Visualize your time with a budget

I was recently inspired by Sharon Ello’s Quarantine Question of the Day to update my time budget, and it occurred to me that others might benefit from this tool. Many have lost their daily structure under the executive stay-at-home order and could use a visual aid to wrangle their schedules back into order.

I have many priorities to cram into a week. It happens that, if I don’t plan chunks of time to meet these priorities, the quietest priorities are pushed out by the loudest. I find that a time budget, a tool I’ve been using for years, gives me a helpful visual of my day so that I can make space for every priority.

Directions

  1. List the priorities you want to budget. For example, you may want to budget time for work, rest, personal projects, study, and spiritual exercises.

  2. Open a tool that allows you to create a grid to represent one week in half-hour increments. I’ve used MS Excel, Google Calendar and MS Outlook.

  3. Mark out the days in half-hour segments on a grid. I skip the hours that I sleep for a more compact time budget.

  4. Start on one day and add buckets for your priorities. I begin with my highest priority item, even if it doesn’t take much space. This ensures that I make room for what’s most important.

  5. Fill out the entire day. Leave no unstructured time, even if you mark a bucket “Free Time.”

  6. Move to the next day. I structure most days in similar patterns, so I copy the buckets from the first day and modify them as needed.

Here’s an MS Excel example from 2017.

Single 2017 Time Budget

Benefits

There are three benefits I’ve discovered with this approach.

Energy Mapping

Do you know which are your heavy-lifting days? A time budget, especially when I’ve color-coded buckets of interest, allows me to visualize what times I’ve aligned with the most challenging mental labor. I use this to spot when I’m overcommitted on a single day or when I’m working at a time that’s not conducive to that type of work.

For example, I’ve learned that the morning hours, after a cup of coffee, is the perfect time for heads-down mental labor. The focused effort wears me down, so I pace my day with lighter admin work in the afternoon. By starting in the morning, this also gives me the freedom to carry on with a major project if I’m in the flow.

Team Alignment

Insight into my own weekly schedule is invaluable, but I don’t live and work alone. When Amie’s schedule gets as complex as my own, I include her time budget alongside my own (example below). This helps me recognize her heavy days and coordinate my project hours and rest times. This may not scale to a team of more than eight, but I think small teams could benefit.

2017 Time Budget

Task Placement

When my tasks get excessively long I avoid them because the list overwhelms me. To ensure that I complete the topmost tasks and ignore the rest, I will put them onto my calendar. Except for those tasks which naturally have a set time, such as a doctor’s appointment, I struggle to know when to schedule them. My time budget orders each day with buckets of time that I fit tasks into.

Do I have a PowerPoint presentation to draft? Add it to my morning work bucket for two hours of heads-down time. An email I don’t want to forget to send? Put a reminder in the afternoon admin bucket. An idea I want to explore for my home project? Add it to my Monday evening project bucket.

You can make a time budget with great detail or broad strokes, with vivid colors or gray boxes, on paper or your calendar app. Be creative, have fun, and enjoy the benefits!

For another example, here’s a draft of my recent Google Calendar time budget.

2020 Time Budget