What are your favourite ways to buy time?

• Order groceries online! Maybe this is obvious but I have the impression not as many ppl do this as they should. Saves me at least 1 hr (usually closer to 2) for < $20
• Pay for a bunch of disk space. I find it generates a lot of overhead to have files in different places. For me, the solution has been a high performance workstation plus remote desktop forwarding to my laptop when I travel so I can always have the same disk and workspace
• Buy more paid apps/ premium upgrades/ digital subscriptions. I haven’t done the math on this so might not be as good as I think, but I have the impression that time spent watching adverts ads up and that in general apps are underpriced/ people have irrational behavior around eg not buying the $5 app they would have been excited for if free. A big one for me is Premium Youtube which lets you listen to videos with the screen off and gives me access to all youtube lectures as if they were podcasts (there are a surprising number of high quality informational videos that can be listened to!)
• Related to above: make slack time more useful by listening to stuff. Mix of podcast, audiobooks, youtube and text to speech of articles. I use a mix of Pocket, Speechify and Voicedream for the latter. I invested in noise-cancelling earbuds and (separately) found some pretty cheap earbuds you can wear in the shower
• extra battery packs and unlimited data plan to allow for work time in more places. For same reason, laptop with long battery life. I couldnt find anything better than the newest macbook pro M1.
• pay for flights at times which work better and reduce time in transit. Your comfort/ restedness affects productivity. Also plane wifi.
• give yourself a budget for productivity experiments that feel speculative. Many of the above were discovered by spending that budget, a lot of other things failed but its worth it for the wins
• stop worrying about late fees (within reason). Most of the time the fees for things like late registration at a uni are small relative to not needing to occupy your brain with those sorts of deadlines
• pay for excercise/ hobbies that increase your wellbeing + energy. For me this is climbing
• buy extra of things you lose frequently. This is an embarrassing one but I cannot for the life of me keep track of sleep masks, for example. I have like >6 pairs now lol, but there is usually one when I need it. If you are scatterbrained like me, this is worth it for cheap things.
• corollary of above: don’t waste time looking for cheap things you’ve lost, just buy another.

I think I have a few more I’m forgetting but I will stop there for now.

At the recent EA Global conference, I decided to experiment with getting a hotel very close to the venue, rather than a cheaper Airbnb further away.

I think this paid off very well. I had more time at the conference, got more sleep, and didn't need to carry nearly so much stuff around. I was much more able to go back to the hotel and work when I had downtime in my schedule. I think I probably saved 1-2 hours of low-value time per day.

In addition to the time saved, having a room across the street from the venue also saved significant cognitive effort / attention, which noticeably improved my conference experience compared to, say, a 20-minute commute. Overall I would probably pay at least $100/day in future to have accommodation very close to conference venues.

[Edited to increase the amount per day I would pay.]

Hire a cleaner.

• Minimising travel time by
  • living closer to work
  • working from home
  • taking more expensive but faster/nearer to you flights
• Minimising years I need to spend working by "buying" perpetual income/lower living costs by putting money in index funds or a mortgage
• Paying for faster services instead of using cheaper free alternatives. e.g: getting a video appointment with a private GP instead of waiting weeks and hours on  the day for an NHS (UK public health) appointment
• Choosing to work at a lower paying but lower time commitment job (40hr vs 55hr work weeks are a big deal)
• Buying a $15 sleep mask + ear plugs = higher quality sleep = less time spent sleeping

I think saving money and putting it into index funds perhaps the best way you can buy time with money. It will literally save you decades of 40 hour weeks over the course of your life.

I think it'd be cool if someone pulled the ideas from answers here into a spreadsheet, maybe categorised them somehow, and other people comment with +1s or -1s (if they've tried the thing and found it worthwhile or not) or any tips. Then the maintainer of the spreadsheet can sometimes reorder the items by which one has the most net +1s.  

(This is something me, at least one other EA Funds person, and I think at least one other Rethink Priorities person previously thought we'd find useful.)

• Delivery: for groceries (from Instacart), restaurant food (from ubereats), convenience store stuff (from Amazon), etc
• Automation/outsourcing: more prepared food (either from restaurants or grocery stores) instead of cooking
• Redundancy (so I'm not caught off guard and in need of doing an errand): for batteries, chargers, extra food, etc; also if you need something to be productive and you're not sure which version you need, just buy a few versions at once and eat the costs instead of buying one at a time
• Comfort (so I can work harder/longer without getting distracted): good chair with back support, good mattress, large desk that can convert between sit/stand, acuvue oasys daily contacts
• Home workout equipment (so don't need to waste time driving to the gym)
• Upgrades to avoid wait times/ads: Youtube premium, ubereats premium, etc
• Not searching for great deals but instead just buying quickly and eating the difference in cost
• The big one: a place that has the following features:
  • no roommates (less distractions and easier to sleep)
  • in a quiet area
  • large-ish/multiple rooms (less claustrophobic feeling/easier to focus, and also easier to compartmentalize by room)
  • close to a park/other green space or blue space (I like going for walks in these sorts of areas, and closer means less time to get there)

Get the fastest internet you can with good service. 

High-quality laptops of course.

If your job involves a lot of videocalls, get at least a decent headset with a microphone, and maybe a professional standalone microphone too. I know people with $300+ headphones but use their laptop's built-in mic, which feels irrational to me.

I know lots of people swear by external monitors, though I haven't found them that helpful myself.

I've been trying out various things in this domain in the past few weeks and have a few new things to recommend:

• Batching emails: For ~$150/yr, Boomerang will batch your Gmail inbox. (In detail, it will auto-redirect emails into a special label, then move them into your inbox on schedule.) I now get emails at 1pm and 5pm. This saves a lot of time and even more attention – having an empty Inbox when I wake up in the morning is a huge boon.
  • I think this is substantially better than other approaches, such as blocking Gmail except at certain times of day, for reasons I'm happy to get into if people are sceptical.
  • This requires Boomerang Pro (it's not included in the lower paid tier), and is the only Boomerang feature I use regularly. Inbox batching alone is worth the price, but if someone developed a cheaper, more focused tool I would happily consider switching.
• Laundry service: This especially applies to Europeans without driers, but even in the US giving a big sack of laundry to a driver every so often can still save substantial time and attention over doing multiple laundry loads yourself.
  • Some care is needed with this one – many commercial laundry services are much less careful with your clothes than you would be, which can lead to damage. Our first laundry service in Oxford didn't turn out well; we're currently trying others.
  • I'd recommend starting by outsourcing laundry for items you care less about (socks, underwear, towels, bed linens) and/or are more robust to rough treatment (many T-shirts). This is like 75% of laundry bulk for us; we wash and hang the remaining (delicate/important) items by hand and have the cleaners fold them.
• Ready meals: The last couple of decades have seen a huge boom in actually-healthy frozen meals, including many online services. Doing a bit of research and stocking up can save money and calories vs takeout while preserving most of the convenience.
  • Some services in the UK for this: Cook, Planty, Field Doctor. The latter has a range of certified low-FODMAP vegetarian ready meals, which I don't personally need but is a lifesaver for people with IBS.
• Buy a printer: The jury is still out a bit on this one, but being able to print out Amazon return labels at home is pretty valuable, enabling e.g. quick and easy return pickup from home. I also find it useful for efficiently using FVP on printed-out to-do lists.
• Taskrabbit for everything: The central use case of Taskrabbit is handyman stuff, like assembling furniture or putting up shelves. But you can use it for almost any well-defined task, including online stuff. I've only used it for a couple of tasks so far, but have a number of other things I'm hoping to try. So far I've used Taskrabbit for:
  • Finding me a flu vaccination appointment when the local pharmacy didn't have any;
  • Picking up medical prescriptions (basically paying someone else to be bored waiting in line for me).

Hiring an outsider (e.g. a coach or a psychologist) to go through all relevant and most time consuming parts of your work / life. Just explaining each stream to an outsider is likely to help clarify your priorities, leave out less important ones and make sure you really are doing the most important things.

Also, hiring someone to support working on any addictive tendencies. Intentional and supported work to improve your self-directedness is likely to pay off.

These might not save time immediately but save a lot of time over the years.

I think I'm getting reasonably good at noticing opportunities to avoid physical tasks via money (cleaner, laundry service, Uber, buy duplicates of everything for travel, etc.). My biggest time sink right now is digital admin tasks (finances, weekly review & general planning infrastructure, emails). I find these more difficult to think of good solutions to, so if anyone has concrete, detailed suggestions for how to circumvent these it would be very valuable to me.

Some ideas I came up with when I previously researched this question. Sorry if these are redundant with other answers. From a US suburban/urban work-from-home perspective:

1.) Get a dishwasher if you don't have one.

2.) Get the fastest possible laptop (assuming most of your work is done online).

3.) Instacart - ~$40/mo, to save me ~3hrs/mo (good idea as long as you value your time at >$13/hr)

4.) Uber/Lyft instead of driving, to save time spent driving and parking - ~$200/mo to save ~4hrs/mo (good idea as long as you value time at >$50/hr)

5.) Cleaning service every week - ~$550/mo to save me ~9hrs/mo (good idea as long as you value your time at >$60/hr)

6.) Use GrubHub more (~10x a month, ~$30ea) - $300/mo, to save ~5hrs/mo (good idea as long as you value time at >$60/hr)

7.) Get other chores done via Taskrabbit - ~$180/mo, to save ~3hrs/mo (good idea as long as you value time at >$60/hr)

Possibly of interest to people here: An abandoned first stab at drafting a post on "What stops EA-aligned people spending money on themselves?"

Meal replacement shakes like Queal, Huel, Soylent or Jimmy Joy are a big one for me.

• I mostly have the sweet flavors for breakfast and save maybe ~15 minutes each day
• (different brands have very different tastes imo, so just try out some)
• (pro tip: you can also prepare the shakes with little water and eat a creamy version of it - add nut butter or berries for perfection)
• (Queal was co-founded by an EA and I think they still offer discounts for GWWC members and group organizers)

Day care for Jeremy the two year old!

Have you hired a digital assistant? Multiple of my coworkers have, though I think reviews are mixed.

Use flightfox to buy flights. Opt for a human to book your flights and trust them to make decisions about money.

It seems everyone here already implicitly understands how much value our free time has, however I would suggest using this Free-Time Value Calculator from Clearer Thinking which uses several thought experiments to further prime and clarify your intuitions into one central Free-Time Value.  It also has several suggestions for Time-Savers at the very end depending on your Free-Time Value Estimate.  If you take it feel free to share! I've had several friends (EA and otherwise) take it and find it fascinating, but put spoilers on your comment to prevent people from anchoring to your value.  I made a google spreadsheet calculating the value of different time saving options, I can't seem to find it now but let me know if you'd like it.

As for specific and semi-surprising time savers I recommend:

1. Looking up food delivery options. We tried out Dumpling, but then settled with a food pickup option from Fred Meyer that is free!
2. Youtube premium. Saves me at least 15-60 minutes per month. And I would argue the moments of watching those commercials are actually negative utility making a youtube premium account even more valuable.
3. Soylent. Just bought it today. We will see.
4. Also consider paying more for a parking spot, either at work, or in my case at my apartment. We spend an estimated 3-5hrs per month looking for parking at my apartment between my girlfriend and I, and a 60$ parking spot is very worth it.

ALSO. Thank you for this post! My girlfriend and I have made several time-saving updates after reading this and all the comments. The time this post has saved me is... a lot. 

We have someone doing some of our household-work (cleaning, some ironing, folding clothes, etc) for us. It‘s only 6 hours a month for her. We „save“ rather 10 hours - she‘s faster. Even with less money, I would still love to pay her a good wage, because it really saves some time.

Surely not for everyone, but visiting a sex worker from time to time helped me to be less distracted from and more relaxed about dating. It’s legal in my state, and my experiences were pretty wholesome, so ymmv.

One more for the list (suggested by a colleague - I haven't tried it myself): "Consider getting a virtual assistant to outsource some of your life admin tasks, like calling internet service providers, waiting on hold with airlines, and/or researching local plumbers, etc. FancyHands has a $18 monthly service that includes 3 20-minute tasks. Upwork and other services allow you to get an assistant for $6-$30 an hour."