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This week I refreshed my time budget and it is already impacting my productivity for the better. I should really do it more often.

I came up with the time budget when I was tired of feeling like I wasn’t getting the most important things each week.

It’s tricky to balance the recurring tasks of your business week to week – things like content creation – with marketing and other massive actions that will grow your business.

So just like you might create a budget to carefully plan how you spend your money, you should also create a budget for your time.

The Payoff of Time Budgeting

This technique is one reason we’ve been able to reduce the amount of time that we each spend on Internet Business Mastery to twenty hours a week. We have to very deliberate about how that time is used.

Tasks will always expand to take up as much time as they can. Time budgeting helps keep that in check. For example, I can look at my calendar and know that I only have one hour budgeted to put this article together.

When I create a time budget and stick to it, I feel less desperate about my time. At the end of the day I have the peace of mind that I spent my time doing what was most important.

Time Budgeting Tools

There are two tools that I use for time budgeting.

1. Excel: About once each quarter I update an Excel spreadsheet that lays out week to week what my schedule should look like.
2. Google Calendar: The budget in Excel gets transferred to Google Calendar where I can see what I should be working on, when and for how long at any given time.

If you’re an Academy member, there’s a 50-minute tutorial on how I do this here (log in first before clicking that link).

Planning Your Own Time Budget

If you feel overwhelmed by everything you have to do, if you wander from task to task based on whatever “squeaky wheel” is making the most noise in your psyche at any given moment, the time budget will help alleviate that.

Give it a try this week.

1. Create a chart that represents each week of the month. Decide how much time you can spend each week on your business.
2. Make a list of the recurring (daily, weekly, monthly) tasks that MUST be done in order to maintain your business and keep new leads coming in.
3. Decided as realistically as you can how much time each of these should take.
4. Now you have to start prioritizing. Based on the total hours you want to work each week, decide what is most important to do. Reduce the amount of time allotted to each task as needed. You’ll probably need to plan four budgets, one for every week in a month.
5. NOTE: Every third month you will have a fifth week. This is a great time to schedule catch up time, cleanup tasks and other things that only need to happen once a quarter.
6. Make sure you have time left over for strategy and putting one or two “massive action” big ideas into action each month. I try to have 5 or so hours a week to spend on these things.
7. At the beginning of the week, plug your time budget into a calendar

Again, examples of what this looks are available in a tutorial posted in the Academy.

Invest Your Time Now for a Quick Payoff Later

Maybe you’re thinking, “But I don’t have time to spend two hours creating a time budget!” Think of it as an investment. You’ll “earn” those two hours back within a week’s time.

What other tips do you have for managing your time? Share them in the comments below.

This post is in: Productivity

Tags: Productivity