Balancing Your Time Budget
Most of us are trying to accomplish too many things and therefore feel that we have too little time. Worse, we constantly feel that we have to still add more things to our to-do list. To stop doing this it helps to become conscious about our time allocation.
1. Importance of Being Time Conscious
I was constantly feeling overwhelmed and was never able to complete my daily task lists. I knew I needed to work more to accomplish deadlines at work, but at the same time I knew I had to sleep more, spend more time with friends and family, spend more time exercising, spend more time in nature and also get back to being more spiritual. So I was constantly pushing to do more in every area, but was frustrated that my time was limited. The only comfort I had was that for most of my friends the situation seemed to be similar.
So how could I get rid of this overwhelm? How could I be productive and also feel productive, while experiencing less overwhelm?
I decided that I needed to be more conscious about how I spent my time. So I opened a spreadsheet and wrote down all the activities on which I was spending time; things like sleeping, exercising, spending time with family, personal development masterminds, as well as working. At the end of this exercise I gained much more awareness of how I was spending time and this insight enabled me to take actions that reduced my feeling of overwhelm. So in what follows I want to share with you what I did step by step.
2. Time Consciousness Exercise
Here are the steps of the Time Consciousness Exercise:
- Write a list of activities that take your time.
- Then write down the actual hours you currently spend on each task, both on a daily and on a weekly basis.
- Then increase the amount for activities you want to spend more time on and activities that you want to start doing.
- Then cut out activities that you want to drop.
The above is best done in an spreadsheet as follows:
5. The spreadsheet has five columns:
- Weekly Activities
- Actual: Hours per day
- Actual: Hours per week
- Goal: Hours per day
- Goal: Hours per week
Actual hours are the hours that you currently spend on the different activities. Goal hours are the hours that you should be spending on the different activities.
The last two rows in the list should always be work and total time. Total time should be fixed at 24 and 168 hours respectively for day and week. As daily and weekly total time is fixed, you can set daily work hours as 24 hours — daily non-work activities and set weekly work hours as 168 hours — weekly non-work activities.
The results spreadsheet should looks something like this:
The kinds of activities that you might spent time on are as follows:
Physical Maintenance
● Sleeping
● Go to bed, get up (awake while in bed)
● Power Naps
● Prepare, eat food, restaurant (all meals), do dishes, buy food
Clean and order
● Personal hygiene, shower & toilette
● Wash cloth, make bed
● Clean up room, files, emails, organize
Health and fitness
● Exercise, running, gym, biking
● Beauty (shave, color hair, makeup)
● Doctor, dentist etc.
Purchase and finance
● Personal finance/admin
● Buy electronics, cloth, repair
● Rent, travel, buy travel
● Make payments
● Renting out apartment
● Window shopping
Family & Friends
● Spend time with Friends & Family & Colleagues
● Dating, dating sites, messaging
● Help friends
Personal development
● Personal Diary
● Self-development
● Professional Skills (Programming, Marketing etc)
● Language learning
Charity
● Volunteering
● Blood donation, Sperm donation
Entertainment
● Games, films, fiction book
● Distraction: Check news, Youtube, Facebook
● make love, masturbate
● Dance, Tennis, other sport
Spirituality
● Church, spiritual
● Meditate, yoga, pilates, nature walks
Work related
● Professional development
● Job search
● Commuting work
Plan & Review
● Planning (weekly, daily)
● Review & analyse work
You can access the sample spreadsheet and make a copy of it here:
Use the above activities and timing as a starting point for your own list, but include additional activities that you are either already spending time on or that you want to spend time on.
You do not have to estimate the time both in terms of weeks and in terms of days. You just estimate either days or weeks and then calculate the other one by a formula: either you divide weekly hours by 7 to arrive at daily hours, or you multiply daily hours by 7 to arrive at weekly hours.
3. Write Down Goals, and Increase Time for Tasks
In step 1 you wrote down your weekly activities and in step 2 you wrote down the time you spend on each task. Now, we want to see the difference to your goal time, how much time you aim to spend in the future.
After you have written down all your tasks time estimates in the column for actual time, now do step 3 which is to copy-paste the value to the column for goal time. That means that the current time you are spending on each task is the starting point for your goals.
Then in step 3 you increase the value of the task you want to spend more time on. You first look at which activities you want to spend more time on, and increase the time value for those. Also, you add activities that you are not doing yet but want to do in the future.
A lot of people add additional time to these activities:
● Sleep
● Yoga, meditation
● Physical exercise
● Time with family
● Time for spirituality
If you add value to the time of those activities the total value of time of all non-work activities is now likely quite large, often beyond 20 hours, which leaves little time for work.
4. Make Space for Work
After adding all the non-work activities you want to work on, in step 4, you need to look at the total work time available and make more time available for it.
If you have used the formula we recommend above, all your activities would automatically have reduced the time available for work, to fit into 24 hours per day.
Let’s say that you have a total of 20 hours per day of non-work related activities. This means that you only have 4 hours available for work. Is that enough? You likely want and have to work more than that!
In my experience, once people add all the non-work activities they want to do, like exercise, yoga, time with family etc. they always have a very low amount of time available for work. In many cases the work time is negative, meaning that the non-work activities alone take more than 24 hours per day.
In order to be able to get more work time, you need to now delete activities or reduce time for them.
Activities were people are able to reduce time easily without regret are:
● Entertainment
● Distractions via social media
● Shopping
However, most often people find that still there are only very few hours available for work, as non-work activities are above 18 hours.
5. Multitasking Does Not Work
You might think that there is a way to get more than 24 hours of activities in your day by multitasking. For example you could be doing the following:
- Listening to a personal development podcast while working
- Learning a language while sleeping
- Checking social media while playing with your kids
You might think that by doing two things at the same time, you can save time, but generally this is a bad idea, as you are less effective at both of the two activities done simultaneously.
For example, a friend of mine listens to self development podcasts the whole day, while doing other activities. However, even if she listens many times to a podcast she will still not have absorbed the content. By contrast I will put my undivided attention to a podcast but have absorbed the full content after only listening once.
6. Balancing Daily Time Is Difficult
Fitting all your activities into only 24 daily hours is difficult. You can compare it to balancing the budget of a government. No government in the world is able to regularly balance the budget. This is because it is always easier to add new things to spend on, rather than to cut spending. This is why we need to focus on cutting things out more, and not on always adding new stuff to our daily work schedule.
Yoga, meditation, walking in nature, physical exercise, volunteering, spending time with family are all good for you. But you need to first make sure that you have enough time in your day before you are adding them to your activities. If you do not, then adding these activities will only increase your stress and feeling of overwhelm.
Unfortunately, many people are suffering from wanting to do too many things. They get up early to do some sport, then hurry to work, then hurry back to their family for dinner, then hurry to finish dinner and then hurry to talk to have a final work meeting before going to their meditation class. This constant hurrying is toxic to their happiness, health and productivity.
7. If You Do Something, Do it Fully
There are two ways to make time for more work: cutting out stuff, or reducing the amount of time spent on it. Generally, I recommend doing the things we do with passion and giving them enough time. That means it is better to cut things out completely rather than minimizing the time slot for it to only a few minutes. So for example, instead of limiting yoga, meditation, tennis, and church/reading the Bible to 10 minutes each per day, I would recommend you decide on a maximum of two activities and just cut out the rest. So for example if you are very much into yoga and also want to go to church or read the Bible then you will not be able to do tennis or meditation.
In conclusion, our time is very limited and the activities that we want to push into a day are too much. Thus, we need to go over our daily and weekly schedules and try to cut out as many activities as possible in order to be less overwhelmed and focus on the most important activities.
