Budget your time, design your life
I once read something like, “You’ll only see a full moon X number
of times before you die.” I don’t remember what X is, but it was surprisingly
small. And it was true. Or, at least the point was true: We only have so much
time.
Replace full moon with, sunsets, the beach, live concert, or your
parents, and realize that, in a world of infinite possibilities, experiences,
and things to pay attention to, time is finite. We’re here for a blip, and it’s
over. How do we make the most of it? How do we use our time in the way that
really reflects our values, goals, and desires?
Part of the answer, of course, is better software.
The software we use for managing time—mostly, calendar apps—has
barely evolved in decades. This is an area ripe for reinvention, and I could
write a few posts in this collection about it (here’s a little one).
But let me offer here a more specific idea that I’ve not seen done anywhere.
“Time budgeting” is perhaps a prosaic phrase for what I’m actually
picturing. What I want, ultimately, is a tool that lets one make better
decision about the time they have.
Inputs
I don’t have the design fully worked out in my head—that would be
a process of weeks or months. But the first part is to get a bunch of inputs
from the user—essentially, commitments and goals with times attached. For
example:
- Sleep: 8 hours/day
- Grooming: 30
minutes/day
- Work: 50 hours/week
- Exercise: 3 hours/week
There would need to be a hierarchy to get more detail. For
example, within the work bucket, you could add:
- Recruiting: 8
hours/week
- Strategy: 8
hours/month
- Staff meeting: 2 hours/week
To be accurate, you’d also want to build in less-frequent
commitments, like:
- Visit parents: 1
week/year
- Dentist: 2 hours/6
months
- Spring cleaning: 2 days/years
Ideally, this would be a reporting tool not just a one-time
budgeting tool, but that requires some way to input on what you actually did. You can imagine a system for this,
but that might be too much work.
Outputs
The goal is to visualize how you’re choosing to carve up your
life. Charts and graphs. Maybe a block diagram that let you zoom in to various
levels.
One of the most interesting exercises would be learning how
muchactual free time you have. I’m guessing for the vast majority of us, it
would be virtually none, which is why we’re always feeling like we can’t get
done what we want to or thought we would.
Everything is Instead of Something Else
The real beauty of having this app would be when it comes to
making decisions about new commitments or setting new goals. If you decide
you’re going to start doing yoga, or join a committee, or learn how to juggle,
you need to decide what you’re going to not do.
If you had my awesome time-budgeting app, you would enter your new
commitment, and it would ask you what you want to take away from: Free time? TV
time? Eating?
Likely this will make you think a lot harder before committing to
anything and, hopefully, a lot less disappointed that you’ve run out of time.
I could go on, but I only have so much time budgeted to sharing
this idea and, unfortunately, none budgeted to making it a reality. (Hoping
someone else does.)
