The Chore Purification

You already tracked where the hours go. You already isolated your mornings from the phone. This issue is about the third step, and it starts with a question most people never actually ask about the chore they hate most: what would it cost to make it someone else’s problem, and why haven’t you already done it.

The Math You’ve Been Avoiding

Divesting means running the numbers on what a task costs you against what it would cost to pay your way out of it, then actually acting on the answer instead of just noticing it. Most people skip the second half.

Researchers Ashley Whillans, Elizabeth Dunn, Paul Smeets, Rene Bekkers, and Michael Norton tested this directly, across hundreds of working adults on multiple continents.¹ People who spent money to buy themselves out of disliked tasks reported greater life satisfaction than those who spent the same money on possessions instead. The effect held regardless of income.

This Week: Divest

Pick the one weekly chore you’d pay real money never to do again. Price it honestly: what does a service, a delegate, or a subscription actually cost to remove it entirely. Then compare that number to what an hour of your own time is actually worth, not what you wish it were worth.

We built a short handbook for making that comparison properly, with a simple version of the same calculation the research above uses.

At an hourly value of $60, here’s how 3 common chores actually price out once the comparison is run honestly instead of estimated from memory.

Every row on this table favors removing the chore. That pattern holds most of the time once an hour of your own time is actually priced instead of treated as free.

Run your own numbers and the table might land differently, and that’s fine too. The exercise is about stopping a chore from surviving purely on inertia.