How Much is Time Really Worth?

As the iPhone's retail launch approaches and eBay listings are already rocketing through the stratosphere, I've been thinking about all the people who stand in line for hours and hours and I wonder how much money I personally would be willing to pay online to be able to skip the line (assuming I didn't have a preorder). Probably a lot, I hate waiting in lines.

If your college econ professors are to be believed, you should take your hourly wage and multiply it by however many hours you'd be waiting and that's how much your time is worth. I was delighted with this revelation in college; I think through some absurd reduction of that concept, I even saw an argument that some rich celebrities could pay thousands of dollars to some kid to mow the lawn and they'd still come out on top versus mowing the lawn themselves, because they made more money than that per hour. So if you make $10,000 per hour working but spend an hour mowing the lawn instead, you've essentially lost $10,000 or something like that.

While the concept makes sense, that's just an absurd assertion, as if someone is standing there with a checkbook in hand waiting to pay you your hourly rate for any time you do decide to work. Anyway, I digress.

The real point of this rambling diatribe is to express my frustration (and I don't know why I'm thinking about this now) with the annual March Madness story that invariably comes out and says something like "March Madness Costs Companies $356 Quadrillion in Lost Productivity," and all it does is calculate all the hours that workers will be watching basketball games and multiplies it by their average pay, as if these workers do nothing but work every minute of every day all year long until March Madness rolls around. Usually, if you haven't been fired yet, it's because you get your work done. And if you spend the excess time watching basketball instead of puttering around on Facebook or chatting in the break room, companies aren't actually losing any productivity that they had before. Not that any waste of time should necessarily be condoned, and not that March Madness has no effect, but the stated effects are invariably overstated - by several orders of magnitude.