Agile Personal Development

This is the first of six posts on how to establish a Personal Time Budget.

The first step in establishing your Personal Time Budget (aka a Life Budget) is deciding on the budget categories to track. The key thing to remember is that you are converting your time (in hours) into money (in dollars or your equivalent currency) in order to set up an equivalent monetary budget. Tracking how many hours you spend on something isn’t enough - you need to understand the impact of doing that specific activity instead of something else.

I’m recommending the below Life Budget categories to track, along with their equivalent personal finance categories (in italics).

Just like with personal financial budgeting, some of these are income items, some are expenses. In personal finance, income is used to pay for the things you want to do in life. The equivalent Life Budget categories include those activities that allow you to meet your life goals. Life Budget expenses are those activities you spend your time on because you want or need to. You have less control over some of them, like mowing your lawn or managing your personal finances. Others are discretionary activities, like going out to movies or going camping. The specific activities within each category are very dependent upon your own personal vision and values. For example, if your personal vision includes spending time outside working in your garden, you will categorize this time as an entertainment or personal development activity. If you don’t enjoy working outside, then you’ll categorize this time as a “required” activity.

Income Category Descriptions:

Work. You likely spend a significant amount of time each week doing work to support your life’s objectives. In addition to the hours you spend working, this category also includes commuting time. The equivalent in a normal financial budget is your Salary. For most of your work hours, this is “income” time, since the money you make from a job give you the ability to do things you enjoy (leisure activities). However, if the time you spend working begins to take away time spent with family, those extra hours can become an expense.

Exercise. Working out is great for your body and mind, and helps you live a long life. This is a category where if you don’t do it, you’re actually losing time because your life span is slowly getting shorter. This is similar in some ways to having to pay Taxes. You gain some short term benefits like keeping your local roads in shape, just like you get short term benefits from exercise. If you don’t pay your taxes, it will eventually catch up with you (spending the rest of your life in prison is not cool), the same way that not exercising will.

Expense Category Descriptions:

Required Activities. There are certain activities required to keep life moving smoothly. Taking your car in for maintenance, mowing the lawn, housework, etc - all of these are required activities. The equivalent in personal finance are Utilities (keeping the lights on, the water flowing, and reality shows on your TV) and Auto (keeping you mobile).

This category also includes time spent taking care of your basic needs, like eating, brushing your teeth, and taking a shower. This is the equivalent category of Personal Care, where costs for toothpaste, shampoo, and a trip to the day spa (OK, that one is probably an entertainment expense) are covered.

One last activity within the required activities category is sleep. Letting your brain and body rest is a basic necessity to be effective in life. The equivalent in a financial budget are things like Food, Housing, and Clothing (also basic necessities of life). By getting the proper amount of sleep, you will enjoy life a lot more, and be more effective in your relationships and your career. If you spend too little (or too much) time sleeping, there a significant negative consequences to your life budget.

Investment for Future. This includes all the activities that you commit time to for a future benefit. This includes raising your children, spending quality time with your spouse, and working on personal development activities. This category is equivalent to the money you invest in your Retirement Savings, College Funds, or other long term personal finance goals.

Volunteering. Giving your time to support others, such as volunteering your time for a charity and helping your friends move is an important part of a balanced life. This is the equivalent of Gifts and Charity expenses within personal finance.

Entertainment. These are the things you do strictly for your own fun and leisure, including hobbies. Going out with friends, watching TV, or skydiving (OK, this may be a stretch for a hobby) are included in this category. Entertainment is the equivalent category within personal finance.

Miscellaneous. There are always activities that pop up out of nowhere that you spend time on. These are the same types of expenses within personal finance. The key is planning for the fact that you’ll have these pop-ups, and being able to adjust your time accordingly. More on that in follow-on posts.

The next post will talk about how to assign hourly dollar values to the various activities you spend your time on.

With all the demands on your life, how do you make good choices about splitting your time between different activities? For example, is an hour of exercise “worth” more than an hour of spending time with your spouse? At what point does the time you spend commuting to work “cost” you more than the income you are bringing in?

My recommendation is to assign a dollar amount to each hour spent on an activity, and use personal budgeting methods to ensure that you are increasing your life’s net worth. In other words, manage how you live your life through a “Life Budget”. The key concept is that time management cannot be done simply by comparing priorities of activities against each other. (If this was true, you’d just sit around watching the reality TV show network on television - a top priority for most of us) You need to understand the impact on your life of the choices that you make. By applying traditional personal budgeting methods to balancing the “income” and “expenses” of your daily activities, you can find the right balance in your life.

I’ll walk you through this process in several follow-on posts, but here is a general outline of what to expect:

1) Identifying your ‘Life Budget Categories’. I’ll discuss how to develop the specific categories of activities to track in your Life Budget. These are based on your own personal values. This includes how to determine what activities in your life are “income” activities, and what are “expenses”. I’ll compare these activities to the traditional type of “income” and “expense” categories you’d find in personal budgeting, like Salary, Interest, Food, Housing, Utilities, etc.

2) Assigning Dollar Values to your Life Activities. After you’ve determined what categories you want to track , you need to calculate the hourly rate of those activities. I’ll describe how to do this for some common life activities, like exercising (or being a couch potato). Just to give you a idea, the time you spend exercising is worth about $21 per hour of “income” due to the increased life span. You could also look at not getting enough exercise as a $21 per hour “expense” for each hour you should be exercising. Spending more of your time on “expense” items than on “income” items results in a life that is out of balance.

3) Calculating your Current Life Budget. After determining the hourly rate of each life activity, the next step is to find out where you currently stand from a Life Budget perspective. Are you going into Life Debt each month by not spending enough time with your spouse and children? (I know, Life Debt sounds pretty hokey, just keep reading) This step is likely to be an eye opening one for you.

4) Establishing your Future Life Budget. Once you determine your current state, you’ll likely want to make some changes in your life to better balance out priorities. I’ll describe some typical hours to consider budgeting for specific activities. For example, you should budget about 75 hours for sleeping and eating, and will likely have about 29 hours available per week for “leisure” activities. How you spend them will be based on your personal choices.

5) Tracking your Life Budget. I’ll go over some ideas on how to apply traditional personal budget tools to tracking progress on your Life Budget. This will include ideas on how to analyze what you are doing right, and where you could use some improvement.

6) Making Corrections. As you track your progress, you may find you need some help in the ‘Life Finance’ department. I’ll highlight a few concepts from personal finance and budgeting, and how they can be applied to better balancing your life’s activities.

If you’re interested in keeping up with the follow-on posts, subscribe!

One of the areas that many people (including myself) have on their personal development list is to “increase physical fitness”, aka “get into shape” or “lose the spare tire”. We all know in general what it means to be in shape, but if you are truly interested in tracking your progress, you need some metrics to track.

First off, what is physical fitness? The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports breaks it down into five components:

Cardiorespiratory Endurance - the ability to deliver oxygen and nutrients to tissues, and to remove wastes, over sustained periods of time. Long runs and swims are among the methods employed in measuring this component.

Muscular Strength - the ability of a muscle to exert force for a brief period of time. Upper-body strength, for example, can be measured by various weight-lifting exercises.

Muscular Endurance - the ability of a muscle, or a group of muscles, to sustain repeated contractions or to continue applying force against a fixed object. Pushups are often used to test endurance of arm and shoulder muscles.

Flexibility - the ability to move joints and use muscles through their full range of motion. The sit-and- reach test is a good measure of flexibility of the lower back and backs of the upper legs.

Body Composition is often considered a component of fitness. It refers to the makeup of the body in terms of lean mass (muscle, bone, vital tissue and organs) and fat mass. An optimal ratio of fat to lean mass is an indication of fitness, and the right types of exercises will help you decrease body fat and increase or maintain muscle mass.

Although there are many different metrics associated with the above components of physical fitness, the following are the more common ones. If you want to take a fun quiz to find out how you currently stack up, check out Outside magazine’s fitness quiz.

• Cardiorespiratory Endurance
  • Maximum / Target Heart Rate. Your target heat rate is how fast your heart needs to beat during exercise for it to count. This is normally calculated as a percentage of your maximum heart rate (important not to confuse these!). There are a lot of online calculators out there to determine yours.
  • Resting Heart Rate. This is another method to calculate your target heart rate. Your resting heart rate is normally measured just before you get out of bed. So if you want to sleep in when your kids wake up early, just tell your spouse you’ll be measuring your heart rate for the next hour or so. I’m sure they’ll be happy to get up and let you work on your physical fitness goal. (Good luck with that).
  • VO2 max. This is a measurement of how well your body processes oxygen during long periods of exercise. This metric can be increased over time, although how much you can change it is dependent upon your own body. Here is one method to estimate it.
  • 5K speed. How fast you can run 5 kilometers is a good metric if you are into running. Or if you are more advanced, your speed on a 10K or even a marathon can become a personal metric to beat the next time. You can substitute other metrics here if you are into bicycling, swimming, or something similar. Anything that requires endurance works.
• Muscular Strength
  • Repetitions. This is a key metric when building strength, and refers to how many times you apply resistance to your muscles (e.g. lift a weight) before you let them rest.
  • Sets. Normally you do a certain number of repetitions, then let your muscles rest before repeating the cycle again. Each time you repeat this cycle is referred to as a set.
  • Resistance. Depending upon how you are building strength, this could be the amount of weight you are lifting, or the resistance applied by a elastic band. Depending upon your fitness goal (e.g. building big muscles, staying toned, or losing weight), you will vary whether you do a lot of repetitions or use heavy resistance.
• Muscular Endurance
  • Number of pushups / pullups. How many can you do in a row?
• Flexibility
  • Touching your toes. OK, OK, I struggled to find good metrics on flexibility - this is about the only one I can find. Maybe your ability to perform specific yoga poses? Not sure. You need to find your own personal metric for this one - leave me a comment below if you know of some.
• Body Composition
  • Body Mass Index. This is a popular measure for determining your overall health, based on how much of your body is fat. Here is a good calculator for it.
  • Ideal Weight. This is a good target for a healthy weight, based on your age, gender and height.

Now that you know the key metrics, the next step is to identify a fitness plan and get started. I plan to evaluate different methods in the future, and will post about it. In the meantime, here is a good site with a lot of information on exercise and fitness.