{"id":4520,"date":"2019-06-21T03:45:06","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T08:45:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hectic-dad.com\/hectic-dad\/?p=4520"},"modified":"2019-06-06T13:11:17","modified_gmt":"2019-06-06T18:11:17","slug":"quantified-life-time-budgeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hectic-dad.com\/hectic-dad\/quantified-life-time-budgeting\/","title":{"rendered":"Quantified Life – Time Budgeting"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Everybody knows how to make a budget. You might not use it, but you definitely know how to create one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019re older, you\u2019ve got to work with some kind of budget with your money, even if it\u2019s an informal one. As you make more money, there’s always pressure to spend more than you make. That\u2019s when you have to develop a system for allocating your funds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m 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\u2019ll wager they have a budget for that sort of stuff. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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\u2019s selling stuff you already own. Maybe it\u2019s making crafts and selling them. Or maybe taking a second job. Regardless, you can usually increase the amount of money you have. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s not true with time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of us is allotted 168 hours a week. No more, no less. Those rich dudes I wrote about earlier don\u2019t get extra time because they\u2019re rich. And poor people don\u2019t get less time because they\u2019re poor. Everybody gets the exact same amount. When you think about it, time<\/em> is the perfect thing you can budget\u2026because it\u2019s fixed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As I was entering 2019, I started to think a lot more about time budgeting. I\u2019ve been tracking my time since early 2016. That means I\u2019ve got a lot of empirical data to work with. Yet over those years, I really haven\u2019t been proactive<\/em> with my time usage. I could tell how<\/em> I spent my time, but I wasn\u2019t using any formula to help me determine how I wanted to spend<\/em> it. The start of this year seemed to be a good opportunity to address that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First off, I\u2019m new to the idea of time budgeting, so I haven\u2019t done much research. I\u2019ve simply created a system I\u2019m 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When I started thinking about time budgeting<\/em> I wanted to avoid micro-managing. I didn\u2019t want to be a slave to my calendar or the clock. My life is hectic<\/em>, after all. So I wanted to have flexibility. I also decided I wasn\u2019t going to beat myself up if I didn\u2019t make my budget<\/em>. Life gets in the way sometimes, so the goal was to continually get better at anticipating what I knew and what I couldn\u2019t know. Eventually I hope to be fairly accurate at budgeting my time. Most of all, I want to feel like I\u2019m using time the way I intended to. It\u2019s not so much about control<\/em> as it is about intentionality<\/em>. I want to be able to look back and say, \u201cyeah, that\u2019s what I meant to do\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also decided I didn\u2019t 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<\/em>. I\u2019d 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<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In addition, I decided to stick with my framework of my five primary areas of focus<\/a><\/em> for my budgeting: <\/p>\n\n\n\n