How Much Value Does An Hour Hold?

If you could magically stretch your day to include an extra hour would you?

I, like most people, would love to have extra time to do things I enjoy or even to get around to the tasks that need to be done but I never seem to accomplish.  I always think and say the phase "if there were just more hours in the day! when I meet a challenging time frame or I wish I had a moment to catch my breath in the middle of the hubbub.  I bet that if you could put a price on one of those magic hours it would be outrageously expensive.

I'm know there are practical ways to gain time.  You could pay someone else to do your housework or cook your meals for example.  The dinner we bought from Arby's tonight was definitely a time saver, but it probably wasn't worth the $17+ it cost to bring it home.

  I could buy books on CD and have someone read to me, or I could turn on the text to speech function of my Kindle and alllow the disconcerting robot voice to tell me what the pages say while I did something else like work out or bake.  That would save time too, but it wouldn't be as fun or relaxing as devoting some time to the pages myself.

I'm sure that if magic hours existed I wouldn't be able to afford them.  Hopefully they'd have contests where you could win a few.  I thank my lucky stars all the time for the good fortune thrown my way, so I'd probably end up with a few eventually.

I wonder what I'd do with them?

On days like today when I wish I figured things out sooner (finally learning a trick to help construct a project after I built 130 of them - *sigh*), I wonder how much value I'd place on the extra time.  I also wonder if the hours could be saved up and used all at once.  It would be amazing if I could save them up and then use them on a holiday so I could travel home and see my folks, but I bet everyone would have the same idea.  Holidays would stretch into weeks and no one would ever go back to work.  It doesn't sound bad at all until you have everyone in the magic hours at once and they just become regular old hours again.  Then everyone would say "there are too many hours in a day and nothing's special anymore!"

I'd probably be saying it too.

I also wonder if the magic hours were expensive if people would worry about wasting them.  If time were a different kind of magical commodity would we realize how precious it is?  I hope so.  I hope the next time I have "an hour to kill" I'll remember that I can't nudge the edges of the day and slide it in when I need it back.  I will also try my damndest to turn off terrible movies instead of wasting my time with crap like "Jingle All the Way" which distracted me last night.  Ain't nobody got time for that.