What is your time worth?
I asked myself this over the last few days, while skimming through wanted sections.  Most people associate their hourly wages with their worth.  I'll admit, it's one of the simplest (if not the most inaccurate) ways to calculate pros and cons of daily expenditures.
A lot of times, I find myself giving my time away to family or sleep. Last week, I had been working insane hours. To give you a hint, I left work Friday at 11 am... with over nine hours of overtime. I was determined to "take myself out" to a movie. I invited a friend, one that is not such a pansy when it comes to blood, gore, suspense and medical verbage. Too bad it involved disrupting their usual sleep pattern. But hey, if they didn't want to go, they would have told me, "No".  I hope work was kind to them.
But to delve deeper into my question... with all these hours I work, I accrue time off.  In a little over a month, I qualify to accrue even more time on a bi-weekly basis. It's one of the perks that keeps me at my job, even on the worst of days. With me rarely taking time off, I run into an odd situation. I think I have said this before, but I am getting close to maxing out my bank of time off. My other problem is that the calendar is filling fast with other people's requests for time off. If I don't take any more days than what I have planned now, come September, I will have to take at least a full day off each pay period to avoid "not earning" any further PTO.  I already asked to see if I could get vacation pay added on to full paychecks- 'against company policy'.  But when I take "random days off", it's usually spent sleeping, baking, hanging out at my apartment or feeling like a wasted day. In a weird way, I almost hope that more drama comes my way when my bank gets full.  The last two weekends have been spent in hospitals for my parents' surgeries. What else could go wrong?
I know that I can find something to do, on whatever days I find to take off in the upcoming months. I'm more wondering when this prize for being a good employee turned into a pain.
So what is my time worth? A little knitting? A little writing? A bit of baking? Or is it worth nothing more than a lot of sleep and some TV?
It's up to me.