I am obsessed with finding ways to improve my productivity and better manage my time. It's something I've been pursuing for more than 3 years, not relentlessly but incrementally generating minor improvements that compound over time.

In the last couple of months, I've been experimenting with a different way to manage my professional and personal life. It has been an exciting journey, with many discoveries and step-backs. Most importantly, a process that has been yielding results in terms of how I feel. The only reason I care about time management is to increase my happiness levels and thus be able to do things that bring me joy consistently in the different domains of my life.

Ideally, you have a monthly budget to manage your finances. You know how much to allocate to rent, transportation, education and investments. The budget might be more or less detailed, but at least you've got some idea of where your money is going. This process comes to fruition mainly because income is limited — a scarce resource, at least, when having a short-term perspective.

Following the same argument, time is another scarce resource, even scarcer than money. You can buy anything with a credit card... but not time. (Not exactly true, if we consider investing in health and longevity a way to get more time, but you get the idea). So, why not establish a time budget? This results in the allocation of time to different areas to manage priorities in the best possible way.

Consider this decision: spending a full-month salary on a new fur coat, with no leftover to cover rent, transportation and food. A dumb decision, right?

Consider another decision: being busy 30 hours per week, accomplishing no meaningful goal, or making progress in priorities. A dumb decision, right? No! A really dumb decision. You might be able to get a loan to pay the rent or use a credit card. But you can never get those hours back.

When I was exposed to the idea of time-budgeting, I was astonished by how simple yet brilliantly logical it was. When resources are scarce, we better manage them smartly. But in this case, and oppositely to what happens with money, we all have the same budget — 168 hours, every week. The question is how well we allocate the budget to the different projects and priorities.

Laura Vanderkam, the author of the book "168 Hours", found we have little clarity of where our time is going. And with no clarity, you can't choose differently. Should you turn left or right if you don't know where you are?

1) So, the first step to defining a time budget is tracking your time for a week, with the intent of understanding where your hours are going. The revelations might surprise you: finding the 20 hours per week reading the news or the 10 hours scrolling social media. The key is conducting an audit of your time and being honest about it is being spent. To track my time, I use Toggle. It is entirely free and works on all devices.

"What gets measured, gets managed."
— Peter Drucker

2) The next step is deciding exactly which categories you want to spend your time with. Let's say: work, meditation, reading, side-hustle, hobby, sports, etc.

To better organise the process, I've split my life into 2 core areas:

— Professional

— Personal

Inside the professional bucket, I introduced 2 main segments:

— Professional:

Business
Master's Degree.

Inside the personal, I have got more segments split into 2 main categories.

— Personal

a) Growth

Playing the Drums
Learning (podcasts + books + training)
Skill acquisition

b) Maintenance

Work-Out
Meditation
Planning
Journaling

3) After splitting your life into segments, allocate several weekly hours to each. We have 168 hours — what if every hour was filled purposefully, with what matters to us? There is no right or wrong, generally. Only what is right or wrong specifically for you. The key is reflecting on the goals you want to achieve, the things that make you happy, and carve out time for it.

As a potential source of inspiration, I pretend to only have 6 days in a week for the professional category. This means I will work more intensively for 6 days but carve out a day of recharge. It also means that the "no-work-day" will be dedicated to nurturing relationships and spending quality time with those I love.

Since I started incorporating this system in my life, I've been much more productive, organised, and, most importantly, happy. It's easy to complain about lack of time, but I've certainly found that a huge part of it comes down to lack of priorities, lack of clarity and lack of motivation to experiment. They can all be solved as long as you have the will to challenge your assumptions and better manage your time.

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Food for Thought:

In the last couple of months, I've been questioning assumptions more frequently, which overlapped with the time-budgeting implementation. One of those assumptions was the necessity to watch all my master’s degree classes' live, rather than wait for them to be published. This led to frustration, dread and annoyance because I had to alter my schedule to fit the classes. When I started questioning the assumption that "you should watch all classes live", I immediately knew I was not doing the right thing. I managed to pivot and can now say I feel much more empowered with time and energy management.

What assumptions might be holding you back from moving your life forward and feeling great about yourself? Question your assumptions. Surely, spending countless hours in dreadful activities is no way to live. I don't mean "quit your job", "stop doing the dishes" or "don't take your kids to school in heavy traffic". Instead, start by questioning the underlying assumptions, making you miserable, and pivot slowly, but steady.

See you next week!

Filipa Canelas
www.filipacanelas.com

Filipa Canelas

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