How To Manage Your Time: A Visual System

I find that I waste a lot of time during my week. I use lack of time as an excuse as the reason why I am not accomplishing my goals. Since I was a child, I have struggled with time management and procrastinating. Recently, I have read a lot about time management systems and bought calendars. I tried to keep track of how I was using my time by keeping a journal of what I was working on every hour. I found it tedious to stop and write down what I was doing. And what should I write? Do I count the five minutes I was on facebook? Is that worth writing down? My calendar time only goes to 7 p.m. and I was still wasting precious hours in the evening.

Enter Dave Ramsey. Yes, I know that he is a financial guru. My husband and I have been working on his baby steps for the past year, living on cash and paying down debt. I thought, “Could his process work for time management as well?” I need to tell my time how I want to spend it instead of wasting it away and wondering where it all went at the end of the week. I’d turned myself from a money waster into a money saver, why not a time waster into a time saver?

Like making a monetary budget for the month, I make a time budget for the week.  Every Sunday night I take out my calendar and look at my upcoming week.  I have fixed expenses of time (sleep, work, church) and variable expenses (family, reading, writing, research, creative time, exercise, chores.)  I divvy up the 168 hours of the week into the various categories assigning a time value to each.  My sample weekly time budget is below (note: my job is only part-time):

• Work: 29.5
• Sleep: 52.5
• Church: 5
• Writing: 10
• Exercise: 1.5
• Family: 37
• News/research: 7
• TV/goof off: 10
• Reading for enjoyment: 6.5
• Creative (quilting, scrapbooking, etc.): 3
• Chores/grocery shopping: 5
• Doing the time budget: 1

This is an average week.  Each week changes depending on what is going on that week.  Sometimes I have a committee meeting to attend, or book club (which usually requires additional reading for enjoyment leading up to it so I can finish the book on time.)

 What I realized when doing this is I wasted a lot of time…I wasted almost 40 hours of time a week!  That was 40 hours that I didn’t know where it went or how I spent it.    My guess it that it mostly went to TV and Wii games.  Now I keep track of where my time is going.

Penny Jars:

During the week, I have a pile of 168 pennies.  I move these pennies into jars marked for my variable time categories.  That way I have a visual reminder of how I am spending my time.  It also helps me tweak my budget for up coming weeks.  If I find that I have 14 pennies in the goof off jar and none in the exercise jar, I know that I need to switch my behavior for the next week (or switch my budget.)

What about pennies for half hour times?  You can’t have a half a penny (at least not in the US) so, I trade in a penny for two nickels and one nickel represents a half hour of time. 

Some categories overlap.  While I’m folding laundry I may also be hanging out with my family and watching TV.  You have to ask yourself, “What was the purpose of spending that time?”  In this example, it’s chore time.

Sometimes a chunk of my goof off time is used up on Wednesday (my day off from work.)  Once I realized this, I made sure to be deliberate about doing other things rater than vegging out in front of the TV watching reruns of Top Chef or hours of HGTV.  Not that there’s anything wrong with those shows.  Now I enjoy them guilt free spending my goof-off time.  And the goof-off time is just that.  I know i have time in my budget to spend doing the things I need to do, but I also need time to catch up on my shows or watch a movie with my husband.

My new motto is “That which matters most should never give way to that which matters least.”  This time management system has helped me prioritize what matters most and cut back on the things that matter least.  It also holds me accountable to what I say I want to spend my time doing.  There is a time of reckoning every week when I look at how I’ve spent my 168 hours.  I only have a finite amount of time and I want to use it as effectively as possible.