Lots of people in EA/rationality spheres are interested in concepts of ‘the value of one's time’ or ‘trading money for time’ - for example they might talk about whether it's worth it to hire a cleaner, or take an uber rather than a bus, because it costs you money but saves you comparatively more time.

In these discussions, it's usually assumed that the value of your time is something like your hourly salary or hourly rate. (This seems true from the first few 'non-EA-world' google results too). So e.g., if you make $20/hour (the theory goes), it's not worth it to spend an hour to save less than $20 (by, say, taking a slower and cheaper bus rather than a faster and more expensive train).

But I’m not sure sure this is the right way to look at it. Everyone needs rest. Let’s imagine that A can work the standard 40 hours a week, but if they try to work more than that, they quickly become tired and unproductive. And let’s imagine that they make $20/hour (based on dividing their salary by hours worked). You might think that by putting in an hour of time, they get $20 ‘out’. But in order to put in 40 hours at their job, they need to also rest for the remaining weekly hours (128). So if their weekly salary is 40 hours x $20/hour = $800, then in order to ‘get out’ that money, they really need to put in not just their working hours, but also the 128 rest hours in between (without which they couldn’t do their working hours). So the real value of their hour is not $800/40, but $800/168, which is $4.70 — quite a bit less!

I think this perspective could be applied to other things: the production of value often requires more hidden, shadowy supports.

Consider a big company where the CEO makes millions, but the factory workers make minimum wage. From a pro-capitalist/more classical-liberal perspective, this might be fair enough: the CEO has unusual specialist skills that generate lots of value for the company, whereas the factory workers don’t. If you put a random factory worker in the CEO role they’d probably do way less well at it.

But from a more leftist/anti-capitalist perspective, this is actually unjust, because the CEO couldn’t make *any* money without the factory workers. This is why unionizing and striking works (and why progressives usually support it): you can coordinate to prove to the bosses that they really need your labour.

This feels analogous to the work hours thing: the value produced by the CEO depends on the support of the workers who actually make the product.

For another example, people who work in the formal economy are often supported in hard-to-see ways by loved ones labouring outside the formal economy. The stereotypical example is a man who works 9-to-5 (for pay) while his wife cleans, cooks, does admin, and looks after the children (for no formal pay). Feminists have talked about this a lot. It seems as if the man’s money comes from the labour he puts in; but in fact, he can work the hours he does only because his other needs are taken care of.

Another possible example: often when we think of social impact, we think of individual heroes or geniuses. But usually, such people couldn’t do what they did without the support of more ‘average’ and less famous people who took care of their basic needs, or created communities and institutions they could thrive in.

It strikes me that which lens you take is influenced by your politics: liberals, centrists and libertarians might be inclined to focus on the individuals who "actually" produce the value, whereas socialists, leftists, anarchist might be more inclined to focus on the collectives and communities that work together to enable valuable things to be produced. And surely both lenses capture some truth.

I’m not really sure how coherent this thought is or how well the examples really map. Thoughts?

I think the spirit behind inbox zero is good, and it's good to push yourself to get rid of e-mails once they hold no value to you. However, I'm not quite disciplined enough to make it happen, especially where I have a large existing backlog, and I don't like "artificially" creating an inbox zero situation by e.g. marking things as read that I haven't read, or archiving things that I haven't "dealt with" (whatever that means).

Some time ago, this led me to try to come up with ways I could approximate the virtues of inbox zero, without being able to get there. One approximation is obviously, like, "inbox four", or whatever. Another is "inbox zero since date D". A combination I am fond of is "how old is the oldest e-mail on the first page?", pages being 50 e-mails each.

I track this, along with "total unread e-mails in my inbox", through a simple google apps script daily that writes to a spreadsheet and then draws me a graph. Ask me if you want to know how to set it up, it was simple code-wise but getting Google to let me keep the permissions was surprisingly annoying ("do you trust this developer?" IT'S ME) until I figured it out.

Anyway, today the oldest e-mail on my first page is more than a year old :) I'm at like, "inbox 50 over the last year". There's still some way to go of course, but I'm pleased to have made this much progress, and still in my heart believe that one fateful day the stat will reach infinity as I get down to less than one page of e-mail.