Budgeting Time Based on Your Profession - Work-Life Balance Articles

Budgeting Time Based on Your Priorities
By Sharon Teitelbaum, MA, MCC Sharon@stcoach.com

Recently I read an article about a group of engineers who groused to each other about how little of their real work they accomplished in a typical day due to frequent interruptions and way too many meetings.  From their grousing came a radical idea: creating a "quiet time" during their workday.

After conferring with their co-engineers and manager, they drafted a simple proposal for a daily four-hour block of quiet time:  no email, no phone calls, no interruptions, and no meetings.

Due to this one change, each engineer experienced significantly improved productivity and much greater job satisfaction. As a group, they achieved their first on-time product launch.  No surprise, huh?  As a result, they made the change permanent.

"Too much month left at the end my money."

Like many of my clients who call me about work-life balance, you too may find yourself with too many "to-dos" left at the end of your day. Many people believe this is due to poor time management. "If I could only work more efficiently," you may think, "I would accomplish everything I need to get done."

One of my clients addressed this issue head-on. For years she believed she was a poor time manager and decided to develop a time map for a typical week. Her map included everything from the time her alarm clock rang all the way through getting herself to bed and sleeping 7 hours a night.  

Once she saw her life on paper, she realized with a shock that her problem wasn't poor time management skills.  The problem was that she simply had too much going on.  Her many projects actually didn't all FIT into her life. 

There weren't enough hours in the week for all that she expected herself to do.  What she needed was an endless supply of 30-hour days.  Well guess what?  She didn't get them.  What did she do?  She started scheduling fewer things into her evenings and weekends and cutting back on the number of projects she would take on concurrently. 

Was she happy about it?  No, not initially.  She didn't LIKE that she didn't have time to do all the things she wanted to do in a given week.  But over time, as she budgeted more realistically and managed her expectations better, she was a lot less stressed and unhappy with herself. 

Determine What is Important to You

It's beyond the scope of this article to talk about how to determine your priorities, but suffice it to say that in order to budget your time so that everything important "fits," you must know what your priorities are. To figure this out, take a few hours one weekend and really think this through, or ask a good friend to talk it through with you.

Once you have a list of priorities, double check them.  Are they based on what others want for you or what you truly want for yourself? Is there something listed that may have been a priority at one time but really makes no sense now?  If so, cut out the so-called "priorities" that no longer serve you. 

If you want to take a trip to England, you have to find the money in your budget to pay for it.  Ditto for budgeting time for what is most important to you. If you've decided that you'll be home for dinner with your family four nights a week, how will you make that happen?

Will you make a radical change the way the engineers did, or can you make a few smaller changes that will pay off handsomely? Can you say no to tasks or projects? Can you delegate tasks to other people or eliminate some tasks entirely? Is there a standard you could lower with little fallout?

Strategies for change: As with financial budgeting, small changes with your time budgeting can add up to big savings over time. Here are examples of changes my clients have made to help themselves live in closer alignment with their priorities:

• Track every minute of a typical workday day in order to determine where your time is really going. Then make changes based on data, not hunches.

• Instead of checking email all day long, check it once mid-morning and again mid-afternoon. Keep your email software turned off the rest of the time.

• If you have a public calendar, block out time each day as meeting time.  But make it a meeting with yourself so that you can focus on work.

• Reduce or eliminate "chitchat" with co-workers – including g phone and email chitchat.

• Underpromise.  If you believe you can get something done in 24 hours, tell yourself and others you'll get it done in 48. 

• Keep firm time commitments with yourself. If you've decided to leave at 5:00 PM today in order to get to the gym, cook a decent dinner, or have time with your son, don't answer "one last email" or make "one last call" before you shut down. The next thing you know, it's 5:45 and you've missed your window of opportunity.

• If you must go online to research something, train yourself to not get distracted by news articles, videos, or social media. Save these things as "rewards" for when your priority work is complete and you have time to spare.

Learning to budget time so that you spend it on what is most important to you can take a while, so be gentle with yourself. Keep making adjustments until you learn what works for you.

If you'd like to talk about setting your priorities and budgeting your time to support them, please email me at Sharon@stcoach.com for your complementary 30-minute consultation.

Copyright 2009, Sharon Teitelbaum