ime and money are things you trade your life for," says Vicki Robin, co-author with Joe Dominguez of Your Money or Your Life (Viking Penguin, 1992).

If so, you might be selling your life more cheaply than you think.

Let's say you are paid at the rate of $50 an hour for a 40-hour workweek. That's an impressive figure: You're making more than $100,000 a year. But take a closer look. The figures ignore your unpaid overtime, commuting time, hours spent dressing for success, days spent in seminars and networking. They ignore the time you spend recovering from it all, staring mind-numbed at the TV because you're too exhausted for anything else.

Then, Robin says, take a look at the dollars. Factor in what you lay out for clothes, housing, cars, vacations and other accouterments of this $100,000 lifestyle.

Robin figures that for many of us, that $50 an hour shrinks closer to $12.50. If our time is so precious, can it really be worth so little in dollars?

This is a decade of time awareness, down to the nanosecond. A pervasive sense of time famine has engendered new ways of viewing the intersection of working and living. A lucky few have managed to reconcile the conflicts - through compromise, through a willingness to say no to demands on their time, to settle for less cash and to avoid expensive lifestyles.

And occasionally through writing a book about the time-money conundrum.

Gil Bashe is one of those willing to compromise - and to say no. "I work hard so that I can acquire time," says Bashe, a 42-year-old executive managing director of Hill & Knowlton, a big New York public relations firm. If a client has a crisis, I'll rush to his side - my family understands that. But if next week's meeting needs to be moved back a day so I can attend to family needs, I say that upfront." Clients understand, Bashe says. "The client sees me as someone very human," he says, "and supports that."

Bashe is salaried with no fixed value on his working hours. The labor of his wife, a psychologist, has a measurable value in the marketplace: $120 an hour. Less clear, says Bashe, is "how much our life is worth in the marketplace of life. If my wife does not see a patient, she's out $120. But her desire to make a difference in life - and in her own life - is worth more than $120. So she'll see certain clients for less than that, or not see someone at all. And you can't put any price tag on that."

Peter Dickstein, also 42-years-old, is chief financial officer of EndoTex, a cardiovascular medical equipment manufacturer in Menlo Park, Calif. He has worked for a number of startup companies as an employee and as a consultant, and has made no long-term commitment to any line of work.

"I have to have time off for myself," he says. He often ponders how much his time is really worth. There's no fixed answer. "If I'm building a company, I'll spend time that may be undervalued, in the hopes that the ultimate result will be worth far more than that," he says. "There is something inherently more satisfying in spending time building a business than there is pumping out consulting reports or articles - even if I'm getting paid $1,000 or $1,500 a day doing that. "

Personal satisfaction, in contrast to money rewards, motivates Sandy Jacobs, too. She says she works many hours of unpaid overtime as executive editor of Health News, a newsletter published in Waltham, Mass. She takes pride in her newsletter and in her book, Having Your Baby With a Nurse Midwife, a subject she considers worthwhile. When she started the book, experienced friends told her, "If you calculate your pay by the hour, you'll go crazy. Like most book authors, she found her financial rewards in the minimum-wage category. But she wouldn't hesitate to tackle another, equally unprofitable book. "That was an important investment of time for me, personally and professionally," she says.

Jacobs has acquaintances who work even harder, up to 100 hours a week, for money. She says they spend it in ways she doesn't have to: buying fancy business clothes, eating every meal in a restaurant or ordering take-out. "They don't see spending that money as a sacrifice," she says. "It's almost a reward for them. But I enjoy home-cooked meals. The time I spend on those sorts of things is worth a lot to me, and it's something I can't put a price tag on."

Greg Cumberford, a 32-year-old Stanford graduate, can't ignore the economic necessities. "I value my time highly, because I am married and have a young daughter," he says. "Time spent with my family is precious. Yet I am also currently the primary income earner, so I must find a balance between time spent with them and at work."

Cumberford found the balance in work with the Faraway Foundation, a non-profit organization near Telluride, Colo., that owns and operates a 1,000-acre wilderness ranch for the ecology-minded.

"I value my time not so much on the financial components I receive, but according to the system-wide benefits that my time accomplishes," he says. "I compensate myself less well than I might financially, but with the knowledge that I am helping nurture a more viable form of civilization than the one we've got."

Still, Cumberford, like most of the rest of us, never feels that he has enough time.

Maybe we ought to take heed of a project being developed by Danny Hillis, a high-speed computer pioneer, and Brian Eno, the musician. They have come up with one solution: It's the world's slowest clock, designed to chime just once a millennium. If it were only that simple.