If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.

Held consistently, the value of time makes most casual waste look extravagant. People who guard money carefully will spend an evening they cannot recover without noticing, because time never presents a bill and its loss is invisible until much later. The argument is simply asking you to apply the same care to the scarcer resource.

That does not mean filling every hour, and rest is not waste. Look instead for the hours that give you nothing you chose: the scrolling, the meetings that could be a message, the obligations kept out of inertia. Reclaim one of them this week and spend it deliberately.