Background
Mert Sahin holds a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Hamburg in Germany, and has more than twenty years of leadership experience, from venture-backed startups to multibillion-dollar global conglomerates across a range of industries.
He has lived and worked across Asia, Europe, Africa and North America, leading turnarounds, scale-ups and international expansions. The lessons from designing those organizations, and from running his own days, shaped the operating system presented in his book.
Money has an operating system. This book brings one to time. The Time Exchange Rate is the attempt to give time the same treatment: a rate, a ledger, and the rules to use them.
What the Time Exchange Rate measures
The measure at the center of the book is deliberately narrow, which is what makes it usable.
The Time Exchange Rate, or TER, is your actual hourly value of time, calculated against the total hours your career and financial life require from you. It follows the real hourly wage method of Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez in Your Money or Your Life, under a different name. The claim of the book is that time is a currency in its own right, with prices, tradeoffs, and a balance that can be spent well or badly, and that attaching a rate changes the decision.
Read the full definition of the Time Exchange Rate, or work out your own in about two minutes.
The book
Time: The Ultimate Currency. Know What Your Hours Really Pay and Spend Them Where They Matter is available now in paperback and on Kindle. Fifteen chapters carry the system from a personal rate through business decisions to the life the ledger is ultimately for. Chapters 2 to 15 each close with an exercise, and the appendix holds the references, key terms, and formulas.
Get it on Amazon: paperback or Kindle edition.
Speaking
Mert delivers the method in four formats: a keynote, a half-day workshop, an executive or board session, and a team offsite. Each one ends with every person in the room holding a number they did not have when they walked in.
Tools built alongside the book
- The personal Time Exchange Rate calculator, which returns your own hourly rate.
- The reader exercises, fourteen interactive worksheets for readers of the book. They unlock with the reader code printed in the book and save to your own browser rather than to a server.
The calculators compute in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose to submit a form. See the privacy policy.
Get in touch
For speaking, workshops and board sessions, the enquiry form is the fastest route. The book is available in paperback and as a Kindle edition.