How Much Is Your Time Worth?

I really wish I had a before picture. What you see above is the culmination of about 5 hours of my workday following a power outage at our church. The power went out after a bad storm last week, and I just got around to trying to restore internet connectivity to our computers. It's really weird how useless I feel when there is no internet available, but I guess that would be a subject for another post.

Anyway, the modem and router area up there used to be a mish-mash of cords, routers, and sketchy electrical work. Let me show you what I mean...



The black wire goes to the surge protector which evidently has trouble protecting from surges if the ground on the plug isn't plugged in!!!

So now it's nice and pretty with the added bonus that our computers are once again connected to the internet. My question, however, is this: how much is my time worth? If I had an IT person come in this morning and work this all out, I have no idea how much it would have cost, but all they would have had to do was look at that idiotic (that's a biblical word by the way) way the surge protector was plugged in to understand that the router and modem were fried by the storm surge. He or she probably could have been in and out in about an hour.

However, I am paid on salary, so technically it didn't cost the church anything to have me do this. Why did it take me so long? Because every time I plugged something different in, something different would happen. I could get wireless to work, but no wired; I could get one wire to work, but no router, etc.

But I'd love to know what some of you have decided that you would pay for because your time is simply to valuable to spend on it. For instance, would you change your own oil which might take 30-40 minutes to save $5-$10? And what would you spend the time you saved doing? Would it be more profitable? Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about. I wonder what I could have done that would have been more productive that working on this post...