If you had to make a list of the 900 most common things that poor-to-average managers say daily, you wouldn’t get very far without hitting “time is money.” Bad managers love to say “time is money,” thinking of it as some kind of catch-all motivational approach for our times.
What if the phrase “time is money” actually has much the opposite effect, though?
“Time is money” research
Love me some Jeffrey Pfeffer over at Stanford. He inspired this post of mine back in the day about companies and moral norms. Now he’s got new research, subsequently summarized here, and let me just get right to the heart of the matter:
Their study concludes that people who are keenly aware of the economic value of their time — people who think of time as money — generally are more psychologically stressed and exhibit higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol that do people for whom the economic value of time is less salient.
In other words: the good old “work stress” problem rears its head again.
Here’s the other money quote:
“We’re moving in the wrong direction in many ways, and this is only one,” Pfeffer says. “People are continually calculating the economic value of their time. And all the research shows that when people are thinking about time…
