Where Does The Time Go?

Time is a currency everybody uses. No matter who we are, we all have exactly 168 hours of time to spend each week, no more, no less.  It’s not enough to do everything, so try not to waste too much of it worrying about the infinite things we aren’t doing and instead focus on the things we want to do.

So, how are we spending our time, and is our spending getting us any closer to where we want to be? The answers to four questions will let us know if we’re making the most of our limited time:

  1. How would we ideally spend our time?
  2. How do we actually spend our time?
  3. What’s a realistic target that will bring our actual spending closer to our ideal?
  4. Are we happy with the target?

Ideal Time Budget

The hardest part of determining our ideal time budget is setting aside our current reality, just for a moment. Our ideals aren’t based on what we currently do or what other people want or think. This is an individual exercise that helps us understand and define who we want to be and gives us something we can always work towards. Ideals can change as we learn and grow, so writing them down doesn’t mean we’ve made a contract cast in stone for all eternity. It just gives us something tangible we can refer to and work with.

The ideal time budget doesn’t have to add up to 168 hours because we don’t want to start this exercise by constraining and compromising our ideals right off the bat. We can tabulate our ideal time budget on a simple spreadsheet. A table using the standard categories of want is provided below, populated with a sample budget of ideal activities and weekly hours with comments explaining each amount:

Key Points from the Ideal Time Budget:

  1. Sleep uses up a big chunk of our budget.
    • 8hr of sleep per night x 7 nights per week = 56 hours of sleep per week. In a normal week, this would be 1/3 of our total budget. It’s important not to underbudget sleep time because it’s not only important for our health, but it’s also the most common activity to steal time from if anything unexpected comes up.
  2. No budget for cooking, cleaning, maintenance, and chores
    • Eating keeps us alive and can also be enjoyable, so we put aside some time for it. In an ideal world, buying groceries, preparing food, and cleaning up are activities we’d be happy to skip. Not having a budget for these activities in the ideal world encourages us to look for ways to minimize our actual time spent on them. This thinking may have led to the rise of meal kit delivery businesses.
  3. No ideal time allocated to “work”
    • Work is something we do to earn a living, but we need to remember that we work to live and don’t live to work. As much as possible, we should look for opportunities to do work that supports our ideals, which would improve employee satisfaction and produce higher quality work for the employer / customers.
  4. Our total ideal budget is greater than 168 hr
    • To meet our ideal time budget, we would need 54 more hours than there are each week (222-168 = 54). We can’t create time, but we can strategically combine activities to satisfy multiple ideals which we will do later on.

Actual Time Spent

Our actual time spent gives us the baseline we need to compare with our ideals and to set our target against. It lets us see what we’re doing and what we’re not doing. Using a calendar app and making sure that every time block has an activity tracked against it is a good way to make sure we’ve accounted for all our time. The total actual time must add to exactly 168 hr, so any preparation, travel, waiting or follow-up time should be included with the appropriate activity. The identified activity should be the primary planned activity with no double-dipping with other activities. For example, taking a shower may only involve 10 minutes under the water, but if 5 minutes are required to find clothes, towel off, and change, then the shower budget would be 15 minutes. For another example, having dinner with a friend can be captured under Eating or Friends (if it’s a standing weekly activity) but not both.

The activities captured should represent a typical week so special activities like vacations or business trips should not be included, unless weekly business trips are a normal thing.

The sample table has been updated with actual weekly hours and comments below:

Key Points from Actual time spent:

  1. Not getting enough sleep
    • We have sacrificed a lot of sleep in this example to do other things, which could lead to undesirable health consequences.
  2. Not getting enough exercise
    • This is a significant physical and mental health risk, especially when compounded with the lack of sleep
  3. Cooking, cleaning, maintenance, and chores are accounted for.
    • The time to shop, cook, prepare kids’ lunches and clean-up have added 9 hr to the Eating and Drinking category. Also, a new activity called “Maintaining Home” has been added to account for basic chores and maintenance required to maintain a sanitary living environment and avoid costly home repairs.
  4. “Work” has been added
    • Work takes up the bulk of our weekly time. If working too much has become a norm, it’s important to make it visible and understand how it impacts other activities.
  5. Family, Child Development, Friends, and “Personal” activity times have significant gaps with the ideal.
    • Lack of time in these activities are common sources of regret but they’re often put on the backburner when we’re overwhelmed with immediate concerns and deadlines. We may have the intent of catching up later when there’s an opportunity, but when being overwhelmed is the norm, that opportunity won’t come unless we start doing things differently.
  6. No time left to help others
    • If helping others is what brings us happiness, we need to find a way to work it in to our busy lives.

Target Time Budget

After confirming our ideal budget and actual time expense, we will likely see some gaps. Setting a practical target time budget, that we believe to be sustainable, can start to close those gaps. The target time budget will become our working standard to evaluate against our new actual time spent each week. Now, the word “standard” can make people a little anxious with thoughts of having more suffocating rules that need to be followed, but this isn’t what a standard should be. A standard, in this case, provides a reference for what we expect, which makes it easy to see abnormalities, prevent problems, and keep improving our standards so they can continue to help us achieve our goals.

With target time standards, it’s easier for us to answer questions like “If I’m spending more than my budgeted time on one activity, what activities am I taking that time away from?” or “I haven’t been spending enough time on certain activities, am I ok with that?”. Having the answers to these types of questions prevents us from unintentionally sacrificing something we’ll regret.

Please note that having targets does not mean we’ll hit them right away, but they give us something to aim at, and we’ll need to make adjustments and changes how we do things in order to hit them. When we start hitting our targets consistently, we can then move the targets even closer to our ideals.

The sample has been updated with target budget details below:

Key Points from Target Time Budget:

  1. Target 7 hr of Sleep per night
    • Not ideal, but a significant improvement that should mitigate some physical and mental health risks
  2. Target normal Work hours (8 hr per day plus commute)
    • This is the biggest targeted change, and will require a conscious effort to realize and sustain because working overtime is generally the result of one or more of the following legitimate drivers:
      1. Wanting to do a good job, or at least to look/feel like we are
        • This is natural, but there is a practical point where additional time investments will no longer provide any significant return. In the worst cases, the additional time can end up doing more harm than good if work quality goes down or safety incidents and errors go up.
      2. Overtime pay
        • If we need overtime to afford the cost of living, then finding alternatives will be a challenge. A question to keep in mind when pay is a factor: “is there something we’re not doing that will cost us more than we’re making from working overtime?”
      3. Being requested to work overtime to overcome problems.
        • There will always be new problems, so the occasional need for overtime can be expected. However, if overtime becomes the norm, then it’s not really overtime anymore and it means that somewhere along the way, a problem was normalized instead of fixed. Constant overtime stretches our resources, and if resources are stretched as the norm, how do we see and solve any new problems? In many cases, the unfortunate answer to this question is, we don’t, and continue to suffer from very avoidable consequences.

Happy with the Target? - Combined Time Budget

Our target time budget gives us a realistic time standard that will be an improvement over our actual baseline, but realistic doesn’t mean it’s enough to make us happy. We’ll need to see how our targets stack up against our ideals. Activities can support more than one target, so for this last exercise we can double-dip time by looking for opportunities to combine activities. This lets us break the 168 hr per week limit and gives us a better comparison with our ideals.

Some activities will be hard to combine with, like sleep. We could volunteer for sleep experiments (Helping Others) or hire someone to wash us while we slept (Personal Hygiene), but not everyone would be into that. Other activities might be inappropriate to combine, like Bathroom and anything from the Relationships category because not everyone is into that either. However, with a little creativity, there are countless combinations waiting to be found.

 

The modified table drops the old Actual column and adds a Combined column. The Combined column takes the target hours and adds hours that can be shared with other activities.

Key Points from Combined Time Budget:

  1. Child development time still less than desired
    • Will continue looking at rebalancing and combining to improve this number. No activity would compensate for failing to support a child’s healthy physical, mental, emotional, and social development. There’s opportunity to drop 1 or 2 weekly meals and recover some preparation / eating / clean-up time, and maybe a tiny bit of bathroom time if one of those meals is taco night.
  2. Personal time still well below ideal
    • This is lower priority, but good to keep visible so it can be revisited after child development has been properly managed. It’s wouldn’t be ideal, but this time would naturally become more available after retirement, as long as the child development activities have been handled well, otherwise, maybe not.
  3. Helping others as part of work
    • If helping others is important, then having a job that supports that activity will make a big difference in getting closer to ideal. A career in healthcare, the public sector, not-for-profit organizations, or coaching are all viable options.

Practical Application

Having budgets are only useful if they are used, so we need to keep them simple and meaningful. Having the previous tables available with development comments are handy for reference, but after targets have been set and understood, the following table is enough:

Key Points from Practical Time Management:

  1. Only need to monitor gaps between Target and Actual
    • We can see if we’re spending too much, or not enough time in each area of importance to us and can make changes to prevent problems.
  2. Identify opportunities for improvement
    • This is where we identify what we can try to get us closer to our targets, keeping in mind that we won’t be able to exceed 168 hr of activities per week without setting ourselves up for failure. Typical actions we can take include:
      1. Fixing specific problems (preferred)
      2. Changing how we do things to be more effective or efficient and reduce time requirements (preferred)
      3. Temporarily rebalancing target budget – This may be required to manage temporary problems. Keep temporary changes visible so managing problems doesn’t become a permanent thing.
      4. Permanently rebalancing target budget – This may be the result of a change in our ideals or knowledge.

The idea of working out ideal, actual, and target states is a core continuous improvement practice. The concept is presented in different ways, but the basic idea is the same. Improving how we spend our time is just one application, but an important one because time is easy to measure, easy to understand, and it controls everything we do. Hopefully this introductory discussion about time budgeting inspired a useful idea or two for improving something in your life. Good luck on finding the time budget that works best for you and spend wisely.

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