If you are an economist or have ever been a student of economics, you’ll be familiar with the principle of ‘opportunity cost’:
Opportunity cost is the next best alternative foregone.
Now, that is lofty jargon! Nevertheless, the principle has very useful implications for you and me, so let’s try unpacking it a little and considering an hypothetical example of how this principle could apply.
Suppose that you have an arrangement to play tennis with your neighbour each evening after work. And now suppose that your boss offers you an hour of overtime for each day of this week. You could do the overtime after your regular working day – and look forward to an extra £100 in your bank account at the end of the month. Or you could play tennis after work. But you can’t do both.
The opportunity cost of deciding to play tennis and forego the overtime would be £100. And the opportunity cost of deciding to do the overtime and forego the tennis would be five hours of exercise, fresh air, and companionship.
In essence, we can’t have everything we want nor take up every opportunity that comes our way, for every opportunity has a cost. Sometimes, on balance, the cost seems reasonable. We may, for example, forego a game of tennis to spend an hour with a sick relative. But sometimes the cost feels unreasonably high. We may, for example, forego a vacation to spend a week with a sick relative.
Perhaps you have not been aware of this before, but everything you do (and I do mean everything – even engaging in fundamentally necessary biological functions such as sleeping) has an opportunity cost. Whatever you are doing, the cost of doing that is the something else you could be doing instead. When it comes to your nightly slumbers, the opportunity cost is generally not very high. Nature requires us to have a certain amount of sleep and there is a limit to how much of that we are able to give up in order to do something else. But finding a balance between different ways of spending your leisure time is likely to be rather more complex. You have, say, four hours of ‘leisure’ time from the time you finish work in the evening until the time you go to bed. How are you to apportion that time? How do you deal with the conflict between ‘obligation’ and ‘desire’? Your obligations may involve such things as preparing an evening meal, or helping children with homework, or doing voluntary work in the community. Your desires may be to go running or to become proficient at a craft of some sort or to meet with friends.
In an ideal situation, you are able to find a comfortable balance between fulfilling obligations and meeting desires, and the associated opportunity costs are reasonable. In a less amenable scenario, you find that your leisure time is being consistently consumed with the meeting of obligations. Over time, the opportunity costs you are incurring by being in this situation are likely to become burdensome.
If you find yourself in this situation, you may find it useful to do a simple exercise: draw up, pencil on paper, a table with two columns. In one column, write a list of those things that you would love to find time to do. This would include ‘one-off’ activities (such as going to the hairdresser), as well as activities you would like to do on a more regular basis (like attending a bridge class). In the other column, draw up a list of the activities that currently consume your leisure time. This would include the mundane things that most people have to do anyway (shopping, cooking, cleaning, managing your household finances, and so on) as well as any extra responsibilities you may have (like caring for someone who is unwell, finishing a building project, running an after-hours business, and so on).
By examining these lists carefully, you may discover that the opportunity cost of one (or more) of the activities on the ‘obligation’ list could conceivably be reduced if it were diluted by an activity on the ‘desires’ list. Let’s consider an hypothetical example: You have, on the one hand, an obligation in the evenings to care for someone in your family. And you have, on the other, a desire to learn to play bridge. You realise that the desire to learn to play bridge is shared by the person you are caring for. If you were to join an online bridge class together, the opportunity cost of caring for that person would be considerably reduced.
Hopefully, in making and examining your two lists, you will discover strategies for reducing the opportunity cost of some of your obligations and, in so doing, release some of your so-called ‘leisure’ time for pursuits that are leisure pursuits. But if the opportunity costs you are incurring still seem too high, send me a message. The casting of a fresh eye over your lists may well reveal strategies that you hadn’t noticed before and enable you to cast off some of the costs that are currently burdening you. Reading about my approach to counselling, mentoring and life-coaching will give you some idea of how we could work together to do this.
