Treat Your Time Like You Budget Your Finances
I like to think of productivity as a budget. You’ve got 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 168 hours a week, 672 hours a month.
How do you assign value to your hours? Where do you say you’ll spend time versus where do you actually spend time.
I use an app called YNAB for my personal budgeting. It’s extremely helpful for me to actually recognize where my money is going and ensuring that I save money where I say I want to spend it.
Here’s some basic principles for YNAB.
Rule 0: Decide your top priority for your money. Key word is decide. You have the ability to choose what to spend it on.
Rule 1: Give every dollar a job, by creating accounts for each of the goals you want to fund. If you don’t assign each dollar a job, you may be tempted to spend it on something else. If you recognize that that dollar is part of your rent money, then you won’t spend it on random snacks or a nice article of clothing. Yes, essentials are essential so food and rent are both necessary, but understanding and segmenting your money between vacation, fun money, clothing, subscriptions, take-out food, and the rest can help protect money for things you actually want.
Rule 2: Embrace your true expenses, by creating categories for each infrequent, but predictable expense (car repair, doctor’s bills, new computer, Christmas gifts) and assigning a portion of the money you currently have to each of them, until they are fully funded, you aren’t surprised or scrambling for a large payment.
Rule 3: Roll with the punches. Every once and a while, you’ll get an unexpected big cost. Whether that’s an unexpected car repair, an emergency hospital bill or insurance claim, or whatever else, recognizing that a budget includes being flexible is important. The flexibility to realize a budget isn’t set in stone and can change to adapt to each month’s unique circumstances, you can feel comfortable pulling money from lower priority accounts to fund higher priority ones.
Rule 4: Age your money, by waiting as long as possible from the moment money comes in, to the moment it is spent, which creates a cash buffer for dealing with fluctuations in income and expenses.
Parallels to Productivity
What does a budget do? It keeps you on track and intentional with what you spend your money on. It inventories what you do, what you save, what you spend and makes you formally recognize and assign monetary value to the respective categories of your life.
Time equally can be scheduled and managed with the same level of intentionality. You can track and decide what you spend your time on. You can inventory what you do, what you decide not to do and you can formally recognize and assign a temporal value to the respective categories of your life.
So here’s what you can do.
1. Figure out the deeper purpose
Sit down and figure out what you want to spend your time doing. Whether you do that in a 2024 Annual Plan, a 2023 Annual Review, a State of the Union plan with your partner, or whatever else, take the time to answer the question: “What do I want my time to do for me?”, just like you can ask, “What do I want my money to do for me?” for your personal budget.
Taking the time to decide and assign for yourself a deeper intention or a relative direction you want to head towards, you can make future decisions and plans accordingly.
If you value freedom and autonomy, then protecting time to be spontaneous and not booking yourself months in advance, can be a smart move that aligns with your overall direction. But if you don’t have a vision of where you want to go, then maybe you wouldn’t have the foresight to refuse future requests.
If you value creativity and self-expression, but have a current career filled with administrative tasks, limited self-autonomy, and you work endlessly to the point that you’re exhausted in your free time and subsequently not motivated to have creative time, then maybe a more dramatic productivity shift is needed in your life.
2. Rejig Your Budget - It’s Allowed.
With both money and time, a budget is fluid and allowed to change.
People often times approach budgeting and their time as black and white or set in stone. Once it’s decided, it’s decided. But the reality is that you can change, adapt, modify, and tweak these things. Just like financial categories as abstract, so are your time commitments.
What I mean, is that you can have an honest conversation with yourself and recognize trade-offs. If you have no money in your Restaurant category but it’s a Friday night and your friends are hanging out, you can move money from another category - let’s say Clothing & Appearances. My point though, is that you need to acknowledge the trade-off and accept the reduction in money for the Clothing & Appearances category. So maybe not buying a new sweater this month or deferring a haircut.
The same can apply for your time. If you accept that Friday night you are going to spend 3 hours hanging out with friends, then maybe that’s 3 hours of time taken out of your Reading or Hobbies time and maybe you’re going to have to be okay with less reading for the week.
This lets you reframe your week or your scheduling from, “Did I get enough done today?”, with more nuanced ones, like “What could I have done differently today?” because you aren’t working with more or less time, it’s more about what you decided to do with that time.
3. Tighten the feedback loop between your present and future self
Both money and productivity boil down to a relationship between your present and future self.
In order to forge towards a desired future, it necessitates planning and decision making. The only way you can align your future and present self to align your goals and decision-making, checking in frequently is important. When it’s a personal budget, updating regularly and budgeting as soon as you get your money ensures that every dollar is assigned and accounted for.
For time, deciding what you will spend your time on for the week ensures that you are deciding ahead of time and not simply strung along by others. You are designing the life you wish to live.
4. Manage unexpected events by turning them into consistent routines
Both money and time can be consumed by unexpected events. A death in the family requires a barrage of last-minute funeral expenses, maybe some travel expenses, and a lot of coordination costs.
A new responsibility at work means a flurry of meetings, oversight, an extra pile of responsibilities and so forth.
But the truth is, the unpredictable is predictable and having the capacity to anticipate, appreciate, and account for these curveballs can help us prepare for these inevitable events. YNAB recommends categories for each of the “emergency” expenses we are likely to encounter at any point in the future, and to fund them up to a reasonable level. This ensures that when your fridge or boiler breaks down, you have funds ready and waiting, instead of scrambling for cash and taking it out of your grocery budget.
Preventative maintenance is what allows you to ride out the crises and emergencies, without being completely thrown off track from your priorities. Auditing your weekly time commitments, recognizing the average amount of time you get side-tracked or how much time you commit to unexpected or unplanned events can give you a calibrated estimation for future week planning. This can slowly but surely assist you in predicting and designing a weekly schedule for yourself.
5. Create milestones to provide a sense of completion
Managing flows of money or time is never-ending. You start doing it and it’s a commitment for life. This means there are few built-in stopping points to celebrate how far you’ve come. It can feel normal or what I should be doing and sometimes it neglects a part of us that I think should be celebrated.
YNAB recommends funding a category only until it has enough funds - something that can be determined when the category is first created. Instead of one giant “emergency savings” fund that is never quite big enough (and so tempting to “borrow from”), you have a series of smaller, more targeted savings accounts designated for specific purposes. Once all your accounts have been funded, you’re free to spend anything left over guilt-free!
The same mechanism is valuable in productivity. Figure out your tasks, completion dates, weekly reviews and to-do lists. Finishing those should allot you free time and energy to do what you want.
Build in reward time into your schedule if you accomplish the things you want to get done - whether that’s 60 minutes to relax and play video games or 60 minutes to read a book before bed to wind down. The idea is knowing ahead of time that you have time to relax and unwind so that you can focus your attention on work.
6. Have an honest discussion with yourself about what is actually happening instead of what “should be”
In both your personal budget and investment of time, what should be happening and what is actually happening can differ. That’s okay. It happens sometimes and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But it’s a message and you need to listen loud and clear.
We can make up justifications, rationalizations, and excuses effortlessly, and maintain our behaviours even when the impact on our health, happiness, and relationships are evident.
Take a second to acknowledge the current state of things. Take a second to realize your actions and decisions may not match up with what you tell yourself and others. Take it as a sign that maybe you need to have an open discussion with yourself about you care and prioritize and gravitate towards, because it perhaps may not be what you think you should. Instead you may need to change your budget and your schedule to reflect what you actually want instead of what you should want.
7. Don’t try to fully automate – instead, make it quicker and easier to make good decisions
When you use YNAB, you are actively budgeting your money. No autopilot, “set it and forget it” approach. Instead, you create a current financial picture and actively route funds to the categories you have actively set up.
Likewise with productivity, let’s just get this out of the way and say you wouldn’t have a “perfect system”. You won’t know exactly what to do each moment. Some days will be more productive and some days will be less productive. But the habit of deciding, refining, and planning will be a vital component of having a more intentional routine.
8. Scarcity can help us be more concrete about our priorities
Scarcity in money or time provides an invaluable source of clarity. It quickly can determine for you what you truly care about and what matters most. When funds dry up, that is the exact moment when you find out what’s most important, and what can go.
When time runs out, you find out what needs to be done and what can wait.