A life skill you should all learn: How to tell if you make an hour of your time worth an hour of your coworkers time (or more)

A bigger company I work at (300-400 employees) recently started hiring a bunch of junior engineers. The vast majority of them do not have any life experience outside of school. It would be hard to exaggerate how many hours some of them waste per day for the hour invested in an issue. This is something that millions of people (and probably yourself) could benefit from. <br><br>I don't mean don't bother with anything that takes time. Just make sure that when someone else picks up where you left off, you have actually made things better for them, rather than invested an hour of your time to make things worse.<br><br>There are many ways to think about this and I’m certainly not the most experienced person on this topic, but I wanted to share what I have found to be a simple rule of thumb. Generally you consider the life cycle of a project over a quarter year. Generally speaking if you spend an hour on it make sure that invested hour is guaranteed to save at least 3 hours of your coworkers or clients time per quarter year going forward. This is a good rule of thumb because if you do, then it will always be a good investment of your time to spend an hour on a project and you can be confident that you are making your coworkers lives easier, rather than investing an hour of your time to make things more complicated and wasteful for them. <br><br>A simple example of this: Let’s say you have six coworkers, and you spend an hour to make something that would take your coworkers 2 minutes instead of 3 minutes. That invested hour will save them 6 minutes a day. In an 80 day quarter year this is 480 minutes, or 8 hours invested to save 480 minutes or 8 hours. This is a good investment of your time. <br><br>If you’re a bit sceptical, consider this: Many things you work on have a life cycle of a year. At least 50% of people are going to leave in the next 5 years, and millions of people spend their entire lives in one place. Every investment of your time that is well spent will stay with you for probably at least 2 years, even if you change companies. This is way less true for any other asset. When you invest money, someone else maintains it. And money certainly can’t make money on its own. Maybe your house could be considered this way but this is a terrible investment for many reasons. You could make the argument for your health as well but this is a messier case that is hard to quantify and is always necessary anyway. <br><br>This is a skill that anyone can learn and improves your coworkers lives and your work environment. The effort you put in now will also pay dividends for your entire life.