Many businesses find great wealth in focusing on the small things. For example, banks and other financial institutions are very fond of the benefits of partial percentages and fractional cents. When collected together, the sum of those parts is quite exciting.
What if there were an opportunity to do the same thing with time? After all, time is money, and based upon my earlier arbitrage post, wouldn’t there be an opportunity to do some great things?
Let’s start with calculating my spare time. Each year, I have time I can invest in projects of my fancy. That time can be broken down into these categories (assuming 365 days per year):
hours: 8,760
minutes: 525,600
seconds: 31,536,000
Now, in most cases, I’m going to have certain amounts of that time allocated to things that I really need. Those things are going to include sleeping, eating, and working.
Let’s say that I’m going to sleep 8 hours per day. On average I eat two real meals, and I spend and hour on each. For work, I’ll falsely state that I only spend 8 hours each day at work, five days a week (40 hours). Of course, I do get sick time, vacation, and holidays. For argument sake, let’s say that there are 1′840 hours which are allocated as work (2080 work hour possible per year - 80 hours for holiday - 80 hours for vacation - 80 hours for sick/personal time).
The annual time allocated will include:
Sleep: 2,920 hours (8hrs x 365 days)
Eating: 730 hours (2hrs x 365 days)
Working: 1,840 hours
Allocated time: 5,490 hours per year
Now, let’s figure out how much time I have left to discretionally invest.
Available hours: 8,760 hours
- Allocated hours: 5,490 hours
======================
Free hours: 3,270 hours
Stated in the same terms as above:
Free hours: 3,270
Minutes: 196,200
Seconds: 11,772,000
Now, imagine that I can get 24 seconds of your time to complete a small project. What would that be worth? In general, the amount of time required to complete a project will take much longer than this, but we’re talking about less than 1/2 of a minute. This represents
0.00020% of your free time per year…
Now, imagine that I can get 10% of the population to give me 45 seconds of time.
Population Clock:
U.S. 299,315,488
World 6,530,710,933
13:14 GMT (EST+5) Jul 26, 2006
US: 29.9 million people x 24 seconds = 718,357,171 seconds
World: 653.1 million people x 24 seconds = 15,673,706,239 seconds
Let’s make that tangible:
US time: 11.9 million minutes = 199,544 hours = 8,314 days = 22.8 years
World time: 261.2 million minutes = 4.4 million hours = 181,408 days = 497 years
Now.. we can argue about my assumptions… but let’s create one more calculation. What if I would normally need to pay minimum wage to accomplish these tasks, but was able to offer a solution which eliminated that cost? What type of value creation are we talking about?
US: 199,544 hours x $5.15 USD = $ 1,027,650 USD
World: 4.4 million hours x $5.15 USD = $ 22,422,107 USD
Now.. imagine I could get that accomplished more than one time per year.
Following the example of Linus’ Law, which states “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” I believe that we can expand this to state that given enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow. And, I think that the companies who figure out how to leverage this crowdsourcing framework are going to drive the next wave of innovation.
