Paul Graham recently wrote about peering through the cliched simile, "Time is Money", to see some deeper similarities between time and money in our built in alerts about waste:

It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking "wow, I'm spending a lot of money."

Paul asserts that lots of money can't be wasted all at once by spending without setting off an internal alarm (that you can then chose to heed or ignore). He also thinks huge chunks of time can't be wasted all at once without setting off similar alarms. I might easily lose 30 minutes a day watching TV, but I'm not likely to decide to spend 12 hours straight on the couch watching TV and not trigger an internal alarm or two.

But Paul points out that there is a way to waste huge sums of money without triggering our alarms, in bad investments:

Investing bypasses those alarms. You're not spending the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say "it's an investment."

This rings true to me. I know my wife and I consider our house an investment, otherwise we never could have brought ourselves to spend that much money on one thing. And the housing bubble has taught us all a thing or two about safe investments.

Here's where Paul brings something very interesting to the table. Are there time "investments" that can bypass our alarms?

A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work... alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work...With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you.

That's quite a thought. We can waste huge swaths of time doing things that feel very productive, but which we don't value. Two years for that MBA when we really want to be a entreprenuer? 4 years in college when we really want to be a chef? A mind numbing 9 to 5 office job when we really want to write? 12 hours a week volunteering for the church when all we really want is more time with our kids?

It's not just about the half hour spent in email, or the hour in front of the TV. Make sure your big time investments are as valuable to yourself as the time you are putting into them, ignoring what other people or society might think. Because another place where the "Time is Money" cliche breaks down is that we can always make more money, but none of us can make more time.