The less time you are willing to invest, the more it will cost you. The more time you are willing to invest, the less it will cost you. This is true of so many things: houses, cars, gardens, children, exercise… Benjamin Franklin said, “Time is money.” But how interchangeable are they? How much would you sell to get more time? How much would it cost for a 25hour day, an extra hour of sleep, or for more time with your kids?

When I’m travelling away from my family I often wonder how big of a gift I need to buy to make up for the missed time. But this is a flawed approach. Money does not make up for time. You can’t buy it back. There is no magic equation that allows me to figure out that one six-year-old and one nine-year-old deprived of 12 hours of Dad’s time equals Y amount of dollars to make up for it.

But let’s imagine for a moment that there is. And let’s imagine that this equation is called the Toy Time Tax Equation. What would this equation look like? We need a kid or two, I. Since we have more than one individual, we’ll call them I₁ and I₂. We know their values are 6 and 9 respectively. Then we have the time lost, or L expressed in the unit of hours (hr). Let’s imagine that the cost of being away depreciates with the age of the child. You miss a lot more of your child’s development when they are younger, and by the time they are sixteen they pretend you don’t exist anyway. So we need to reverse the value of the age by subtracting it from a constant, g. Let’s say that our constant is 20, because by the time they are 20 they are all grown up and won’t be living at home hence the equation will net out at zero. Some of you may argue that this constant should be higher, but since it’s my equation it’s my rules. So g, our grown-up constant, has a value of 20. Because our constant is such a high number, we need to bring our costs down by assigning a going rate, t of 10¢ (or 0.1$) to each hour. (If you belong to the 1% of income earners in this country and wish to spoil your kids rotten so they have absolutely no idea what the value of a dollar really means, feel free to bump up your going rate (t) to 1$ or even $10.) The Toy Time Tax Equation now looks something like this:

[(g-I)L]t=Y

It’s no E=Mc², but it’s still pretty cool. Our equation for my two children then looks something like this:

[(g-I₁)L+(g-I₂)L]t=Y

Remember, g=20 (our grown-up constant), I₁=6 and I₂=9 (for our little individuals), L=12hr (our lost time), t=.1$/hr (t for ten cents on the dollar), so let’s figure out Y, the amount of money I need to spend on my kids for being away on business and missing 12 hours of their lives (which does NOT include their time at school, or sleeping of course, so it’s about 3 days). Here’s the equation with all the known variables filled in:

((20-6)12hr+(20-9)12hr)0.1$/hr=Y

Let’s work it out. 20-6=14, and 20-9=11 so:

((14*12hr)+(11*12hr))0.1$/hr=Y

14*12=168 and 11*12=132 so:

(168hr+132hr)0.1$/hr)=Y

168+132=300 so:

300hr*0.1$/hr=Y

If I remember high school algebra correctly, the hr units cancel each other out because one is a dividend (above the line)and the other is a divisor (below the line):

300*0.1$=Y

300*0.1$ knocks a zero off the prize:

Y=30$

That’s how much money I need to spend on my kids if I’m away on business and miss 12 hours of their lives. And they are of the ages 6 and 9. There is a whole other equation for wives/partners, but that will have to wait for when I have more… time.