I was just calibrating the project management time tracking feature on my online project management software.  “Time tracking” has a portentous ring to it, no?  Business is the business of time.  Workers sell it, companies trade it, promise it.  Time is money.  We’ve got to keep track of the time, compensate for it. 

According to Karl Marx, a commodity is congealed human time.  Time goes by, and is not worth anything.  But when time goes by for a person, it’s worth everything.  A commodity isn’t a resource that we find lying around.  The commodity is the time it takes to gather that resource up or make it useful.  If it doesn’t take a human time to gather it, it isn’t a commodity, no matter how useful it is. The air we breathe is an example.  When you pay money for something, no matter what it is, what you’re buying is the time it took humans to get that good (or service) into a form you find useful (or pleasing).  Nothing that didn’t cost a human time is worth any money, and nothing that did is not worth money.  In a very real sense, then, time is money.  And what is time but the breadth of a life?  Your life is a certain stretch of minutes big, and nothing beyond the scope of those minutes.  Time is human life; money is time.  There’s some corporate resource allocation for you to chew on.

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