What’s in a Time Budget?

Preparing Your Time Transactions

Budgeted Time – Part 4

Your calendar represents your daily calendar transactions. Like a bank statement that lists your financial transactions, your calendar holds your time transactions. Let’s think of the items on your calendar as time transactions used against your time-budget. In this way, you can see how you’re spending your time. Since we’re making transactions we must determine what type of transactions are available. You can track set appointments, meetings, events, and even journal entries of time used. Your time tracking ledger could include such things, but not limited to, movies watched, games attended, or errand run. In this way, we can go back and review our time ledger to evaluate how we spent our time. With a time ledger one can easily review and remember what he or she was doing on any particular day. Be as meticulous with your time tracking as you are with your financial tracking.

Preparing for Time Transactions
There are two concepts we need to master in order to make the best use of our calendar: 1) add margin and 2) go overboard with time entries.

1. Add margin.
   I always like to start with margin. When a person begins seriously using their calendar to manage their life, one tends to over extend themselves by underestimating how much time is needed. When this occurs a person will overbook himself or herself and create overload. Therefore, I suggest to begin with always thinking of how you can put margin into your calendar. For example, for every one hour of an activity you have scheduled, give yourself a buffer of 30 minutes before another appointment can occur. In other words, work to have 30 minutes between all your activities to give yourself space and room for margin. You would be surprised at how many professionals have to find time to go to the restroom during a workday because they have those back to back meetings. Find a way to add margin. Following work meetings that I know I’ll have takeaway items, I add an appointment immediately following for about 30 minutes so that I can process my notes, delegate activities, and/or create next action plans. Leave yourself space to breathe, we call it margin.

2. Go Overboard with Time Entries
   Be prepared to go overboard with calendar entries. Keep in mind that this is your calendar and you want it to be as useful to you as possible. Schedule everything, down to processing emails if necessary and personal down-time. I have appointments for sleep so that I can visually see what time I have available and where I fit my rest into my day. As you know, not all our days’ activities begin or end at the same time. Therefore, you want to plan for this. We call it budgeting time. This way not only can you see what you have in front of you, you can evaluate the time spent. By using a calendar to visually see your time budgeted out, you never have to assume you have time for activities when you don’t. So go overboard with calendar entries if that’s what it takes.

Time Transaction Categories
Now let’s discuss the calendar entry transactions. These transactions may fall into a number of categories which I’d like to describe below. These are in no particular order of importance nor is it a complete list of all the categories one might come up with.

• Special Days
  Your calendar transactions will certainly include special days such as anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays.
  • Anniversaries.
    For busy people, one needs help remembering anniversaries. This isn’t limited to wedding anniversaries, but deaths, children’s special events, any special annual significant dates like work anniversaries of key-staff, etc. Log all this into your calendar so that it reminds you of these upcoming days. This way, you won’t book yourself for another time transaction category when you should be free to celebrate a significant anniversary.
  • Birthdays.
    The best way to remember birthdays is to add it to the calendar and set reminders. You can also add notes for gifts you’d like to send or any action you’d like to take. Your calendar is more than a date keeper, you see, it maintains significant data for all your time related activities. Set a time transaction for when to shop for that birthday gift you will need or like me add a date in which you need to mail someone a birthday card. Again, go overboard with your time transactions.
  • Holidays.
    Go ahead and add holidays into the calendar. You’d be surprised at how often holidays sneak up on ordinary people. The internet is a powerful tool and offers calendars you can subscribe to for this. You can choose from a number of holiday calendars. You can also subscribe to your favorite sport’s team calendars or your child’s school calendars. This way you have a view into what’s coming up at school and see how it fits into your time budget.

• Special Conferences.
  Are there conferences or seminars that you must attend? We often have a number of annual conferences that show up in our time budget. By placing them on our calendar, we make certain that we don’t overbook and later have to choose one event over another when we could have easily seen it coming by budgeting our time. I think of our weekly church attendance as a conference or seminar, so I add it in as a staple event. Which brings me to staple time transactions.

• Staple Time Transactions (or Staple Events)
  There are just some events that are staple items on our calendar, like exercise classes. What staple events do you have that need to go into your calendar so that they are considered when you budget your time? Allow me to give you a couple that most of us have: work hours and vacations.
  • Work Hours.
    For the most part, we know when we have to be at work or have office hours. Go ahead and add these into your time budget. Therefore you have a complete picture of what your life looks like for any given day.
  • Vacation Days.
    When you’ve made plans for a vacation, add that with all its details to your calendar. Place flights, hotel check ins, events, shows, and excursions to your time budget. These time transactions are critical to how you manage and plan for what you do while on vacation.
• Available slots for activities.
  Lastly, I’d like to discuss what I call my available time slots. Once your calendar is complete with the staple items and the special events and most important activities, what you have left to do is establish your available time slots. These time slots can be placeholders for where you can have other activities. Each week, I locate all the open slots on my calendar that are convenient and to use in a number of ways. Those ways include, but aren’t limited to, the following: specific project work, meetings, luncheons, mentoring, being mentored, date nights, outings with friends, small groups, etc. My open slots represent all the available, usable, within margin time I have left to be used. Once these slots are filled, then it’s over to the next week we go. In this way, there is no overloading or mismanaging of our time and blowing our time budget.

Whenever you are budgeting time remember these major two guidelines: 1) leave room for margin, and 2) go overboard with your time transaction categories. In order to go to the next level in planning and time management, you will need to do what very few do. Be uncommon. Your time is more important than your finances, so why not treat it this way.

Question: what guidelines can you place around your time budgeting to make the biggest difference starting today?

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