Reward to Effort
What is the Reward : Effort ratio you require to take action? When people want me to deliver a Facebook Marketplace item I am selling for $10, the 120 mile round trip to Denver makes me want tell them to pound sand (in a kind way of course). Even if I was selling it for $100 I still wouldn’t do it accounting for associated costs and the high amount of effort to make the remainder. Now, if I were selling something for tens of thousands of dollars, I would be willing to put in much more effort than just taking a long drive on a hazardous stretch of I-25.
At some point on that scale after you achieve profitability I choose whether or not something is worth doing.
We would first need to define reward. Money is not everyone’s highest metric; consider people volunteering at the food pantry. The feeling they get providing a necessity of life that the recipient may desperately need is worth every Tuesday night to them. Regardless of the mode in which the reward is received, people are willing to put in a certain amount of effort relative to their individual valuation.
I am sure everyone does this on a subconscious level, but how many people actually put a number to it. A fun thought experiment is contemplating whether or not a lawyer should do a task themselves or hire someone else. There would be an easy approach to this by comparing their hourly billing rate and hiring out everything that has a lower labor rate; which in a lawyers case is most everything. If a lawyer charges their clients $300 an hour they would be losing money by taking the time to fix their own car even if they had the skills to do it and tools in their garage.
This is where the nonmonetary values come into play, especially for a majority of society that has a much lower hourly rate. A personal example of this would be cooking for me. I love the process of cooking a meal, listening to a podcast, & preparing the food the exact way I want it. Not only do I save money cooking my meals, I wouldn’t take someone’s offer to cook my meals for free. Plus you lose out on the feeling of pride you get when you do something for yourself. On the contrary you may also be fearful to do something yourself. Fixing that leaky faucet may have a simple solution, but you may feel more comfortable paying $100 to have someone come do it for you.
It is interesting to look at how people value things differently; it may say a lot about the person or maybe nothing at all. Regardless, with time being a limited recourse we should use it wisely.