Value of time: what an hour of your selling week is worth

The value of time is what one hour is worth to you: the money it earns, and what you give up to spend it. If you sell for a living, you need two figures. Your average hour is your take-home pay divided by every hour you spend earning it. Your selling hour is the same pay divided by only the hours you spend with buyers. The second figure is always higher, and it's the one that should run your diary.

Money comes back and an hour never does, so the moral of the value of time is to give your best hours to the work that pays. Every half hour spent rebuilding a spreadsheet is half an hour in which no buyer hears from you.

Most choices don't need a number. Nobody needs a sum to turn down a two-hour drive that saves $5 on printer ink. The hard ones sit in the middle. Do you drive a signed contract across town or pay a courier $30? Do you spend an afternoon polishing a quote for a buyer who's gone quiet, or making twenty dials? Those are the choices a figure settles in ten seconds.

James Clear tracked every hour he spent for three months before he wrote up his method for pricing an hour. His first figure uses only money you've already been paid. Here's how it runs for a seller:

1. Add up every hour it takes you to earn. That's the call blocks and meetings, and also the drive to a site visit, the commute and the emails you answer after work. If you've no idea, Clear suggests starting from 2,500 hours a year: 10 hours a day, five days a week, for 50 weeks.
2. Take your pay for the year after tax. For a rep that's base plus commission. If you sell your own services, it's what's left after tax and business costs.
3. Divide the pay by the hours. That's your average hour.

He then checks it against two other figures: what another company would pay you for the same work, divided by your hours, and what you'd pay someone else to do your job. He averages all three, since it's easy to flatter yourself on any single one.

Expect the result to sit below any rate you'd quote a client. A freelancer who bills $100 an hour only gets $100 for the hours somebody buys, while the proposals, the travel and the follow-ups nobody answers still count as hours spent earning and drag the average down.

Your selling hour is your take-home pay divided by the hours you actually spend with buyers: on the phone, in a meeting, or replying to one person about their deal. Admin, internal meetings and travel don't count, and you can't skip them either.

For most reps that's a small slice of the week. When Salesforce surveyed 7,775 sales professionals in 38 countries in August and September 2022, reps said they spent 28% of their week actually selling. Deal management and data entry took most of the rest.

Don't guess your own share. Time one normal week in 30-minute blocks and mark each block that had a buyer in it. Then:

1. Count the buyer blocks and halve the count to get hours.
2. Multiply by the weeks you work in a year, with holidays and sick weeks taken out.
3. Divide your yearly take-home pay by that total.

Run your call blocks on ActivityTracker's focus timer and Friday's count starts with the week's focused minutes already added up.

Your selling hour is still an average, and some buyer hours earn far more than others. Clear's expected value method sorts the hours that pay from the ones that don't. He splits his time by task, picks one unit that links the work to income (for him that's a new email subscriber, whose lifetime value he knows) and prices each task by how many units it brings in.

In sales the unit is already on your board, so work back from what one deal pays you:

1. Start with what an average deal earns you, in commission or in fees if you sell your own services.
2. Multiply it by your close rate from meetings to get the worth of one meeting.
3. Multiply that by your rate from conversations to meetings for the worth of one conversation.
4. Multiply again by your rate from dials to conversations, and you have the worth of one dial.

Use your rates from the last three months, not the ones you'd like to have. Your close rate comes out of the win rate calculator from deals won, lost and gone quiet. The sales activity calculator runs the chain backwards, from your income goal to the calls each week needs. Logging a call in ActivityTracker takes one tap, so step four's dial count grows while you work.

Say one deal pays you $1,200 in commission:

A block of 20 dials is then worth $400 to you, even when nobody says yes. The yes turns up later, and it only turns up because the dials happened. That block is the hour to protect first.

Most lost hours look like work. Each job takes a few minutes and none of them moves a deal.

Price the small ones before you wave them off. Ten two-minute searches a day is 20 minutes, which is 100 minutes a week and 80 hours across a 48-week year. At Aisha's selling hour, that's $10,000 of buyer time spent scrolling.

Then protect the hours you've priced. Book the call block like a client meeting and fix its end time before you start, the way timeboxing works. The daily sales routine template puts calls ahead of email, so the best hour of the morning goes to buyers.

Hand off a job when someone else can do it for less than your average hour and it isn't selling. Keep it when it is selling, even if it'd be cheaper to pass on. A buyer wants to hear from you, not from your assistant.

Use the average hour to decide what help to pay for, and the selling hour to decide what goes in your best slots. Paying $30 for a courier saves Aisha a 70-minute drive worth $35 at her average hour, which is a small win. It's a large one when those 70 minutes become a call block worth $400.

Paying for time tends to feel better than people expect. In a 2017 study in PNAS, Ashley Whillans, Elizabeth Dunn and three colleagues surveyed 6,271 people in the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands. The ones who paid for time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction. In their field experiment, 60 working adults in Vancouver spent $40 on two weekends in a row, once on something that saved them time and once on a thing to keep. When the researchers phoned them at 5pm, they reported a better mood and less time pressure after the time-saving purchase. Hardly anyone spends money this way: asked how they'd spend a $40 windfall, only 2.0% of another 98 working adults named something that would buy them time.

Some jobs aren't a trade at all. Confirming tomorrow's meetings while you wait for a lift costs no buyer time, so it doesn't need a price. Clear calls these opportunistic additions: worth doing in a gap, expensive when they take over the day.

Don't price your evenings. Clear tracked his free time but refused to give it a dollar figure. He treats it as non-negotiable, because the rest is what lets him work well in the hours that are paid.

The same goes for the extra hour at the end of a long day. Go through your day an hour at a time and ask whether that hour, on a normal day, does more good than harm. Clear got the test from Sebastian Marshall. For a lot of sellers the 9pm hour fails. That's when the quote goes out with the wrong figure and a buyer reads a short reply the wrong way. If your late hour fails the test, stop at 8 and send the replies in the morning.

A rep's selling hour depends on the team as much as on the rep. In the next round of 1:1s, ask each rep to time one normal week in 30-minute blocks and bring the count of buyer blocks. Then ask one question: what took the rest?

The answers repeat across a team. The same report gets built by hand every week, the same internal meeting runs long, and the same hunt for an old quote happens on three desks. Fix each of those once and every rep gets hours back, then compare the counts again a month later.

Don't use the figure to squeeze longer days out of people, because the aim is more buyers in the hours they already work, not more hours.

Pick one ordinary day this week and time it in 30-minute blocks, then put a tick on each block that had a buyer in it. Scale the count to a year, divide your take-home pay by it and write the result somewhere you'll see it. Then take one job that costs less than your average hour off your desk and put a call block in the space it leaves, because the value of time only changes your week once it's a number you can see.

• James Clear, The Value of Time: How Much is Your Time Really Worth?, read 28 October 2026
• Ashley V. Whillans, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Paul Smeets, Rene Bekkers and Michael I. Norton, Buying time promotes happiness, PNAS (2017), full text on PubMed Central, read 28 October 2026
• Salesforce, New Research Reveals Sales Reps Need a Productivity Overhaul (survey of 7,775 sales professionals, August to September 2022), read 28 October 2026