Lessons Learned for Tracking Your Life Budget
After tracking your life budget for awhile, there are a number of issues you’ll probably find. Here are some of them, and some ideas on how to work through them.
1) Difficulty Tracking your Time. Even if you use a tool like Toggl, it is difficult to keep up with how you spend your time. This is especially true if you have to catch up on it after you get home from work. If you miss a few days, I recommend you input some typical times for your different life budget categories just to keep things moving along. Keep in mind that the main point isn’t to get everything perfect, just that you understand where you are not spending enough time (or too much).
2) More Detail Needed for Categories. The standard categories may need to be adjusted for your own use. For example, you might want to measure how much time you spend on a specific personal development area, like self-reflection, versus just the general category. It would make more sense to split the Personal Development life budget category into smaller chunks. I recommend not having more than 10-15 categories total, and that you should not have a category with a budget of less than a few hours a week.
3) Duplication of Categories. You’ll find that some activities in life fall into more than one category. For example, mowing the lawn could be considered as house upkeep, as well as exercise. It is fine to “double-count” this time against both categories, but it gets difficult to track this. To handle this situation, I recommend making a note against each activity, and then reviewing at the end of each week (or day if you have time) and make sure you have counted the time against all appropriate categories.
4) Different “Quality” of Time. Sometimes an hour of your time doing a task seems like it should be worth more per hour than your budgeted time. For example, the calculations of how much an hour of exercise is worth is based on a moderate level of exercise (walking, mowing the lawn, etc). If you go out and run a 5K, you are working out at a higher level than moderate. This reduces the number of hours you need to exercise against your budget. However, this gets tricky in practice. I recommend that you modify the hours you spend on higher level exercise to the equivalent hours at a moderate level. This keeps you from having to recalculate your hourly rate for the higher level of exercise, and yet still ensure that you are meeting the required goals for your health. You may also find that due to multi-tasking or other distractions, you need to reduce the actual time spent to better reflect reality.
5) You Spend Your Time Differently Than Expected. After establishing your Life Budget, hopefully you will continually think about how you are spending your time, and whether it aligns with your personal vision and values. However, you may find that it is really hard to change how you spend your time. For example, week after week I continue to spend more time on work than budgeted, but have yet to find a solution to it. I also find that I spend a lot of time on personal development activities, but they don’t always have tangible benefits (like checking something off my life list). You also will find that hours may go by and you can’t even remember what you spent them on. While this may be a difficult feeling to have, I believe that tracking your Life Budget at least helps you to recognize that you are not spending your time as you expect. And knowing is half the battle, as my favorite childhood cartoon burned into my brain….