To be honest, I don’t have a clear answer on this yet.

In the personal finance world, there’s a pretty simple calculation that applies. If you can make more per hour than the activity costs, you are likely wasting your time.

For example, if you’re fretting over whether or not a cleaning service is worth it and they cost you $100 for three hours of cleaning weekly, if you can use those three hours to make money and you can make more than $33.33/hour – the cleaning service is a no brainer.  

But when are things ever that totally clear cut?

I mean, once in a blue moon, so great, apply that formula then, but most of the time, it feels like a judgement call.

In all the pre-pandemic years, I’ve had an annual goal of doing two things to build my stage management skills each year, which over time led me to collect a list of certifications, classes, skills I wanted to build, etc.

Normally, it’s a project to get those two things done while still working and doing everything else I want and like to do in life.

During this pandemic… not so much. There’s actually a full on overload of things. I think I hit my two new skills goal about a week into quarantine. I’m somewhere around 15-20 at this point, probably.

I was recently having a conversation with two of my best friends. One of them is very similar in this manner, and she, too, has been racking up skills and certifications in her field during her time at home.

The other one questions deeply whether or not a certification is worth her time and money.

We had a lengthy conversation about whether or not a $10 Excel certification class was worth it.

I felt probably yes. $10 is (to me) pretty inexpensive and I use Excel all the time.

She wanted to be convinced she would learn $10 worth of new Excel skills. If she wasn’t sure it was worth her time, she wasn’t doing it.

Now, I do have the added benefit of this blog, so if I take a lousy course, I still get some added “value” in that I can write a post about it and be like – don’t take this course. But I do understand what she means, because I have done a few things that were like… wtf? You charged me for this?

I recently spent a few days rethinking whether or not approaching my accounting career goals via an associate’s degree from the local community college was a good idea. The accounting classes and even the business classes have been good and useful, but they have a few basic skills classes I’m required to take that are killing me and I wonder if it would be better to just get the tax preparer certification online and call it a day.

Specifically, at the moment, I have to take a computer skills class that literally teaches me how to delete words in Word, what an Excel spreadsheet looks like, and how to make a PowerPoint. I’m not sure if they think it’s 1992, that I am 8 years old, or that I am 80.   

And I had to pay $500 to take the course.

Furthermore, it’s structured in a way that you can’t skip steps. I can’t be like “oh, I know how to make a PowerPoint, give me the end goal and I’ll just make the project.” Nope. You have to walk through it step by irritating step, learning things like “this is a Save button” over several hours per class.

I think my head might explode. And for honestly the first time, I feel like my time is being wasted and it’s a crime. I’m a little ball of rage the entire time I work on this class.

Sigh.

The question is though, how do you figure out when something is just a waste of your time?

Clearly, this applies a little less to a nonsense institutional hurdle you have to jump with a bigger goal in mind versus a stand alone project, but still.

But it has led me to think a little more about how much time I pour into these projects versus what the payoff is from them. 

Have you ever done anything that just felt like a total waste of time? What was it?