We have all heard of a budget for our money. This can also be done with our time. There are many ways to go about this, but first let me explain to you the benefits that a time budget can offer. One benefit of a time budget is that you can limit activities that you feel are taking too much of your time. For example, just like making sure you don't spend too much money on eating out, you can budget your time for social media, TV, or anything else you may want to limit.
The main reason to do this is to make sure you have enough time for the things you really want to do. Just as we have a finite amount of money, our time should be treated the same way. This is even more true with time because there is no way to create more time, while we can find ways to make more money. To make the most of our time, we should watch how we are spending it so that we can make the best use of it.
There are several ways to go about making at time budget. How detailed you want to be is up to you. I mentioned in my detailed schedule post about how it is up to you on how detailed you want to be. It will take some trial and error to find out which method works best. First of all, you will need to determine what time period you want to use for your budget - do you want to make it annually, monthly, quarterly, weekly or daily? You could also use certain time periods like a semester in college or school year. As far as time periods is concerned, use whatever works best for you, and you can change it whenever you need to.
Another aspect of determining your time budget is how detailed it will be. Will you be tracking everything you do or are you interested in limiting certain activities? It's entirely up to you whether you track 1 activity or over 150 activities like I do. Just as I track practically everything I do, I also make a budget for all of these activities. I use aTimeLogger to track my time and Excel to make a budget. I then use the Excel Budget to view the aTimeLogger activity reports to compare budgets. I personally use Excel so I can do an annual budget and check actual activities such as church events, social events, family events, etc. There is a "goals" function in aTimeLogger so you can limit or set a goal toward an activity. This has been working well for me so far this year, but I know as time progresses I will continue to refine the process. This will be the same for you also, always do what is best for you at the time.