Making a Plan for Your Time
Budgeted Time – Part 3
Time is the one thing we can not manage. The root problem of time management is the myth that one can even manage time. You have what you have and nothing more. In fact, you can’t add more time to your day nor can you subtract any. The famous words of Jesus go a little like this, “can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” [1]Obviously the answer is no. You can’t give someone your hours and you can’t save them in a time-bank. What we manage is how we budget for our time?
In this installment, we will define what budgeting time is and relate it to how individuals budget money or their financial resources. For budgeting our finances, we use a budget. For budgeting time, we use our calendars.
In budgeting time one must ask the question, what am I to do with the time that I have been given? Well, that’s where a calendar comes into play and what sets the successful person apart from the unsuccessful. It’s what makes a normal person become exceptional. Everyone budgets their time in at least two ways: a clock and a calendar. We will focus on the calendar in this section.
“The key is not to prioritize what is on the schedule but to schedule your priorities.” ~ Stephen Covey
While the average person doesn’t think of their calendar as a place to store data, it does. It stores your budget for how you use time. The question then becomes how well are you budgeting your time. Is your calendar empty, too full, overlooked, ignored, or neglected? How you view your calendar is a direct reflection of the condition of how your time is spent. Are you in overdraft with your time? Do you have too much time on your hands? Which indicates one isn’t investing one’s time. Just like people who don’t track their expenses and spending habits, most don’t track their time and how they spend it. The calendar tells you when everything is to be done.
Time Budget: Make a Plan for Your Time
The word budget and budgeting implies finances. In fact, it means to make a written plan for your finances. In the same way, budgeting when it comes to time, implies you’re going to make a written plan for your time. What’s interesting is we have this popular phrase, “time is money” yet we don’t consider budgeting our time like we do our money. Before we get into the specific action of how to make this written budget, allow me to give you a few similarities between budgeting money and budgeting time. Most people spend more than they earn. In the same way, most people believe they have more time than they actually have in any allotment. To gain control of one’s spending of their financial resources is quite difficult. In the same way managing the time one has is difficult. In either case, the normal person overestimates how much time he or she has and underestimates how long it takes to perform tasks. The average person underestimates how much something costs while overestimating how much he or she actually possesses. I like to say it this way. We round up when it comes to how much money we have and round down when explaining how much we owe. Notice how often I say, “average, or normal.” As you know this content and more specifically this concept isn’t for normal people, but for those trying to escape the trap that normal has placed us in when it comes to time. Regardless, budgeting time is your way of seeing on paper how you spend and will spend your time.
Your Time Budget Consists of…
- What’s in a Day?
When one thinks of a day, she or he usually thinks of it as having more time available than there is. To put your day into a better perspective and to help you learn how to budget the time within your days, let’s discuss what all goes into your day. I’ve done this exercise with our daughter Tamia and it helped her to become better with her studies and completing homework.
What’s in a day? If you lay out your day in 24 hour blocks, what would your day look like?- Work or school takes roughly 9 hours out of your day. This leaves you with 15 hours.
- Your commute to school or work takes roughly 30 minutes on the front and 30 on the backend. That’s one hour. This leaves you with 14 hours in your day.
- Your evening dinner takes about one if not more, leaving you with 13 hours.
- While 13 hours sounds like a lot, you’ve not slept yet, while the normal person sleeps for at least 7 hours. This would be equivalent to going to bed at 11 and waking at 5 a.m. This leaves you with 7 hours remaining.
- One hour of this 7 hours is for your preparations at the beginning of the day. This leaves you with 6 hours.
- At best we get 6 hours considering we’ve not wasted any time.
The question then becomes how do you best utilize these remaining six hours of time?
With all the activities of life, it is easy to use these 6 hours on some not so important activities when you live without a budget. For example, we’ve not entered the time for exercise, television, small groups, friends, shopping, errands, etc. Those six hours can easily be wasted.
While I’m here, if you use more than those 6 hours, that means you need to borrow the hours from another category, like sleep. Now can you see why budgeting time is so important? How many hours have you been borrowing from other areas of importance?
- What’s in a Week?
When we think of a week and especially a weekend, we think of it as if there is some huge amount of time. This time too needs to be segmented into blocks. There are weekend activities and weekday activities that need to be accounted for. Most of your week however is already blocked off by work and what it takes to work. If you bleed your work over into your weekend blocks, what are you losing? As I referenced early, Jim Rohn says…
“When you work, work. When you play, play. Don’t mix the two.”
Guarding your time will become a priority when you begin to budget it. You won’t be so quick to let someone have your family time or your personal time. You will make better decisions when it comes to those 168 hours in your week.
You see, if you analyze this future, you will get serious about your time. Sleep takes anywhere from 49 to 56 hours of your week. Work takes up anywhere from 40 to 50 hours of your week. That means you only get 62 to 79 hours for your desired activities. Isn’t that sobering? You have 2.5 to 3 days of seven days for yourself. This is why the uncommon person budgets time and seems to have more time than the average person. There is no time to waste. - What’s in a Month?
A month is a little different. Yet, we think of a month as a huge amount of time. But you have noticed how a month can roll around on you very quickly because it’s only four week. You get only four weekends or four Wednesdays, occasionally you might have five. This isn’t as much as it would seem.
Pamela and I remember our plans for being very strategic with Tamia’s time since we are share-time parents. That means we only had 26 weeks out of 52 weeks with Tamia. There was no way we were going to let anything interfere with those days since we started out with only half of them in any period of time. This is why we budget our time and encourage you to budget yours. Everything you say “yes” to means “no” to everything else. - What’s in a Year?
How I wish a year was a longer period of time? The reason I know a year isn’t a long time is because everyone I’ve ever met has had a goal to achieve something in a year that they didn’t have time to achieve. In fact, I thought I could write a book in a year and it took eight. I had an outline for a book that I thought could be done in a year and it’s going on 2 years. A year isn’t as much time as you think until you begin to budget out the year. A person who doesn’t budget out their year is a person who won’t accomplish what they plan to accomplish in that year. One year is 52 weeks. You know this. If you plan to do one big action each week, you’ll only be able to complete 52 of them. Our minds tell us or what’s normal is thinking we can do a whole lot more giving a year’s worth of time. A year is 12 months no more. A year has only four seasons. You have four seasons to get it done and the seasons aren’t created equally. The summer is totally different than the winter. You need to plan, budget for it accordingly. It’s time to budget your time and budget it well.
This is the concept for which you will use to begin budgeting your time and the concept helps answer these questions.
- What will you place in your day?
- What will you see happen within a week?
- How will you plan your month?
- What will you do this year?
Your time is nothing to be played with unless it is budgeted to play. Your time should not be taken lightly. Unlike money, you can’t get any more time. You can’t buy an extension. You can’t make up for the time wasted. All you can do is get better at what you do with what you have. Let’s get better together. This is how we go to the next level when it concerns our time.
Question: what does budgeting your time make possible for you?
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[1] Matthew 6:27 NIV, Bible.com, accessed September 13, 2022, https://www.bible.com/bible/111/MAT.6.27.NIV
All Scripture references used by permission, see our Scripture copyrights.
