The time budget is a practical method you can use every day to keep your life always in balance. It closes the gap between the high-level world of areas of responsibility and major goals, and the down-to-earth world of tasks and external demands.

As a bonus, the time budget also helps you effectively deal with many productivity killers such as lack of focus, procrastination and perfectionism — all in one fell swoop.

Neglect-Based Prioritizing

Consider the following question. What’s more important to you: health or family?

All right, we know that that question doesn’t make any sense. Its silliness lies in the fact that we know that both health and family are important and that both need attention. The usual notion of prioritizing — choosing one thing over another — doesn’t make much sense here. It’s obvious we need to pay attention to both, and so it is with all key areas of our lives.

But here lies the conundrum: although we can’t properly choose between health and family, in any given moment we may need to choose between their tangible equivalents ‘go to gym’ and ‘call mom’. When we break down these high-level areas into discrete tasks, it’s too easy to forget what they’re really about and make bad prioritization decisions as a result.

The easiest — and unfortunately the most common — way to make these decisions is by what I call neglect-based prioritizing.

It goes like this: You unconsciously start paying too much attention to one aspect of your life, say, your work. After a while, you notice that you’ve been neglecting another area, say, your family. You take some action and then put the family affairs back on track. While you’re doing that, another area gets neglected. You tackle that one area. And so on.

The problem with this cycle is that you’re always in reactive mode — always lagging behind on most areas. We all use neglect-based prioritizing to some extent in our lives, but we can substitute a much better strategy.

The Time Budget

The best method I found to fight neglect-based prioritizing and achieve better life balance is to create a time budget.

Setting a time budget means proactively allocating shares of time for the things that matter to you. Similarly to a financial budget, you define the ideal amount of time to invest in each of your important life areas, and then stick to that budget for the duration of its allocated time.

And, just like in a regular financial budget, the benefits are many. Following a budget prevents you from wasting time on non-critical activities, as it helps you allocate time for the things that are most important to you. And — this is for sure — you’ll gain many insights about how you spend your time! But there’s much more to it than just that…

As simple as it may sound, on any given moment, your time budget is an easy and practical guide to high-level decisions on how you should invest your time. That gives you peace of mind and frees mental energy for you to focus on any task to which you allocated a time period.

Let me show you the 4 steps to making a time budget for you and you’ll also understand along the way the many nuances that make time budgeting so powerful.

How to Create Your Time Budget

1. Organize Yourself Around Key Result Areas

Forget for a minute about tasks. Focus instead on the high-level ‘compartments’ of your life: those can be big goals, areas of responsibility or major roles — whatever suits you best. Think of these as the “big buckets” of your life — the areas that should get your regular attention. Be as broad or as specific as you want. Brainstorm and list these areas.

As for me, I use loosely-structured categories of activities I consider important: some examples are reading, socializing, exercising and self knowledge.

2. Allocate Time for Each Area

Now that you have your key result areas outlined, you need to allocate time to spend on each of these areas. This is of course a very personal decision, but here are some tips that can help you:

• Don’t pay (much) attention to current tasks. Remember that budgeting means allotting your time in one way you consider ideal. Of course, you need to add extra time for contingencies and other unforeseen circumstances, but consider that they are temporary. Think long-term and mentally isolate yourself from current pressures as much as you can.
• Be conservative with your overall budgeted time. You should never commit all of your available time to your budget, as you can never predict the inevitable external demands and random tasks that pop up. Budgeting 50% of your available time is a good start (you can be even more conservative in the beginning and adjust it as you gain more confidence in the process).
• Use a short time horizon for your time budget. If you want to make time budgeting work, you’ll need to review your budget regularly. To make it practical, don’t wait too long to evaluate how you’re doing with your budget. One week is a great time frame for planning and reviewing in general, and that also holds true for your time budget.

3. Spend and Track Your Time

As is the case with any budget, you’ll need to track your spending to make sure it comes as close as possible to what you’ve planned.

There are many ways to track your time as well as many tools you can use, but let me suggest one approach. This is what I consider to be the cherry on top of time budgeting. For me, it’s what makes all the difference, what considerably increases the effectiveness of time budgeting: Since we’re already allocating our time to our budgets, why not make use of time boxing?

Time boxing is the best stand-alone productivity technique I know, hands down. But when used as a companion to time budgeting, you really have the best of both worlds: high-level life balance taken care of, and low-level productivity soaring.

By dividing your time in discrete units of, say, one hour each, you also make it easier to track your time. Instead of tracking running time, you track the number of completed time boxes instead. Even more important than that, you also add all time boxing benefits to the mix, such as overcoming procrastination, conquering perfectionism, increased focus, among many others.

4. Review your Spending

If you’re human, your actual time spending will not match 100% of what you defined in your budget — that’s OK. As important as tracking your time is reviewing your progress and adjusting your budget accordingly. This is what keeps your system dynamic and flexible, as priorities change and as you learn more about yourself and how you spend your time.

If you perform some kind of weekly review — such as in David Allen’s Getting Things Done system — that is the perfect opportunity to review your budget, too. Here are some examples of questions to consider when evaluating your past week’s performance and creating or updating the budget for next week:

• Did you overspend/underspend time on any particular category?
• Did you allocate too much time overall for your budget?
• How do you feel about the amount of time you allocated for each area? Do you feel your life is balanced?
• Are there any key result areas you initially overlooked?

Conclusion

By budgeting your time, you have an objective framework to assess your life balance and adjust it accordingly, instead of waiting for a crisis in a life area to do something about it.

That’s the best way so far I found to seamlessly integrate high-level prioritization into my everyday life. It really has been working wonders for me.

Do you use a different approach? I would love to read about it in the comments!

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The beginning of the year is a great opportunity for a brand new start; it’s the time most of us set new goals and get all fired up and motivated again.

By the end of January, however, that feeling of freshness of the new year is long gone. Many of us don’t even remember the goals we had set, let alone achieve them. How can we keep that feeling of novelty throughout the year so we can follow through our goals?

Years Fly By

When we look back at the goals we set and forgot about, some of us may get a little disappointed but we all move on. Anyone can handle such a mild disappointment once a year. However, if we keep postponing our goals year after year, at some point life will eventually catch up with us: We don’t have many years to live.

If it takes you one year between each time you think about your goals and your life, pretty soon you’ll run out of years. Sad but true, but here’s the good news:

That doesn’t mean that your life is short:
it’s short only if you measure it in years.

Reviewing Your Goals Is Not Enough

What if we review our goals throughout the year, then? Traditional goal setting literature tells us that it’s critical that we not only set goals, but keep reviewing them. I wholeheartedly agree with that, but let me suggest something different.

Even if we review our New Year’s resolutions regularly, this always has a feeling of being an intermediate step. There’s no real sense of completion until it’s time to set new expectations again, at the next new year. Even if we review our goals regularly, we’re still in a “yearly mindset”.

In Search of a Better Life Heartbeat

What I am proposing here is dropping the year altogether as a unit of measurement for our goals.

What I realized is that yearly goals are out of sync with the rhythm of many of modern life’s demands. The year may be meaningful for farmers and their crops, but frankly, I think it does more harm than good anchoring personal goals around it. Years are way too spaced out; we may be better off with a shorter time unit to serve as our personal lives’ heartbeat.

Author Peter Russell goes all the way and measures his age not in years, but in days. From his website:

“[…] I can hold a day’s experience in mind quite easily. Trying to go back and take stock of a whole year is much harder. Numerous incidents and discoveries are inevitably forgotten.

I also find it far more meaningful to think that I have lived through nearly twenty thousand days this life, rather than 50 years. And it reframes the future. I have — probably — thousands of days still to come. Thousands of new days to discover, enjoy and learn from. […]“

The Week is My Best Shot

Although I find Peter’s idea of counting life in days truly inspiring, I doubt its practicality for most of us. What about tracking life in weeks?

The week is a great fit for most of modern life’s demands. It’s the shortest practical and meaningful cycle of our lives, both for personal life and work. If you think about it, there’s always a feeling of closure at weekends, as well as a feeling of “fresh start” on Mondays. For me, a week seems the perfect life heartbeat: it’s short enough to keep our goals fresh and active; and long enough to do something about them.

The challenge, then, is to promote the week to a first-class time cycle as much as possible. Some specific steps I am taking to raise my “week-awareness”:

• Calculate age in weeks, not years. Just like Peter Russell described, counting life in smaller time increments has a strong psychological effect. I enjoy the feeling of knowing that every week is a great new opportunity to start afresh to achieve my goals. To help in the age calculation, there are many resources online, such as here or here. (At the time of this writing, I am 1624 weeks old.)
• Use a week-based calendar. David Seah’s excellent Compact Calendar is a greatly designed calendar that focuses heavily on weekly planning — definitely worth checking out for everyone.
• Use ISO week dates. Instead of ‘01/Jan/2008′, how about ‘2008-W01-2′ (meaning: 2008, week 1, Tuesday). This is surely weird at first, but I’m really looking forward to using this date system. An ISO date converter will definitely come handy. Adopting the ISO 8601 Week Calendar has some interesting side effects, such as knowing the days of the week without needing to resort to cheap tricks. Note: for a long time I have been looking to adopting an eccentric geeky quirk— you know, like speaking Esperanto or using Dvorak keyboards. This is just the perfect opportunity.
• Integrate goal setting in weekly and daily reviews. Although I am a regular practitioner of Getting Things Done reviews and love them, I was always concerned with the excessive focus on tasks and projects. Actively tracking goals will bring a new light to reviews.
• Stay aware of new opportunities. Weekly thinking can create some interesting opportunities for personal growth. For example, I’m interested in how I can integrate holidays and other seasonal events into regular weeks. Wedding anniversary? A bit every week. Taxes? Keep records always updated. And so on.
• Connect with vision and values more often. Remember that having short-term goals does not mean dropping your long-term vision. Since goals derive from vision and values, that will be an opportunity to be in touch with them much more often.
• Fully integrate Kaizen as a way of life. The ultimate goal for all this is to create a better framework for making practicing Kaizen easier, meaning centering life around small, continuous improvement steps. By doing so, goals have more to do with evolving habits than with big one-time achievements.

A Brand New Start, Every Week

Of course the idea is not to completely forgo our yearly calendar — there are many aspects of our lives that are centered on it, and will continue to be so. But there’s no reason to buy the notion that goals have to be that way, too. By breaking free of the yearly mindset, you give yourself many more opportunities to start over — many more opportunities to follow through this time.

Happy New Week!

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This is an article by guest writer Albert Foong of UrbanMonk.Net.

Think about this: everything we do begin as a thought. Every action, every word, every human creation exists first in our imagination.

The ability to see things before they actually happen is what enables us to pursue our dreams and ultimately achieve them. In fact, the better we visualize the future we want, the better our chances to make it happen.

Training the Mind is Training the Body

Your brain cannot differentiate well between real action and mental action. There has been research done showing that thinking about an action — even while your body is at rest — will fire the neural pathways in your brain just as you were actually doing it.

To see this for yourself: hold a piece of string and let it dangle. Then, keeping your hand as still as you can, imagine twirling the string around. Most likely, the string will begin to move, ever so slightly.

And that’s the good news: mental training can improve almost all our skills and fast-track us towards our goals.

For instance, many psychologists and life coaches recommend mental rehearsal for all sorts of things. Usually it is social or work-related: to enhance assertiveness, smooth out an interview or a meeting, or even to enhance a date. Athletes at the highest level are also encouraged to use visualization to improve their technique, motivation and drive. When interviewing Olympic gold medalists, they discovered that several winners used visualization, not just for the sport technique, but also to capture the feeling of being awarded a medal.

5 Applied Visualization Techniques

How do we develop and apply the powerful skill of visualization?

Here I present five basic exercises in order of difficulty. Do them in order, moving on to the next one only when you have mastered the first. You can take as many days as you like to get really good at each level, there is no rush.

1^st Exercise

Find a photograph, and take your time to analyze it. Memorize every detail you can. Then simply close your eyes and try to recreate it in your mind. Bring in as much as you can: the colors, the birds in the sky, the freckles on the skin — whatever is there. Open your eyes to get more detail if you have to. Remember that this is not a test: do it until you get good at it.

2^nd Exercise

For the second exercise, we’re going three-dimensional. This time, take up a small object: perhaps your pen or your keys. Again, analyze all the details and memorize it. Take your time.

Now, close your eyes, and see the object mentally. The challenge here is to start rotating it. See every detail, but from all angles. If you feel comfortable, begin to bring in some surroundings. Place it on an imaginary table. Shine a few lights on it and imagine the shadows flickering.

3^rd Exercise

This third exercise builds on the second, and can be hard for some people, although others will find it very easy. This time, recreate your little object, but with your eyes open. See it in the real world, right in front of you. Again, move it around, rotate it, play with it. See how it interacts with the objects in front of you. Imagine it resting on your keyboard, casting a shadow on your mouse, or knocking over your coffee cup.

4^th Exercise

This is where things start to get fun. This time, we’re bringing you into the picture. Think of a pleasant location. I like to use my favorite beach. Now, imagine yourself in it. It’s important to be in the scene, not just thinking of it.

Bring in your other senses, one by one. What can you hear? Are the leaves rustling, are there people talking in the background? What about the sense of touch? Can you feel the sand you are standing on? What about smell? Can you imagine eating an ice-cream, and feeling it slide down your throat?

Again, make sure that you are in the scene, not just thinking of it. Make this mental movie as strong and vibrant and detailed as you can.

5^th Exercise

And in the final exercise, we’re going to make things a bit livelier. Bring up the mental location from the previous exercise. Now — begin moving around, interacting with things. Pick up a rock. Sit on a bench. Run in the water. Roll around in the sand.

Then, bring in someone else. Perhaps you could bring in a lover, and then choreograph a dance with him or her. Or you could imagine a friend. Hold a conversation with him or her. Imagine them smiling as you tell them a joke. Now, imagine them slapping you on the shoulder playfully. What does that feel like?

Detail and Realism

The reason we emphasize detail and realism is simply because practice doesn’t make perfect. As you might have heard, only perfect practice makes perfect.

If I asked you to imagine the execution of your goals — whether it be doing well in a business meeting, or a date, or sports — you probably saw yourself doing it perfectly straight away. You win big, you look cool, and everyone falls in love with you. This feels good, and can increase motivation but, to put it bluntly, it’s mostly a waste of time.

Realism is the most important consideration in visualization. Soldiers train in almost exactly the same gear they are going to wear in combat. None of them got really good just by playing shooting games on the computer or by playing paintball.

It is the same with mental training. Everything has to be as realistic as possible. I used to be an amateur boxer, and developed my visualization to help me train. My first mental movies were of me moving and punching like Muhammad Ali. But reality soon hit me in the face — the first time I met a live opponent in training, I got destroyed.

My mental imagery up to that point had merely been fantasies — building castles in the air. I had been wasting my time.

But when I began visualizing properly, I found that I made all my usual mistakes, even in mental rehearsal. My heart was beating fast, my fists clenched, and I felt overcome with the same fear. And all this, while I was sitting on the couch!

Did that mean I failed? No, it meant I succeeded. From then on, my mental training began working for me. Because I carried over all my flaws and fears into my mental arena, any improvements I made there would also begin to carry over into the real world.

Applying Visualization to Your Goals

Now, what if we’re not dealing with a physical skill? What if you had set a goal for something like money, a new career or a holiday?

Visualization applies in much the same way. Here are some tips for applying it to your goals:

1. Focus on the positive. A common mistake is focusing on the opposite of what you want. When I wanted to lose weight, I initially made the mistake of posting pictures of my fat belly all over my room, thinking it was motivating me. But that was the wrong way: by focusing on my fat, I was just keeping the fat there. I should have been visualizing the stomach I wanted.
2. Have it, don’t want it. Think of something you really, really want. Now, do you have it? Probably not. Most often, wanting is the opposite of having. So when you visualize, don’t think about wanting something, see yourself as already having it.
3. Be consistent. You have to really work hard on this. Your mind is a muscle, just like your body. The top bodybuilders didn’t get to where they are by working out for two minutes a day. They worked hard for it. Make your goal your burning obsession, a passion and purpose in life.
4. Be specific. Most people have vague goals. They vaguely want to be rich, or they want to travel somewhere nice. Where? Oh, never thought about it much. It’s like getting into a car with a vague goal of wanting to buy… something. Not going to happen, right? You want to have a specific goal: I’m going out to the supermarket to buy myself some shampoo and a toothbrush. It is the same with your goals. Set it in as much detail as you can: a specific amount of money, a specific outcome from a meeting, whatever it is.

Visualization is a very powerful tool for helping achieving your goals, and I’m grateful that Luciano is giving me a chance to share it with his audience.

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