Everybody knows how to make a budget. You might not use it, but you definitely know how to create one. 

Remember when you were a kid in the store and you wanted to buy three candy bars, but you only had enough money for two? You had to juggle your money and your desires to get what you wanted. Now that you’re older, you’ve got to work with some kind of budget with your money, even if it’s an informal one. As you make more money, there’s always pressure to spend more than you make. That’s when you have to develop a system for allocating your funds. 

I’m willing to bet that Sir Richard Branson or Warren Buffett have budgets. Of course, they’re budgeting for buying countries, islands, or entire conglomerates. But I’ll wager they have a budget for that sort of stuff. 

The good thing about money is you can find ways to make more. If you have a dream in mind, you can usually find a way to make extra money. Maybe it’s selling stuff you already own. Maybe it’s making crafts and selling them. Or maybe taking a second job. Regardless, you can usually increase the amount of money you have. 

That’s not true with time. 

Each of us is allotted 168 hours a week. No more, no less. Those rich dudes I wrote about earlier don’t get extra time because they’re rich. And poor people don’t get less time because they’re poor. Everybody gets the exact same amount. When you think about it, time is the perfect thing you can budget…because it’s fixed. 

As I was entering 2019, I started to think a lot more about time budgeting. I’ve been tracking my time since early 2016. That means I’ve got a lot of empirical data to work with. Yet over those years, I really haven’t been proactive with my time usage. I could tell how I spent my time, but I wasn’t using any formula to help me determine how I wanted to spend it. The start of this year seemed to be a good opportunity to address that. 

First off, I’m new to the idea of time budgeting, so I haven’t done much research. I’ve simply created a system I’m trying to use for now with the intent of improving it moving forward. But I have a few observations to share now with a lot more in the future. 

When I started thinking about time budgeting I wanted to avoid micro-managing. I didn’t want to be a slave to my calendar or the clock. My life is hectic, after all. So I wanted to have flexibility. I also decided I wasn’t going to beat myself up if I didn’t make my budget. Life gets in the way sometimes, so the goal was to continually get better at anticipating what I knew and what I couldn’t know. Eventually I hope to be fairly accurate at budgeting my time. Most of all, I want to feel like I’m using time the way I intended to. It’s not so much about control as it is about intentionality. I want to be able to look back and say, “yeah, that’s what I meant to do”. 

I also decided I didn’t want to try and allocate my time on a daily basis. That seemed like too much work. I thought about working on a weekly basis, but even that seemed like I was going to have to be a perfect prognosticator. I’d have to think really hard about everything that was going on and how much time I wanted to dedicate to each item. So I settled on budgeting my time on a monthly basis. I figured that most months have more in common than they differ. Sure, there are seasons during the year when things are going to have more importance than others, but for the most part, much of every month is the same. So I opted for monthly time budgeting. 

In addition, I decided to stick with my framework of my five primary areas of focus for my budgeting: 

• Business
• Family
• Financial
• Household
• Personal

I added in a sixth, sleep, because it takes up a lot of time and I’m trying to get a better handle on my sleep hygiene. Essentially I want to use sleep as a tool to ensure that I’m doing my best work everyday…but I don’t want to sleep more than I need to. 

My first step in setting up a budget was to create a spreadsheet to do the tracking. I use Google Sheets for these kinds of tasks so the information is available everywhere. I like the ability to enter or review data in multiple locations, and having the data accessible on my phone is a nice feature that lets me use my Confetti Time to positive effect. 

Then I dug back through my prior months data to see what a typical month looked like. Because I’m a nerd about these kinds of things, I collected that data in the spreadsheet and looked at the maximum and minimum amount of time I spent in each area on a monthly basis. That provided a range for each area of focus. Next I reviewed each year to discover if there were other patterns. For instance, during the summer I tend to spend a lot of time on Household Tasks, mostly because I have to do the mowing in addition to everything inside the house. From the data, it’s crystal clear I start mowing season in March and it continues through October. Obviously, that sort of thing needed to be accounted for in my budget. 

It hit me that I really can’t create a time budget for very far out in the future. There are simply too many variables and weird modifications to my schedule to do too much budgeting. So I opted to create a budget template I would then adjust for each month. The idea is there’s a certain baseline of time I need to spend in each area to get the bare minimum done. For instance, I need to sleep for a minimum amount of time if I don’t want to be unbearable. So that went into the budget template. I also know I have to spend some time on household chores (cooking, cleaning, shopping, etc.). So I tried to extract how much time that was from my historical data and added it to the budget template. I did this for each of the areas of focus. That afforded a baseline allocated to each area, and then there was a chunk of unbudgeted time that I could distribute to fit that specific month. 

I set all this up too late in January to do much with it. I did go through the exercise without looking at the data I’d already collected though. That gave me a chance to think about how to approach the process, especially of how to balance the unbudgeted time with the things I had wanted to do for the month. The process was a lot harder than I thought. Just like when you budget your money, there wasn’t enough time and there were too many things I wanted to spend it on. But I persevered, and came up with a budget before the last week of the month. 

I went into aTimeLogger 2 and brought up the pie chart of how I’d actually spent my time. Next I compared the actual time usage with the budget I’d created for the month. I saw some glaring differences, and made a specific plan for the last week of the month to try and bring the actual pie chart into line with the budgeted pie chart. That meant spending a lot less time doing personal stuff (reading and TV/video watching were the two biggies) and more time in business activities (focusing mostly on writing and learning). Having the two graphs to compare allowed me to see where I’d really spent my time and where I had wanted to spend it. I was able to make dramatically more intentional decisions about how I should spend my time for the upcoming week. 

I also worked on my time budget for February. I added a task to my weekly review to compare the actual pie chart to the budgeted pie chart and then used that as one of the input in planning my next week. While there were some significant unplanned events for the month (including a five day trip to Pittsburg to take care of my son after back surgery), I was very successful in using the comparison to drive what I needed to focus on during the week. It was somewhat amazing to me how effective this was! 

In reality, the mechanics of creating a time budget aren’t that difficult. The tough part is making the decision on how you’re going to spend your time. 

The first thing I do is determine the number of the days in the month. This gives me a total number of hours I’ll have. So for a 30 day month I’ve got 720 hours, while for a 31 day month there are 744. Next I figure out how many of hours of sleep I should be getting every night. I realize this number is going to vary somewhat, but I’m trying to get away from trying to make up for lost sleep on the weekends. There are too many studies that say you can’t really make up a sleep deficit like that. So for an average night I’m targeting 6:45 hours of sleep. This number didn’t come out of thin air, but rather was teased-out from my collected data. So those 6:45 per night for a 31 day month add up to 209 hours. (OK, it’s actually 209.25 hours for your math nerds, but I’m sticking to the rounded number to make the rest of the math easier). 

With 744 hours in the month and 209 budgeted for sleep, I’ve got 535 hours left for everything else. 

For this month I know we’ve got a couple of holidays we’ll spend together as a family as well as one college graduation. That means I’ll have to budget a bit more family time than the base amount from the monthly average. The weather will also begin to turn nice, and the grass has already started growing. If I don’t want to get behind with mowing our 14 acres, I’m going to have to dedicate some fairly large blocks of time to prepping the yard for the summer.

I’m also embarking on a fairly intensive business project that will span several months. To do this right, I need to dedicate additional time to the business area of focus. 

But if I’m spending more time in the business, family, and household areas, something else is going to have to be trimmed back. That means this month I’ve got to figure out a way to trim my financial and personal time to make up for the extra time in the other three. 

When I look at the numbers, I always balk. I think “oh, I can be more efficient and get more done in the same amount of time as last month”. Then my rational brain thumps me upside the head and I realize I’m falling into the delusional trap. I’m never as productive as I think I’ll be. Everything takes longer than I think it should, and even with the most careful planning sessions on the planet, I’m still struggling! 

But my time budgets have helped a lot. During my weekly review I bring up a graph of my month-to-date time usage alongside the graph of my time budget. That way I can see where I’m falling behind and where I’m spending more time than I should. At the very least, this gives me an opportunity to assess what I need to do for the remainder of the month. Plus it’s a very clear reminder that the time budget is a guideline. If there’s an unexpected event, I need to recognize that. Sometimes I simply toss out the month’s time budget I started with and revamp it. Other times I rededicate myself to achieving the time goals I set at the beginning of the month. 

In either case, I’m being much more intentional about my use of time. And I’m starting to realize no matter how hard I try, I can’t plan for everything. 

The other interesting takeaway is I’ve been able to use my time budget to help me do more of the things I want to do. For instance, the advent of this business project has meant I’ve needed to work for longer hours and more efficiently. When I looked at the four months prior to the start of the project, I realized I simply wasn’t spending enough productive time doing business things. Sure, I was logging hours in my business area of focus, but they weren’t the most productive.

That prompted me to develop some automations for my social media posts. In turn, the automation helped me work on my social media in larger, single blocks of time. I discovered I could setup some categories of my social media posts in one sitting. So now I pre-plan all the Hectic Meals Featured Recipes once during the month, instead of every week. Same with my What’s For Dinner posts. Those types of posts require a lot of time to get into the zone to make them turn out well, but once I’m in the zone I can do several months worth of posts very quickly. The amount of time it takes to get in the zone pays off in huge dividends when I’m creating more of those posts. 

So time budgeting has helped me use my time more wisely, caused me to be more intentional about my time, and helped me realize every month really is going to be different. Coupled with a proactive weekly review to plan my weeks along with a retrospective monthly review to assess how I used my time, I’m getting much better at figuring out what I’m capable of. 

While I’ve still got a long way to go on this journey, I strongly believe that time budgeting has been a huge boon!