Personal Hourly Rate

---
name: personal-hourly-rate
description: Set an absurdly high aspirational hourly rate and enforce it on every task and decision — outsource or ignore anything below it; use for daily prioritization and delegation.
source: "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant — Eric Jorgenson (2020)"
type: framework
tags: [time-management, delegation, prioritization, outsourcing, focus]
---

# Set and Enforce a Personal Hourly Rate

## Core idea
Nobody will value your time more than you value it, so set an aspirational hourly rate far above your market rate — it should feel absurd, or it's too low (Naval used $5,000/hour decades before he "earned" it, and retrospectively beat it). Then enforce it mechanically: if fixing a problem saves less than the rate, ignore the problem; if outsourcing costs less than the rate, outsource it. The rate isn't a billing number — it's a filter that forces your hours into the only activities that could plausibly be worth that much: judgment, building, selling, and compounding assets.

## When to use
- Daily/weekly task triage; deciding what to do yourself vs. delegate vs. drop.
- Caught doing errands, refund-chasing, DIY fixes, or low-stakes optimization.
- Calendar reviews; deciding whether to take a meeting ("do coffee").
- Sizing whether a tool, assistant, or service is "worth it."

## The framework
1. **Set the rate.** Fast-forward to your target wealthy self; pick an intermediate hourly rate. Test: if it doesn't feel embarrassingly high, raise it. Write it down.
2. **Enforce rule A — problems:** if resolving something saves less than one hour's rate, don't solve it. Return the broken $80 gadget? Throw it out or give it away — theatrically if needed, to train the habit.
3. **Enforce rule B — outsourcing:** anything a service or person can do for less than the rate gets outsourced without guilt — including chores like cooking, admin, returns.
4. **Enforce rule C — decisions:** factor time into every choice. An hour crosstown to save $100 is negative-value at any serious rate.
5. **Protect the freed hours for rate-worthy work only:** creating products, high-end selling, key decisions, learning that compounds. Also protect *empty* time — be too busy for coffee meetings while keeping an uncluttered calendar; boredom is where good ideas come from.
6. **Ratchet upward.** Re-set the rate each year; behaviors that were fine at $200/hour are theft at $1,000/hour.

## Business application
- A founder stops doing their own bookkeeping ($40/hr task) and invoice chasing, buying back ~6 hours/week for product and distribution.
- SaaS tool costing $99/month that saves 2 hours/month is trivially approved at any rate above $50/hour — decision takes ten seconds, not a committee.
- Support triage: founder answers only tickets that feed product judgment; the rest go to a macro library or contractor.
- Declining a "pick your brain" coffee that costs 3 hours door-to-door unless it plausibly creates rate-multiple value.

## Agent integration
When helping a user triage tasks, calendars, or purchase decisions:
1. Ask for (or compute) their aspirational hourly rate; if their number ≈ current market rate, tell them to multiply by 5-10x.
2. For each task on their list, estimate hours × rate = implicit cost, and the market cost to outsource. Output three buckets: DO (only rate-worthy: judgment/build/sell/compound), OUTSOURCE (market cost < rate), DROP (value < one hour's rate).
3. Auto-flag classic violations: returns, disputes over small sums, DIY errands, low-stakes comparison shopping, unpaid "coffee" meetings.
4. For tool/service purchases, approve instantly when cost < hours-saved × rate; skip further deliberation (deliberation itself bills at the rate).
5. Preserve at least one thinking day per week in any schedule you produce — empty calendar space is rate-worthy.