Do you have a time budget?
“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12
We often say that “Time is Money” and “Money is Time”.
But how many of us actually live like time is money?
You could even argue that time is more valuable than money.
Money can be earned but time wasted can never be regained.
The sad truth is that we live in a society that is materially rich but time-poor.
What I mean by “Time-Poor” is that there’s too much to do yet so little time.
We live like we have an infinite amount of time even though the opposite is true.
If we are being honest, most of us don’t treat time as a precious resource.
We have financial budgets but why don’t most of us have time budgets? What if we did?
Here are some reasons why we should budget our time.
We should budget our time so that:
We don’t overspend
When we don’t actively budget our time, we are at risk of overcommitting. This is especially true for the optimists and people-pleasers among us. We say “Yes” to everything and end up overcommitting ourselves.
We don’t waste time
Ever felt like you had a busy day but you don’t remember what you did? This often happens when we don’t have a plan on how we are going to spend our time. We end up being reactive - responding to every urgent thing that comes our way, that may not be important.
We have enough time for the things that matter
When we don’t budget our time and spend (or waste) our time on things that are unimportant, we end up not having enough time for important matters or have to dip into other time i.e. “Family time” or “Relaxation time”
Credit to Mindful Ambition
We don’t become overwhelmed
When we don’t budget our time, it’s only a matter of time when we become not only time-poor but in time-debt. This is when we feel overwhelmed and feel burnt out. It can take a long time to recover.
So, how do you budget your time?
One of the most effective ways that I’ve discovered recently is to use my calendar as my task list.
Our calendar is essentially a ledger of how we will be spending our time.
So it makes sense to combine what we have to do with how we will spend our time.
Here’s how to budget your time using Google calendar
Step 1: List out all the things that you need to do and put them on the calendar.
I like to start my planning every Sunday evening, so I’ll temporarily put all my to dos on Sunday as a backlog
Step 2: Prioritize them according to Importance and Urgency.
Try to delete tasks that are not important and not urgent. That way, it frees up more time for the things that matter.
Step 3: Estimate the time that you need to complete them.
Remember that things always take longer than we expect.
Step 4: Drag and drop your tasks into your week
There you have it! Now you have successfully budgeted for the important things that you need to get done this week! These time slots are now blocked off so that you can get it done. If you want to take more tasks, you will have to use up the other available time or delete unimportant ones.
Some pro tips:
Make sure to set a recurring event in your calendar for regular tasks that you need to do. That way, those tasks will have been naturally budgeted.
You can use different colors to mark the status of your tasks on the calendar. i.e. I use Red to mark tasks that are not completed and change them to green when I’ve completed them.
Adopting a budgeting mindset towards time has helped me spend my time more wisely.
I hope this will help you start thinking about time in a more deliberate manner.
What other ways have you found effective in helping you budget your time? I’d love to know in the comments below!
Talk to you next week 👋