps.

There are two legitimate ways to make a good income working from home. Crystal’s book focuses on one of those: starting a business. If you’re entrepreneurial, there are all sorts of things you can do, and technology has made scaling up a business possible in a way that it wasn’t before. If you made crafty things in the past, your market was limited to the stores where you could sell your wares, or the people who stopped by your booth at craft shows. Now you can get on Etsy and get your wares in front of the world. Crystal’s a prime example of how you can take expertise on something (couponing, in her case) and turn it into a profitable empire.

The other legitimate way to make a good salary working from home is to get a regular job with a good salary and negotiate to work from home. Often people are able to do this a few days a week if they’ve built up enough seniority.

But — and here is the other hard truth — neither of these 100 percent solve the childcare issue for most people. If you’re working a conventional job with real hours but happen to be doing it from home, your employer is going to expect you to be focused on the job. You can see your kids during breaks but you still need someone else to be watching them. More likely than not, that someone will need to be paid. And while you can probably do something entrepreneurial in fewer hours than a FT job with a commute, and do it more flexibly once you get it going, building a business still takes time. Growing it requires an investment of hours. Crystal has written before of pulling all-nighters as she built her business, and has written on the blog that hiring a mother’s helper was one of the best investments she ever made.

I am grateful for my ability to earn a decent living working at home, but it has taken years of working 40+ hour weeks, with many of the things I’ve done needing to be done during business hours. Hence the full-time childcare.

In other news: I’ve considered writing a piece called “A cold-hearted capitalist’s argument for daycare subsidies.” Maybe if we called it school vouchers for the under-5 set…

Photo: Why does every stock photo about “working from home” feature a mom at a laptop holding a baby? Perhaps this is what perpetuates the myth that this works.

Prahin also has a day job in the fashion industry. She has two young kids. So how, I wanted to know, does she structure her weeks?

The good news is that there is time, in 168 hours, for all these things, particularly with some creative strategies.

First, Prahin has honed an exquisite level of productivity at her day job in order to keep her hours at 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. “My strategies for confining my work to this time are to stay focused, follow a to-do list that I try to create with every project, and really understand all the details involved prior to starting something new,” she says.

While she has a business partner for Signature.Styled, she needs to be involved in a lot of matters too. And some of those things really need to happen during the work day. Her solution? “I use my lunch hour for my start-up. I meet with my partner during our lunch for updates and planning. If we are not meeting during that time, I write and answer emails, brainstorm, do research, or go over my to-do lists. Sometimes I schedule phone calls at that time as well.” She’ll schedule in-person meetings for 5 p.m. In NYC that’s not considered a no-go meeting time (a lot of people work 9:30-6:30-ish hours). “I will come into my day job earlier that day so that I can leave earlier to make it on time,” she says.

Long time blog readers will not be surprised to learn that Prahin is a proponent of the “split shift.” She does start-up stuff at 5 or 5:30 p.m., and then will go home and spend a few hours with her two young children. They’re in bed by 9 p.m., and that’s when she fires up the laptop to work in earnest on her business. “As in all entrepreneurial work, it’s never done,” she says, but “I do have a to-do list of what I want to accomplish in my time for each night, and I try to stick to it as much as I can.” She enforces a stopping point of midnight or 12:30 a.m. — “to make sure that I get to sleep and have the energy to do it again the next day!”

It’s a pretty grueling schedule during the workweek, but here’s what makes it all possible: Prahin does very little work on the weekend, either for her main job or for Signature.Styled. She will occasionally do an hour or two at night, and nap with the kids during the day in order to make up the sleep, but not much beyond that. “It’s hard not to work on weekends, I can be doing so much in that time,” she says. “But my children need me more than any job or start-up ever would and spending the time with them and my husband is the most important thing in the world for me.”

The good news is that by organizing her time this way, she can log full time hours at her day job, invest around 20 hours a week in her start-up, and still spend big chunks of time with her family too. This rhythm of busy weeks and lighter weekends “does make it easier on my family, but also easier on me, as I know that at the end of the week, no matter what happens, I will still get to spend time with them!”

If you’ve got a side hustle going, when do you make time for it?

That was my take-away after several readers sent me Sue Shellenbarger’s WSJ article on “Do You Know What Your Time Is Really Worth?” The article had a link to an online tool called ClearerThinking that asks a series of questions about your salary and work habits, and then guides you through thought experiments to figure out how you value your time.

I put in that I work about 45 hours during the weeks I work, but I only work about 48 weeks per year (2160). From tracking my time lately, I see that 42 hours is my long-term rolling average, so that comes out about right. I figured roughly what I earn per hour (let’s call this X) and then the tool calculated that I valued my leisure time at a rate that was 60 percent higher than X. It warmed my economic-minded heart to find out I was more consistent and rational in my answers than the majority of survey-takers, but still, the recommendation was clear: I either need to ask for a raise, or I need to start working less.

I am not interested in the latter. Indeed, I’ve been trying to figure out how to work more. I’d be happy to earn more, but I also know I’m not optimizing my income. I know how to earn more money, and I’m not doing those things.

So what’s going on? Well, I’m irrational like all humans are irrational, but there are complicating factors that go into deciding what my time is worth, and these factors may affect others’ calculations too.

Factor 1 – my husband also earns money. Therefore I probably make some decisions on what my time is worth based on total household income and total time available, not just mine. I imagine lots of couples do this; a non-working party in a high-income household generally doesn’t value his/her time at zero. This person is often willing to pay for some childcare, for instance, or a cleaning service.

Factor 2 – if earning lots of money were my primary motivation, I went into the wrong line of work. I chose writing because I really enjoy it, and I chose the version of writing I do (primarily book writing and essay writing) because it’s what I like best. I’m thrilled to get paid pretty well for something a lot of people do for free. I find it becomes harder to put a rational dollar value on work time when you know that if you had a different job, you’d be doing your current day job as a hobby on nights and weekends. I try!

Factor 3 – happy time and time not spent working are not the same things. While I know that I have a reasonable amount of leisure time (even “me time” per yesterday’s post), an hour not spent working could be devoted to different things, which I value differently. A lovely trail run on a gorgeous day is one thing. So is a nice one-on-one excursion with a happy child, or a date night dinner. An hour on a rainy Saturday with bickering children is another thing entirely. I imagine some parents who thought they could get away with it have claimed to their spouses that “I have to get caught up on work!” in that scenario.

Factor 4 – it’s hard to adopt assumptions in thought exercises. For instance, in the ClearerThinking tool, you were asked to say how long you’d wait in line for a $100 gift certificate. You’re allowed to have an electronic device, so it’s neutral and not unpleasant, and so in theory, I should be willing to wait at least an hour, but I’m not. I hate lines. Irrationally! I put 20 minutes, but even that might be stretching it.

Factor 5 – how easily do time and money convert to each other? I don’t get tripped up on this one as much, but a lot of people do. I know that an additional quantity of my time could be turned into money relatively easily. That’s one of the upsides of self-employment. When people are salaried, working an additional hour doesn’t always translate so clearly into extra cash. In the long term, I think it often does, and I encourage people to think about that when making decisions (especially childcare decisions) but the path isn’t so straightforward.

When you think about what you earn per hour, and how you’d value your leisure time, how do these things compare? Would you have to be paid more than your current hourly rate to work additional hours?