I am picking the blog back up with another lesson from my poker years, part of an ongoing series on what the tables taught me about business and, more quietly, about life. Today’s theme is time. Poker did not just give me pocket money; it handed me a very explicit way to price an hour. When you can open your laptop at almost any moment and expect something like fifty or a hundred dollars by the time the clock hands cross again, every activity begins to compete with that number. That was the first time I saw my schedule as a marketplace.
The comparison feels obvious to me now, but at the time it was strange. In law or consulting you also bill by the hour, yet those professions run on appointments and retainers. Poker is different because the work is on demand and the results are nonlinear. You can play half a session, hit a rush, and eclipse an entire day’s target, or you can tread water for hours. That volatility made the value of each minute vivid in a way salaried or hourly jobs rarely do.
Once that mental meter was installed, it followed me everywhere. I would glance at a sink full of dishes and instantly translate the chore into foregone hands played. The calculation was never perfect, but it pushed me to notice trade-offs that most people skip. Friends would (and still do) say they were “saving money” by handling a task themselves. All I could see was the unseen cost of what they might have done instead, whether that was paid work, creative work, or rest that left them sharper the next day.
Now, to be clear, there’s a downside to viewing the world through that lens. Life is not meant to be an endless search for the highest bidder on your next hour. Some work is worth doing for reasons that never show up on a spreadsheet. I like the smell of fresh-cut grass and the quiet satisfaction of cooking my own dinner. I also know that forcing myself to outsource every low-dollar activity would flatten my days into nothing but screens and transactions, which is not the life I want.
So the practice I settled on is lighter than full optimization. And I’m in no way perfect at this. But generally speaking, before I start a task, I pause and ask whether this is the optimal way to spend the next slice of time. If the answer is yes for reasons that matter to me, I do it without guilt. If the answer is no, then I look for ways to delegate, automate, or simply skip it. The point is not to win some imaginary efficiency contest. The point is to make the choice consciously rather than drifting into it by habit.
Entrepreneurship brings the same question at a larger scale. Founders love to brag about wearing every hat, but the hard truth is that a company rarely moves forward when its leaders are sanding the desks. The greatest leverage often comes from doing less by hand, not more. Poker made that lesson feel normal to me long before I could spell “opportunity cost” in a pitch deck. It convinced me that time, not money, is the resource that slips away fastest and is hardest to replace.
Again, I do not claim to have a perfect system. Some days I chase the highest-value use of my hours; other days I clean the house and then go walk the dog myself because I enjoy it, the weather is nice, and my brain needs a break. What matters is that the decision is made with eyes open. If this post nudges you to ask that small question before your next task, then the lesson I hauled out of those late-night multi-table tournaments games will have paid out once more.