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Should I Haggle For Something? Depends. What’s My Time Worth?

February 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

MoneyThere was an interesting post on Lifehacker recently about when is it worth to haggle. They had all kinds of ideas on what was worth bargaining for and what was not, to which I say, nonsense! How can you make this kind of decision without knowing the value of your time?

My time is worth about $75 per hour. How do I know this? Because that’s about how much money I can make in an hour if I focus just on making money.

  • This is based on my current consulting rate ($150 to $200 an hour)
  • Take into account the amount of time it would take me to find consulting work
  • Take into account the point of diminishing returns, which means I can’t literally spend 24 hours a day consulting
  • Take into account the amount of time I need to spend on breaks, eating and so on

So if X time devoted to bargaining is going to net me Y money, I should see if X over Y is greater than $75/hour. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Costs, Optimization, Saving Money Tagged With: , , , , ,

Products Don’t Need To Be Perfect, They Just Need To Be Good Enough

January 18, 2012 By 1 Comment
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

Steve JobsPerfection sucks. It’s the enemy of invention, it’s the thing that holds you back. Trying to reach it might be an ok goal but never finishing a project until it’s perfect is the work equivalent of dry humping, it feels good but you never really get to the point. Sorry, but perfection can go to hell, I’ll take good enough any day of the week.

I say all this because I’m struggling with finishing up Diamonds or Dogs, my gift site. There are so many things I want to do. I need more reviewers, more reviews, a better landing page, a better “about us” and more information on why the site is the way it is. That’s just the beginning of my to do list. However, the more I try to get the site perfect, the more I push off the important task of starting to drive traffic to the site. Yes, I want the site to look good but I also want to start doing marketing for it. I want to start linking to it, telling people about it, running an AdWords campaign and the dozens of other things I will need to do in order to get people to my site. I’m not doing any of those things because I’m working on the landing page… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Achieving Success, Making More Money, Optimization, Perfectionism, Step 1 - Priorities Tagged With: , , , ,

The Magic Of Numbers; AKA, How To Get More Messages From Your Online Dating Profile!

April 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

How I slept last night.Over at my fitness blog, 60 in 3, I talk about some recent graphs of my weight, age and workout performance.  I basically charted some of these numbers against one another and tried to figure out what they told me.  And if you read the posts you can see that they told me quite a bit!

For me, this is pretty awesome!  I love numbers and data.  The optimization junkie inside me wants to start playing with them right away.  I want to see what happens to one number when you increase the other.  I want to know if two numbers are related.  I even want to see if I can predict one number based on the behavior of others.  There’s a whole field of science around this statistical analysis and I find it all fascinating.

In fact, one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite books (Friday) has the hero being given some random data about gold prices, beard lengths, skirt lengths and then being told to make sense of it.  At first, our heroine thinks this is nonsense, a crazy assignment meant to annoy her.  However, she slowly begins to see connections until she gets to the point where she can predict the price of gold simply by looking at a picture and examining beard and skirt lengths.

Sounds a bit crazy, doesn’t it?  Maybe not so much. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Optimization, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Optimize Your Life (And Your 101 Commute)

April 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Traffic in BrisbaneI used to hate my commute.  If you’ve ever driven on the 101 during rush hour, you know exactly why.  The only way in which commuting on the 101 during rush hour could possibly be worse is if zombies would attack my car and try to eat my brains at random overpasses.  On second thought, that would probably make the commute better, at least with zombies I could legally try to hit them, something I can’t do with my fellow drivers.  Plus zombies would probably drive better than some of my fellow commuters (yes, I’m talking to you, the asshole in the Prius, driving in the carpool lane at 55mph!), but I digress.  Needless to say, I HATED my morning and afternoon commute.

Now I love my commute.  Ok, maybe that’s an overstatement, I don’t think anyone loves their commute.  But I no longer have barely controllable urges to smash my head into the steering wheel, which is a huge plus as far as I’m concerned.  In fact, I’m relaxed, happy and quite calm.  What changed you ask?  The obvious answer most people would assume is distance.  I am now commuting a shorter distance.  That would be a very reasonable answer but it would also be a very wrong one.  In fact, my commute is longer (29 miles versus 23 miles).  So really, what changed?

The answer is optimization of all factors involved and that’s also what this website is all about.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Decision Making, Goals, Optimization, Risk Assessment Tagged With: , , ,