Time Valuer / Resources / Glossary
Glossary of time and money
38 terms for managing time, tracking income and reaching goals. Each one is defined in a sentence, explained, and priced with a worked example.
Price your time, activities and goals.Free on iPhone. Private by design.
B
- Billable hours
- Hours of work that can be charged to a client. The rest, such as admin and sales, are non-billable.
C
- Context switching
- Moving attention from one task to another, and the time lost refocusing each time.
- Cost of delay
- What it costs to finish something later than you could have, in lost value or time spent waiting.
- Cost-plus pricing
- Setting a price by adding a margin to the full cost of the work.
D
- Deep work
- Focused, uninterrupted work on hard tasks, the kind that creates the most value.
- Delegation
- Handing a task to someone else so your time goes to work worth more. Worth it when they cost less than your time does.
E
- Effective hourly rate
- What you really earn per hour once all the hours you actually work are counted, not just the contracted ones.
- Eisenhower matrix
- Sorting tasks by urgent and important into four boxes: do, schedule, delegate and drop.
F
- Forecasting
- Estimating future results, such as income or time left, from what you know now.
- Fully loaded cost
- What an employee really costs: salary plus benefits, taxes, equipment and overhead.
G
- Goal tracking
- Measuring progress toward a goal regularly, against a clear target.
H
- Hourly rate
- Yearly income divided by the hours worked in a year. For a salary, 2,080 hours is the standard.
I
- Income goal
- The yearly income you're working toward, ideally broken down into an hourly and per-minute target.
- Income tracking
- Recording what you earn over time, across jobs, clients and side projects, to see growth.
M
- Margin
- A percentage added on top of a base amount to set a target or a price. In profit terms, the share of the price you keep.
- Markup
- The amount added to cost to set a price, as a percentage of the cost.
- Meeting cost
- The combined value of everyone's time in a meeting, for as long as it runs.
O
- Opportunity cost
- The value of the best thing you gave up to do something else. With time, it's what those hours could have earned or achieved.
- Outsourcing
- Paying an outside person or company to do recurring work, such as bookkeeping, cleaning or design.
P
- Pareto principle
- Roughly 80% of results come from 20% of the effort. Also called the 80/20 rule.
- Parkinson's law
- Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
- Pomodoro technique
- Working in 25-minute focused intervals with short breaks between them.
- Productivity
- Output for the time put in. For knowledge work, the value created per hour.
- Project cost
- The total value of the time a project takes, plus any other expenses.
R
- Return on time invested (ROTI)
- What you get back for the time you put into something, compared with what that time is worth.
- Run rate
- A yearly figure projected from a shorter period, such as a month.
S
- Sunk cost
- Time or money already spent that can't be recovered, and so shouldn't decide what you do next.
T
- Time audit
- Tracking where your time actually goes for a week or two, then reviewing it.
- Time blocking
- Scheduling fixed blocks of time for specific work, instead of working from a to-do list.
- Time management
- Planning and controlling how you spend your time, so it goes to what matters most.
- Time poverty
- Having too little discretionary time, even with enough money.
- Time price
- What something costs in hours of your work instead of dollars. Also called time cost.
- Time to money
- Converting time into its money value, and money back into time, using your rate.
- Time value
- What an hour, minute or second of your time is worth in money, based on what you earn or want to earn.
- Time value of money
- The finance principle that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar later, because it can earn a return.
U
- Utilization rate
- The share of working hours that are billable or productive.
V
- Value per minute
- Your hourly value divided by 60. The smallest unit most decisions are made in.
#
- 2,080 working hours
- The standard number of working hours in a year: 40 hours a week × 52 weeks.
Price your time, activities and goals. Download Time Valuer for iPhone.