An interesting way to think about time management

You may be familiar with budgeting money, but what about time? Here's a different perspective...

The idea of budgeting money is fairly common.

Money comes in, you break it into chunks, and it goes to work (or, more likely, gets spent) for you.

This works well because money is tangible, at least for the sake of practical use.

You can give someone $500. If you give him $400 when he asked for $500, well...there's a problem.

We all get that (I hope. If not, you should check out a book on personal finance. It'll do wonders for you).

What's money budgeting got to do with time?

We've managed to break time down into clearly defined units, just like money. We've got seconds, hours, days, etc.

And, just like money, we can't spend time on multiple things at once.

You can't buy a Coke and a candy bar with the same dollars.

Neither can you spend an hour doing homework and use that same hour to bond with your kids.

So I'd argue that we can budget our time similarly to how we budget money.

Indeed, budgeting our time is much more important, considering that we can always make more money but our ability to "make more time" is extremely limited.

Perhaps we can extend our lives by exercising regularly and eating healthy, but the end will always be there somewhere.

What do we do with this information?

The best part of properly budgeting is that it allows you to be flexible while being completely in control.

If you've budgeted your time and money (time blocking everything that's important in your life and using envelopes or software like YNAB for money), you can re-allocate those limited resources as things change in your life. (And yes, that's an affiliate link. But I'd be recommending them regardless. It's changed my life.)

Really, this comes down to the old saying "what doesn't get scheduled doesn't get done". If you don't run your life, your life runs you.

I'm making a conscious effort to be more intentional with my money and my time. It's difficult at times, but proving to be exceptionally rewarding.

Try writing down everything you care about and then blocking out time for each thing every week. Do it for a couple weeks and see how much more fulfilling your days seem to be. I promise you won't be disappointed.