You’re walking down the street, you see a coin lying on the ground in front of you, discarded, forgotten, unseen. Should you pick it up? Should you, a real living human person, spend the time and the energy to bend down and pick it up? Should you feel good about it? Or was it a waste? An age old question.

This post is an attempt to answer this question. If anyone has any notes or contributions, leave them in the comments, let’s do some maths.

Quick caveat: You might use a different currency than I do. That’s okay. Simply change the £ signs that follow to € or $ in your head it works the same.

Worth a dime?

The ol’ saying goes, ‘is the effort worth a dime?’ Of course, no one uses dimes anymore, so here I’m going to base my arguments around a pound, £1. I argue that whether you should pick up the pound or not depends on two things:

1. How much money you earn
2. What you're doing when you find the coin

Money money money

If your income is more per second than the seconds it takes to pick up the money, then spending your time picking up the money isn’t worth your time.

Let's say you earn £60 an hour. This means you earn £1/minute, which is 1.67p/second. I.e. £1 is worth about 60 seconds of your time.

By this logic, if it takes you less than 60 seconds to pick up a pound, you should do it, otherwise, you’re wasting your time. For context though if you earn £60/hour, working 8 hours/day, your monthly salary is approximately £13,440. That’s a lot.

The mean monthly salary in the UK is £2,621, which is the equivalent of £11.7/hour. So if we do the maths again that’s 0.3p/second. I.e if you’re in the UK, earning the average salary, and it takes you less than 5.6 minutes to pick up a pound, you should do it.

If you’re on crazy money it becomes less worth it, or if you see a coin worth less, it becomes less worth it. For example, by this logic, if you saw a 2p coin you’d have to get it in 6.7 seconds to be worth it (on the average UK salary).

The caveat being that if find the coin while you’re working you should always pick it up. You are, in that moment, being paid for whatever it is you do so the extra pound is a net gain.

What you’re doing at the time

Just looking at how much you earn doesn’t take into account other factors. There are some obvious ones; say you’re running to catch a train because you’re late and taking the time to stop, pick up a coin, and keep moving means you miss the train and have to wait and buy another ticket. This means the coin is obviously not worth it.

Obvious examples excluded, let’s look at a more silly one. Say you finish work(ing from home) and you go to the shop to buy some stuff for dinner and on the way back you find a few pound coins on the floor and you pick them up one by one. When you get back you count them all up and see if it was worth your time.

You’d likely realise the ‘extra’ time you spent collecting coins doesn’t equate. If your trip to the shop and back took you an hour and you picked up 3 pound coins, that’s a little more than a quarter of what you would have earned if you’d just stayed at work an hour longer watching YouTube.

To be fair, I don’t know anyone who can actually bill their place of work like that so that argument is a little stale. The next is somewhat more grounded. If your income was £10, finding £1 is a 10% increase in equity. For someone with £1000, it’s only a thousandth of a percent increase. For higher and higher amounts of income it becomes even more of a rounding error.

This more broad view highlights a rather important thing. If you have lots of pounds in your bank account, you really don’t need to look down. Except maybe when getting the train or in case someone left a sewage grate open. Looking for the pound is going to take your mind away from other things and distract you from the things that matter to you. And, perhaps more importantly, if you leave the pound on the floor, someone else who doesn’t have what you have, for whom a pound is a non-negligible find, could find it.

In the end

Picking up a coin is a task and you should think to yourself whether its going to contribute in any meaningful way to your life. If your income is such that spending five seconds hunting coins does not justify the effort, then don’t bother. Relative to all the other stuff you’re thinking about, unless you need it for something, put your head back in the clouds and enjoy your walk.

So what?

Next time you see a coin on the floor, step back from the glass, and think about it. Mathematically, if you can pick that sucker up in a few seconds you’re probably taking a win. But you’re also taking your mind from other things, taking that same opportunity from someone more in need of it, and you’re picking stuff up off the floor. Go wash your hands. 🧼

---

Thanks for reading. The best way to support this newsletter is to sign up if you haven’t already, share it around, and get your friends to sign up too. That’s what this lovely purple button is for …