An Hourly Rate So High It Changes Your Agent's Decisions

Where this fits

A developer stares at a browser tab: a package delivery slot at 2pm, a dentist at 4, and a client message asking "can we jump on a call tomorrow?" Then they wonder whether to outsource dinner, say no, or push the whole day into the weekend. This skill encodes Naval Ravikant's "insanely high hourly rate" heuristic so an agent can make those tradeoffs explicit instead of leaving them as vague guilt.

Why agents benefit

• It gives the agent a decision threshold: compare any task's cost or time against the user's declared hourly rate and recommend delegation, abandonment, or doing it yourself.
• It calculates opportunity cost on the fly, turning "is this worth it?" into a concrete number a user can act on.
• It handles retirement and freedom planning beyond money: the agent detects when a user is sacrificing today for an imagined tomorrow and proposes the three escape routes.
• It pushes back on lifestyle inflation, checking whether new spending raises fixed costs and reminding the user to keep the passive-income gap shrinking.
• It knows when not to apply: rest, family time, and slow moments are off-limits by definition, so the skill does not optimize away the parts of life meant to be savored.

Practical scenarios

The $30 Task vs. the $500 Hour

A user asks: "I spend two hours organizing sales receipts every month; should I hire a bookkeeper?" At a declared hourly rate of $500, two hours cost $1,000. Outsourcing at $100 a month is an obvious buy. The agent recommends delegation and shows the math.

Standing in Line at the Post Office

A user says: "I'm waiting in line, should I just leave?" The agent checks the estimated wait, applies the hourly threshold, and suggests either leaving or using the window for one high-leverage call. If the user is actually enjoying the pause, the skill stays quiet.

"Am I Ready to Retire?"

A user asks: "I have savings, but I'm scared to stop freelancing." The agent reframes retirement as "today is enough" and tests the three levers: passive income coverage, spending reduction, or doing work that is intrinsically enjoyable. It also watches for income-driven spending upgrades that delay freedom.

Add it to your agent workflow

Install the skill with:

npx skills add kangarooking/cangjie-skill --skill hourly-rate-time

Then invoke it when time-related tradeoffs appear:

user: Should I spend Saturday fixing my old laptop or buy a new one?
agent: skill: hourly-rate-time
input: task="repair laptop", estimated_hours=6, declarable_hourly_rate=150

The agent returns a recommendation with the computed opportunity cost and an explicit "delegate / do / skip" label.

Compare before adopting

Evaluate this skill against alternatives: decision-heuristics for general rules of thumb, wealth-structure for broader financial planning. Watch maintenance signals on GitHub: commit freshness, issue responses, and whether the author keeps the source-book mappings up to date. Also check workflow fit: if your agent already uses a quantitative time-budgeting system, put this skill alongside it, not instead of it.

Why it is worth tracking

At 9,334 stars, hourly-rate-time is a narrow utility skill with unusual community trust. Track it if you build assistants that give productivity coaching, life advice, or financial independence guidance; its value comes from a stable, memorable heuristic that is easy to test. For related skills in the same family, the listing at https://www.openagentskill.com/skills/kangarooking-hourly-rate-time gives a useful comparison point. Re-evaluate it when your agent stack changes around delegation, scheduling, or wellbeing guardrails.