The Time Exchange Rate

You know your income. You don't know your exchange rate.

Time is the one currency you spend without a price tag. This book gives it the operating system money already has: a rate, a ledger, and the rules to use them. Start by finding what one hour of your life is actually worth.

Calculate your rate Get the book
1 hour= $0.00/ net Your number, in about two minutes
The gap

Money has an operating system. This book brings one to time.


You learned budgets, compound interest, the difference between an asset and a liability. Time got a proverb and scattered methods that few people were taught to use as a system.

So the hours that matter pass by in fragments, a few minutes here, half an hour there. The book calls this time confetti. The chronic sense that your time is not enough for the demands placed on it is time poverty, and many people who have it have never heard the term.

The answer is not moving faster or doing more. It is measurement.

Start with one number

Your Time Exchange Rate

Your actual hourly value of time, calculated against the total hours your career and financial life require from you. It counts your earned income, your commute, your work-adjacent hours, your taxes, and the cost of working. Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez called this figure the real hourly wage in Your Money or Your Life, and the Time Exchange Rate follows their method under a different name. Once you have it, a purchase, a meeting, or an obligation stops being a feeling and becomes a figure.

Read the full definition

Step 1: total annual earned income
Salary
$
Other earned income
$
Step 2: total annual hours
Work hours / week
hrs
Work-adjacent hours / week
hrs
Commute, one way
min
Commute days / week
days
Weeks worked / year
weeks
Steps 3 and 4: tax and work costs
Effective tax rate
%
Commuting and parking / year
$
Other work costs / year
$
Keep your number

Get your individual result and the starter time ledger.


Enter your email and I'll send your full rate plus the one-page time ledger that sorts a week into expenses, investments, and waste.

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Who this is for

Anyone comfortable with money yet continually short on time.

Written for executives making calendar decisions worth more than they look, founders whose own hours are the company's real constraint, and anyone financially literate who wants a framework instead of another productivity hack. The operating system works for anyone, including students, early-career professionals, and retired individuals.

If you want motivation, this isn't it.
If you want a system, it is.

Front cover of Time: The Ultimate Currency by Dr. Mert Sahin
Available now

Time: The Ultimate Currency

Know What Your Hours Really Pay
and Spend Them Where They Matter

Fifteen chapters build the system end to end, from your personal rate to business decisions to the life the ledger is ultimately for. Chapters 2 to 15 each close with an exercise, and the appendix holds the references, key terms, and formulas.

By Dr. Mert Sahin. In paperback and on Kindle.

Buy the paperback Buy the Kindle edition Inside the book
About

Dr. Mert Sahin

Dr. Mert Sahin, author of Time: The Ultimate Currency

Mert Sahin holds a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Hamburg in Germany, and has more than twenty years of leadership experience, from venture-backed startups to multibillion-dollar global conglomerates across a range of industries. He has lived and worked across Asia, Europe, Africa and North America, leading turnarounds, scale-ups and international expansions. The lessons from designing those organizations, and from running his own days, shaped the operating system presented in his book.

More about Mert Sahin, the method behind the book, and how to get in touch.