How to Budget Your Time and Use it Better

“You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.”

~Charles Buxton

It is often said that time is our most precious commodity. Despite that fact, it gets wasted. We find ourselves staring into the distance, declaring that there isn’t enough. After all, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and we need to sleep for six to eight of them. What can we do?

Treating your time the same way you treat your money is the key to finding more.

The first thing a person should do when they want to climb out of a financial hole is to learn the root cause of their money woes. To do that, they have to create a budget. Documenting credits and debits over time helps paint a clear picture of their financial situation. With the data in hand, they can make intelligent changes and save some money.

A budget shows them that they are spending too much on fast food or making a few too many unnecessary Amazon purchases. It tells them that it might be time to call the cable company and see if they can get a better deal. If followed, a budget can be a significant first step toward financial stability.

The choices that you make — once subconscious, become conscious. They aren’t complicated but are indeed life-altering. Drink a little less, drive a little less, eat out a little less, whatever it takes. All you have to do is be willing to write everything down — and I mean everything — to digest where it all goes.

Essentially you make a list of everything you are spending money on and change your behavior as you deem it necessary. It’s a simple, powerful tool for change that anyone can do whether you have the technical know-how or not.

The beautiful part is that this concept should work for about anything in your life that you’d like to change. If you can’t find enough time in your day, then it’s worth making a budget. Just like you did to start fixing your money problems, write down everything you do and look for ways to make positive and permanent changes.

If you are honest with yourself and make a note of everything — not just the good stuff, you’ll find things in your life that you can do without, or at least need a little less. It’s likely that, like that first time you looked at your financial budget, you’ll even have a couple ‘what the heck was I thinking’ moments. Much like wasting money, you’ll discover that you are wasting time.

There’s nothing wrong with watching TV after a long day at work. But do your priorities align with three hours or more every night? Probably not. The kicker is, you likely don’t even know that you’re doing it. Same with scrolling through social media on your phone. Nothing wrong with it — nothing at all, but at what point are you taking time away from other more important life goals by staring at the screen?

A budget will help you see how you spend your time and allow you to make data-driven decisions on how you’d like to change. All it requires you to do is write it down — everything.

Start small. Promise yourself a week of diligently recording your daily events, both big and small, and see what happens. Carry a notebook with you, preferably a standard-sized one (so you don’t forget it at home), and write everything you do in your day down as well as the time it took to do it.

I did. It was an eye-opening experience.

Once I’d tracked my time for seven days, I learned that I’d spent too much time turning blue links purple on Reddit. I was wasting time that I should be using to work toward my goals instead of reading memes and watching animated GIFs. In essence, it was the equivalent of finding out how much I spent at McDonald’s every month when I did a financial budget.

This is a personal decision, and your mileage may vary. For me, however, the idea of consciously choosing Reddit over working toward the goals I’ve set for myself is crazy. Sub-consciously though, it seems that it was easy to shut my mind off and enjoy. Knowing that Reddit is a ‘time-suck trigger’ makes it easier to catch myself down the road. Your trigger maybe social media or YouTube.

After only that one week, I was able to find a couple of extra hours that I could’ve used better by cutting down my Reddit time. I did the same assessment with NetFlix and a couple more hours appeared out of thin air. Understanding that these two activities are time bandits, I pay better attention to how I use them.

Writing things down makes me aware of my biggest’ time-suck offenders’ and forces me to pay better attention to my choices. I haven’t given up either, but I now choose to use them at a level that fits closer to my priorities. The extra time I have — time that I didn’t think was available not so long ago — goes into the things I deem most important.

It is an incredible tool that — now that I’ve seen the results (albeit small ones this early in the process) — I continue to use each day.

The trick, and I can’t stress this enough, is to commit. Commit to writing everything down, commit to making changes that make sense, and commit to recognizing your triggers when they pop up again. Does knowing that Reddit is a potential’ time suck’ mean I should never go there? No. Not any more than never going to McDonald’s again because it’s bad for my finances.

However, being conscious of those triggers — and others — allows me to limit them as I see fit. I’m in control instead of being subconsciously controlled.

The best part is that I can do the things that matter to me with the extra time I’ve found. These things were pushed to the background because I didn’t think I had enough time to give them the attention they needed.

I now have at least four more hours a week to work on growing my passion project (that I hope to turn into a full-time job someday). The beautiful part about this fact, at least for me, is that more time for my “side hustle” will (hopefully) help me reach my goal that much sooner. The extra money will do wonders for my financial budget.

And all it took was to start writing things down. To become a conscious part of my life to pursue the things that matter instead of a subconscious one allowing my time to be wasted.

“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.”

~Marian Wright Edelman