Opportunity Cost is a concept that I first learnt about in economics. Let’s say you have 1 piece of bread. You can either make a nutella sandwich or a cheese sandwich. The opportunity cost of making the cheese sandwich is that you’ll miss out on having the nutella sandwich. This concept of opportunity cost comes because of the limited resources that we have.
The most common economic example given for opportunity cost is let’s say you have 1,000 dirhams, and you put it under your pillow. The opportunity cost of that is the gain – or loss – you might get if you invest the money in a small business. So what helps us decide on whether to invest the money or not?
1) The risk factor of the small business
2) How much money we initially have. If we have 1 million, then investing the 1,000 is easier than if we had only 1,200 dirhams in our pockets.
Likewise, think of time as a currency. You know they say that time is money, when in reality time is more precious than money because acquiring money is a reversible process – money comes and goes – but time is irreversible, once lost, it will never come back. So everytime you spend your time doing something, think of the value of all the other things that you are foregoing by your decision, and ask yourself if the loss is worth it. So if you are spending your time surfing the internet idly, think that the opportunity cost of that action is the amount of productive work you could have done.
Taking an analogy similar to that of money, deciding with what you do with one hour will depend on the value of what you are currently doing, and how much time you already have. So when you are on holiday with so much free time on your hand, it becomes easier to waste 1 hour surfing the net, 1 hour watching tv, 1 hour sitting there and doing nothing…but let’s say you have three deadlines the next day, would you be tempted to waste time?
Plus how much time you already have is not something you can put a value on, even though you might think you can. Time is a limited commodity. Only Allah (SWT) knows much time a person really has in their life, so think twice before you spend it.
