Budgeting Time

If you read this blog regularly, you are familiar with the concept of the calorie budget. I have recently learned that other things need to exist on a budget... aside from my credit cards.

Time is a tough thing to learn to budget, and there is no way to borrow it. You can't take out a line and pay it back later. There are only 24 hours in a day. How you divide that time is your budget. If you allocate too much time to a goal, and not enough for sleep, everything suffers.  On the other side, if you don't allocate enough time to your goal, like marathon training or fitness, reaching that goal will be next to impossible to read.

It's a fine line of finessing. One I don't have quite figured out yet. I'm done with marathon training, so I have that chunk free. I finished certifying as a yoga instructor. But now I am working on the rewrites of a third book, a young adult fractured Oz fairy tale, and it is eating all my time. If word count is any indication, it's getting fat.

The point is, I am making a choice. By budgeting my time sitting and writing, that means less time to hit the gym. Less time reading to my kids. No time to do housework. If I was attempting to write a book and run a marathon and have the perfect house... guess how many of those goals I would actually achieve. A poor time budget often leads to quitting a project in the middle. Finish it. Put in the time and effort necessary to get it done.

Choose your goals wisely, then budget your time with equal care.