What Is One Day of My Life Worth?

Mr. Latte ∙ Software Development Expert

This English page is a machine translation of the Korean original, so some wording may read a little off. Read the Korean original

The last line of the quote

I have written a lot of quotes in more than twenty years as a developer. I never counted how many, mostly because counting would feel like a waste of the very time I am talking about. However long the itemized list gets, a quote always converges to one line at the bottom. So much per day.

People on a salary just never have to write that number themselves. Divide the monthly pay by the number of working days and you get the same figure. Everyone walks around with a price tag on their day. Freelancers only have to write the tag by hand each time, which is why the uneasy feeling shows up more often.

The uneasiness has a single source. Is that really what my day is worth? This day, from opening my eyes in the morning to falling asleep at night, is it really worth exactly that number?

So I wrote a quote for myself

Trying things out is a developer habit, so one evening I actually did it. The same template I send to clients, with the recipient changed to me.

Writing it, I noticed something. The only rows with a rate are the hours I lent to someone else, and every row that is actually mine is a question mark. A person who has written quotes for decades could not fill in half of the quote for his own day.

A day rate is not value, it is rent

Staring at those question marks, something clicked. The number at the bottom of a quote is not what my day is worth. It is what I get for lending my day to someone else. The market was never interested in my day. It was interested only in what I could produce during it. So a day rate is closer to rent than to value. The rent a landlord collects is not the price of the life someone lived in that house.

Confusing rent with the price of the house creates two problems. When the market quotes low, my day itself starts to feel cheap. When the market quotes high, I mistake that number for my real worth. I have been through both. The second one is more dangerous. The first only ruins your mood, while the second makes you stop maintaining the house while the rent is good.

What happens when you live by the hour

The trouble is that once this number settles into your head, everything gets converted into that unit. Divide the day rate by eight and you get an hourly rate. From then on you catch yourself calculating what one episode of a drama costs, or what two hours of coffee with a friend costs.

Pushed all the way, the calculation makes a fool of the person doing it. This piece took me about three hours, so it is a three-times-my-hourly-rate piece of writing, and you, reading it right now, are spending a few minutes of your own rate on it. The economically rational move is to stop at this sentence. And yet I know you will keep reading. So will I.

The trap of the calculation is that the answer never changes. Whatever you do, it ends with “I could have earned this much working instead.” By that logic the most valuable day is one spent working all twenty-four hours. Anyone who has tried it knows that is not a good day. When the arithmetic is right but the conclusion is wrong, the unit is wrong.

What the question marks actually are

Look at the question mark rows again. They do not lack value. They just have not been priced yet.

“Found the cause, did not fix it” is a zero if you only look at output. But without that day, the fix would not have arrived the next day. Nothing was left in the code, but something was left in my head. The internal state changes even when no new row lands in the database. Most human days work like this. Most days produce nothing visible, and those days have to stack up before a day with output arrives.

“One feature on my own service, revenue zero” is the more extreme case. I have planned and built and now run a good number of my own services, and every day spent building them was this row. Days at a loss, if you measure them by the day rate. Yet some of them still send something back every month, and one or two paid back years of day rates at once. Not because that particular day was special. A few hundred similar days piled up and then settled all at once.

So the question mark is not “no value” but “deferred payment.” The price of a day is not set on that day. It is set later. A language you picked up out of boredom in college becomes your living ten years on, and a feature you built without much thought wins a contract one day. The reason you cannot tell what today is worth is not ignorance. The settlement date simply has not come.

There is a condition, though. To get paid later, you have to leave something behind today. A day that leaves nothing has nothing to invoice later. No line item, no settlement.

A deploy with no rollback

Does that mean any day will do? One thing is worth naming. You can lose money and earn it back, but a day does not work that way. Neither does your health. In developer terms, a day is a deploy with no rollback. We check twice before hitting the deploy button, and then treat the day itself with far less care. A fresh one is issued every morning, so it feels infinite. Checking your bank balance every day while never checking how many days you have left is foolish.

I am not trying to scare anyone. As I get older I feel the weight of time more. A day carries a price precisely because it is finite. Things you can print without limit have no price. “What is it worth” is really the question “what did I trade this unrepeatable day for?”

Rented hours and hours of my own

None of this means forgetting the hourly rate. For a freelancer the day rate is survival, and if you cannot price your own time, someone else will take it cheap. The point is only to stop holding that number up against the whole day.

Since writing that quote I split my day into two kinds of time. One is rented time. The rows with a clear rate. What matters there is actually collecting that rate. The other is time of my own. The rows with question marks. Building my services, writing, seeing people, doing nothing. That time does not settle same day. It is deferred. And the large things in life mostly arrive deferred.

Manage the rented hours by the hour, and release your own hours from the hourly rate. Just refusing to measure one with the yardstick of the other makes the day look quite different.

One commit message at the end of the day

So what should you do today? Resolving with great enthusiasm to “spend a valuable day” usually fails. The price is set later, so there is no way to know today.

Instead, I suggest adding a single line to the quote at the end of each day. Like the commit message developers leave when they save code. What you changed today. Code is fine, so is a thought, so is a person.

feat: refactored the payment module, to be invoiced
wip: new service idea, does not even have a name yet
fix: corrected what I said to a friend yesterday
chore: YouTube all day
docs: only read things

Write down “only read things” too. That is a state change as well. Write down “YouTube all day” too. If you do not write it, that day never happened, and if you do, at least a month later you can see how many chores there were. Stack up a single month and you start to see what kind of value your days are producing. Things the hourly rate never showed you. I am thinking of building a small tool that collects these automatically, but until then one line in a notes app is plenty.

Honestly, this piece is also written for me. In my twenties and thirties I never thought about what a day was worth. Work came in and I did it, deadlines came and I stayed up, and the leftover hours drained away. I no longer remember where those days went. The rent came in reliably, but I never recorded the hours that were mine, so the changelog of that era is empty. There were releases, clearly, but no release notes. If I had asked this question a little earlier, if I had been a little more careful with those days, my changelog would look quite different now. That is what I regret. That is why I am writing this.

I still do not know what my day is worth right now. I will find out in a few years. For the regret to sting a little less when the statement arrives, it starts with one line today. Why not start keeping a git log of the hours that are your own?