Personal Time Budgeting - Part 4
This is the fourth of six posts on how to establish and track your Life Budget.
In this post I’ll describe how to establish your Life Budget, using some typical amounts of time needed for different life activities.
How much time is available for these different activities? In a typical week, how many hours do we really have available to do things we want to do? An interesting economic paper on how people spend their time provides a rough average of the hours used for commuting, working, doing household chores, and how much time is left for ‘leisure’ activities.
The approximate breakdown of the 168 hours per week is: 40 hours for working, 4 hours for commuting, 20 hours for housework (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc), and 75 hours are for ‘personal care’ (sleeping, eating, etc). That leaves about 29 hours for potential ‘leisure’ time (doing fun stuff). What activities do you try to cram into those 29 hours? Exercising, spending fun time with your family, writing your blog, reading stuff online, watching TV - wow, that is a lot just for 29 hours a week. Of course, if you are the average American, you are already spending 32 hours watching TV! Clearly there are some choices being made about priorities.
Aligning that data with the Life Budget categories I described in a previous post, here is a good starting budget with hours per week for each activity. After reviewing the breakdown, take a look at your own personal data (see the last post for how to do this) and modify as appropriate.
Work (45 hrs per week) Some of you probably scoff at the idea of only working 40 hours a week, that seems to be the minimum these days. Many of you probably work closer to 45-50 hours a week, especially if you have a Crackberry hanging off your hip. Add in the 4 hours of average commute time, and you could be spending close to 55 hours a week on work-related activities. However, let’s stick with the 40 hours a week of work and 4 hours of commute time, and add another hour for miscellaneous activities, for a total of 45 hours per week.
Exercise (7.5 hours per week). As mentioned in a previous post, you should get at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise 5 days a week. For the calculation of hourly wage for exercise, I used an estimate of 1.5 hours for each session of exercise (30 minutes for the exercise, and an hour to warm up and cool down). That works out to be 7.5 hours per week.
Required Activity - Home and Auto Upkeep (3 hours per week). I’m aligning this type of work with the housework category mentioned in the study. However, the Miscellaneous category below also includes activities that are defined as housework. The exact split between the two is really a matter of what you define as Home and Auto Upkeep, and what you put in the Miscellaneous category. Through my own experience, 20 hours is a lot more per week that I spend on these tasks. I find I spend about 3 hours on Home and Auto Upkeep, and 5 hours on Miscellaneous activities. You’ll need to use your own experience here.
Miscellaneous (5 hours per week). As noted in the previous category, I recommend starting with a 5 hours per week budget for Miscellaneous activities.
Required Activity - Sleep (56 hours per week). Assuming a required average of 8 hours of sleep every night, you should budget 56 hours per week.
Required Activity - Personal Care (19 hours per week). Using the average of 75 hours a week from the study mentioned above, and subtracting out the 56 hours for sleeping, that leaves 19 hours a week for personal care as I’ve defined it (eating, showering, etc).
Investment for Future - Working on Marriage (7 hours per week). In a previous post, I set a minimum budget of one hour a day, or 7 hours a week for communicating with your spouse. Of course, if you don’t have one, spend your investment time in personal development.
Investment for Future - Time Raising Children (10 hours per week). The calculations of $13-19 per hour of time spend engaged with your children is based on 10 hours a week. Adjust as you see fit, particularly if you don’t have children.
Investment for Future - Personal Development Activities (11 hours per week). As mentioned previously, spending 10% of your awake time “investing” in your self is a good target, which works out to 11 hours per week.
Entertainment (4.5 hours per week). For those of you counting at home, there are about 4.5 hours left in the week for Entertainment and Volunteering, the last two categories. You may also find that you spend more time on the activities above, and there is even less time (or if you are lucky you have more time) for these last two categories. The amazing thing is the data that an average American spends 32 hours a week watching TV - what of these other activities are they not doing? This is where you need to make a choice based on your personal priorities. Do you want to improve your relationships, or watch the latest reality show?
Volunteering (discretionary, or include in Personal Development hours). One way to treat your volunteering time is as part of your personal development activities (assuming giving back to your community is part of your personal development plan). If you do that, you won’t need to budget any specific hours. If you don’t consider volunteering to be part of your personal development activities, you’ll need to adjust one of the other categories to take some hours out, like the 4.5 hours in entertainment. Or maybe you can volunteer on your lunch break, or spend time with your children while volunteering, and double count your time.
So what can you do if your actual hours don’t add up to 168 hours per week? You have a few options (besides developing a time stretching machine):
- Increase your earnings per working hour. This will allow you to work less hours and bring in the same income. Pretty simple, but this can be really hard to do. Some ideas would include working from home part of the time, or using your commute time to tackle some of your personal development activities (like reading more, spending time doing self-reflection, or listening to audio books).
- Reduce the amount of time doing housework. You could either not take care of your house (probably not a good idea, especially if you have one of those vindictive home owner’s associations - the fees for your grass not being cut for a year is probably pretty high), or you can hire someone to do it for you. If the opportunity cost of doing something more meaningful with your life is higher than the equivalent rate to buy the service, you should pick this route. And your neighbors will be a lot happier too. You’ll need to do something like this to maintain the 8 hours a week budget for the Home and Auto Upkeep and Miscellaneous categories.
- Reduce your sleep or personal care time. This means sleeping less, eating your breakfast while commuting, or finding some other way to take advantage of time spend on other activities. One important action is to determine how many hours of sleep you personally need a night. According to the National Sleep Foundation, the amount of sleep you need is really dependent upon your own body. In general though, 7-9 hours is considered the appropriate amount of sleep per night for an adult. You may need less (or more) sleep than the average 8 hours a night. I wasn’t able to find a good value for the financial impact of lack of sleep, but it appears that if you get less than 6 hours a night, this can cause significant health issues. Plus the general reduction in quality of life if you are tired all the time.
- Prioritize your personal development activities. Do you have personal development goals of being a better parent or spouse? Or maybe you want to start exercising more? By prioritizing your goals, you can take credit for both activities at the same time, and free up time for other activities.
Now that you have a good understanding of your Life Budget, it is time to start tracking it to see how you are doing. More on that in the next post.