Budgeting Time Based on Seasons

Budgeting Time for the Year – Part 1

Budgeted Time – Part 6

In this particular lesson, we’re going to talk about what it takes to budget the items one normally experiences throughout the year. That means for the person who’s making a budget, this person must consider what happens at each season, each month, and each point during the year. The Bible explains that a wise person makes plans. ^[1] Therefore, one must become skilled at planning. In learning how to budget your time, it teaches us how to become good with planning.

In this lesson, we’re focusing specifically on how to plan for a year. Budgeting your time takes insight, it’s like making a plan. You need to know what your year looks like before you begin it. In other words, you’ve shaping and developing the vision you have for your year. You need to know what your season looks like before you begin one. In this way you can have the success that you want in making plans for your life, your future, your family, your goals, your dreams, your home, and for that matter for everything that you do. Now that you have a good picture of the philosophy or the concept, let’s get into the details that make this great.

In the previous section, we talked about budgeting for your decades. And now we’re going to bring it down to what it looks like in a year. As you know with your decades, you go through each decade of your life and determine at a high-level view what your life should be like at each point, at each decade transaction. Now we’re going to get into the year, what happens within a particular year, which obviously will also include what happens in each month since we’re breaking down the pieces of one’s year. We will begin this topic of budgeting for one’s year by looking at it with a seasonal perspective.

Seasonal Activities
When planning or thinking of a year, it’s wise to consider a year’s makeup which includes four distinct seasons. Of course, we all know the seasons of the year: summer, fall, winter, and spring. However, taking the concepts of seasons a little further, we must also consider the seasons of your life. There are seasons that represent the times of year when you have the most energy or when you’re most tired. You see, each season impacts you differently. Therefore, we need to not only plan for the time period we call Summer, but plan for how this time period impacts us as it relates to our time. One must prepare and plan for that accordingly.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Seasonal activities when you’re in school or have school-aged children must be included in your planning for a year. School begins in one season, but ends in another. Therefore your schedule may be impacted differently than when schools are out. You need a plan for this. Go ahead and place it on your calendar when you’re in school and when you’re out of school. Those changes impact you differently. Let’s plan for it.

There are what we call sports seasons or seasonal sports. Some of us have unique sports that we are involved in. It might be football that fills our fall calendar or skiing activities that fill our winter calendar. If you know football season happens each year and what activities go along with that, then plan for it. If we look at the actual physical calendar seasons, life and the things that we do at each point during those seasons, obviously, impact what we do and do in life during these times. Therefore we must build a plan accordingly and budget our time when it comes to the seasons.

Let’s take just a moment to speak to budgeting for each season respectively.

Spring Time-Budgeting
Spring is that time of year where yard work begins to increase and become more of a weekly activity. In the preceding season, winter, it wasn’t the case. Until spring happens, we’ve been on a break from doing yard maintenance, trimming hedges, pruning, and mowing the lawn. Those activities have been on hold. Winter life is when people spend more time indoors and spring is when we emerge back into outdoor activities. Now it’s time to prepare to begin those activities again. With that said, one must then figure out how to insert those time blocks back into his or her calendar. How does spring-time and beyond impact your calendar? Add this to your time-budget.

Summer Time-Budgeting
In the summer, travel reaches its peak. Planning for your summer vacations and your summer schedule is a must. The summer schedule is a lot different than your winter schedule. In winter, we’re inside most of the time so we’re working very hard. Summer however, we get to go out and even away. Therefore, you want to prepare for a more relaxed schedule, flexible schedule, when it’s compared to what you do and how you perform in other seasons. Why not prepare yourself? Include this change in seasonal availability into your time-budget. If you know for the month of August your family is away at the lake house, then block out that month for lake house available activities. Don’t plan local activities when you already have plans to be away.

Fall Time-Budgeting
Fall is when you get to do things like prepare for all the leaves to fall. It’s the time you close out summer activities. For example, you’re shutting down your pool and things of that nature. Insert that into your calendar so you don’t get off course or overloaded when the change in seasons comes your way. You want to be prepared mentally and physically for the changing of the seasons. What do you need to place on your time-budget or remove from it when you enter the fall months?

Winter Time-Budgeting
The winter activities are when you’re going into somewhat of a hibernating period. This season is where things start to slow down as far as outdoor activities are concerned. It’s time (at least for us) to adjust our finances. In other words we enter a new financial season. We’re taking a look at how our financial operating budget is working and implementing a new financial budget. In the winter months, we review all of these things we need to account for in our calendar, as it pertains to what it looks like over the entire year. Since winter brings us inside, we use this time for inside activities. We don’t want to waste spring, summer, and fall days doing winter activities when all we need to do is rearrange our time budget. Place winter activities in the winter months.

There is a Bible phrase that you might be familiar with. It goes like this. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity.” ^[2] The question is, have you identified the time or place in time for everything? Have you mapped out the activities for each of your seasons? If there is a time and there is, then it’s important to know the time. This Bible phrase implies that you need a time budget. Without a time budget, (as this Bible phrase implies), you might have your timing off. To be fair, because this phrase is from the Bible, it actually means that the normal, average, ordinary person by default has their timing off. Why? Because he or she fails to identify the time for everything and the season for every activity. They fail to set up their time-budget.

Question: have you identified the opportune time for all you do and the right season for your activities?

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[1] ‭‭Proverbs 13:16 NLT, Bible.com, accessed October 4, 2022, https://www.bible.com/bible/116/PRO.13.16.NLT
[2] ‭‭Ecclesiastes 3:1 NLT, Bible.com, accessed October 4, 2022, https://www.bible.com/bible/116/ECC.3.1.NLT

All Scripture references used by permission, see our Scripture copyrights.