Managing time as a budget
Time is precious. To me personally, it’s one the most valuable things I have, and it’s one of the few things I can’t buy more of. In other words, time is finite, therefore you gotta be conscious about how you use it.
If I think of the top few things that help me be successful, I would say that consciousness about time is one of them. I’ve given this advice to so many people over the years, and I can’t stress enough how important this is. Before I go into the details, let’s talk about the problem.
It’s a zero-sum game
Think about it — you only have 24 hours in a day. To be healthy, you have to sleep 8 hours. It leaves you with 16 hours for work and life. If you have a reasonable work environment, you work about 8 hours a day, which leaves you another 8 hours for life, family, and so forth (excluding weekends).
If you work 12 hours a day, though, then you only have 4 hours for non-work — hanging out with the family, helping kids with homework, exercising, watching a movie, going on a date, drinking with friends, surfing, learning carpentry, reading books, fishing, whatever you like to do outside of work.
Some people say they are okay with working a lot because they work on what they love, and they have “work-life integration”, and they’re happy and fulfilled, blah, blah. Sorry to be blunt here, but I think this is bullshit. See, as human beings we all have physical and emotional needs that work alone can’t supply. If you don’t think that’s the case, I’m sorry for you — you may have a sad life. I for one love working, love my team, love getting things done, making an impact, delivering great products, progressing in my career, making money and all these things, but I also love playing with my kids, cycling, playing video games, fixing the living room windows, cooking, going out for dinner and so much more. The way I see it, a good life is about a good balance of all good things.
If you work too much (say you’re working 12 hours a day) and you don’t want to compromise on life/family, since 4 hours may not be enough for all the life you want to have, you may be tempted to start sleeping less. I’ve done that, and it’s not good: you become chronically tired over time, unhealthy, memory suffers, productivity goes down, can’t concentrate, work hours become lower quality and less productive, therefore you have to work more to accomplish the same.
I also don’t see myself working much less than some 8 hours. To me, work is a big part of my life. It not only gives me the funds I need to take care of my family, but also gives me joy and purpose in different ways, and a great sense of accomplishment as I do various things — from building relationships to getting things done and many things in between. With that said, even if I was lucky enough to be among the top few percent of people that don’t need to work, I’m not sure I would like to stop — at least not right now.
Here’s the point of all this: time management is a zero sum game. If you do more of one thing, you have to do less of something else — there’s no magic. And if there isn’t balance, over time it doesn’t work for one reason or another, so you have to be thoughtful and deliberate about the choices you make.
To me personally, to achieve my balance I need sleep, life and work to get 1/3 each. This leaves me with 8 hours/day for work. Knowing that amount is limited and can’t change, I have to be really good at prioritizing, I have to choose what to do and what not to do really wisely, and I have to maximize the impact I can make at work in 8 hours (and the same way maximize the amount of joy I have in my 8 hours of non-work life). I have to frequently look at all the things I’m doing and decide whether I’m spending time wisely or not.
Managing time as a finite resource
If you think about it, this is not much different than managing expenses — you typically have a fixed budget and must make all things work.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you make 1,000 a month (currency doesn’t matter). Let’s say you pay 200 for rent, and 100 for utilities. That leaves you with 700 for everything else. You need to pay a car lease and gas which may be another 150, then food and house supplies for another 200, which leaves you with 350. Maybe you want to save some 250/month for retirement, school funds, and buying a house, so it leaves you with 100 for everything else, which you can use for fun, dining, whatever you want. Then let’s say you want to go on a big summer trip and will have to spend 300. There’s no magic here: to make that work, you will need to save for a few months — maybe stop going out a bit, save 50 for 6 months, and have a great summer time. Or if you’re less than organized, you will be tempted to take from your retirement funds, get a loan, but you typically don’t want to do that. At this point you realize you’re constrained so you have to make choices. You can change your budget maybe moving to a smaller house to pay less rent, using public transportation to spend less with car, and so on. But at the end of the day, there will always be many things you need to do and make sure you can fund, some more optional than others, and you have to make it work with the finite amount of resources you have.
With that framework in mind, I manage my time in a very similar way.
How do I manage my time at work
Just like in the example above there’s rent, utilities, car, etc., as a starting point, I make an inventory of all the things I have to do at work: from 1:1 meetings to other work meetings, recurring team/status check-ins, check emails, focus/work time, random meetings, and so on.
Looks simple enough, but let me go into a little more details, starting with the basic, non-optional stuff.
As a manager with some 8–10 direct reports, I meet them about once a week for 30 minutes at least, so this means 5 hours/week. Assuming a week of 40 hours, this is a good chunk of time already. There are also skip-level meetings with various folks, 1:1s with my product partners, my manager, etc., so I typically spend some 10 hours a week in 1:1s, which is about 25% of my time. It’s a lot, right? But it’s necessary, so it’s all good.
Then I want to make sure I look at emails for at least an hour a day, sometimes a couple times a day. It’s a lot, but sometimes I take even more than that — for instance when crafting a big email response to a customer, or crafting a carefully worded messages in general, forwarding the right things to the right people, and so on. Also, emails frequently result in some actions to be taken, so I have to write them down, track, get back to people, etc. With all that in mind, I save some 6 hours/week for this (15% of my time, a little over 1 hour/day).
I also always want to have at least 25% of protected time. Meaning that, any given week, I want to have some good 10 hours of solid work time. It can be to work on a presentation, review some code, write performance reviews, work on budgeting, whatever I need uninterrupted focus time to work on.
Then there’s recruiting. Any given week I’ll have a couple or so interviews, look at resumes, positions, job descriptions, and so on. At a certain scale, you are always hiring all the time — it’s not a point in time thing. And because a great team is the most important thing to have at work, you gotta put the time to do it right. Depending on the season I might spend as much as 10% of my time (4 hours a week) in average doing this. I’d say typically it’s 5%, but let’s leave it at 10% for now.
At this point, with 10 hours for 1:1s, 6 for emails, 10 for focus/work and 4 for hiring, I’m at 30 hours. I only have another 10 hours (25%) for everything else. Not a lot. There’s so much more to do.
This means I have to be really good at prioritizing everything else: starting with the meetings that I go to — from recurring team meetings to planning, status, demos, and so forth — to everything else. Recently I’m trying to do things asynchronously as much as possible (over email, Slack, etc.) so that I only have to meet when conversations really have to be live. That said, this doesn’t come for free either; it ends up taking more of my work time, email time, etc. (zero-sum game).
At this point I don’t have enough time already.
Then, in addition to everything above (the things I know will happen), there are all the random things I don’t know. Every other day a vendor wants to have a meeting to sell their business, platform or tech. Random meetings in general come out of nowhere for all sorts of reasons (which is even more common nowadays with everybody remote). A production incident will need uninterrupted attention and a lot of focus for a number of hours. A key manager quit and we have to figure out how to communicate and re-organize the team. A customer escalates with a huge pressing request that needs to be looked at immediately. Priorities shift and we need to spend time re-planning. So many things happen every day, all the time… Knowing these things always happen, I also have time set aside for “random stuff”. I typically set aside some few hours and if I don’t use them I will get more work done, and if I need more time, work, meetings and everything else get impacted (meetings get canceled, move around, etc.). Remember, there’s no magic here, it’s a zero-sum game.
Now, on top of all that, just for fun, imagine how I (and many others) feel when a recruiter reaches out on LinkedIn wanting to talk about this “confidential position” in this “game-changing”, “unicorn” company that’s “democratizing [random] services”, without even sharing the details of the company, job description or anything else? Now imagine that this happens every day, sometimes multiple times a day… Thanks for the opportunity, but I’m not interested at this time.
Go for it — put your time on rails!
Here’s my advice: write your time budget down and stick to it as much as you can. Just like I did above, start with thinking about the “categories” that make sense for you. A good way to find that out is to look at what you have done over the last few weeks, and then think about what else is missing and what you would like to do moving forward. Then come up with good, reasonable estimates of how much you should spend on each thing, and use the past few weeks to test the “model” out and see if it’s realistic. It may not be perfect in the beginning, but you can improve it over time. Also, truth be told, many times I don’t stick to my budget either, but over the years this helped me become more and more conscious about it, allowing me to get back on the rails quickly.
Once you do all that, share with your manager and key colleagues so that people around you can become more conscious of your time and how you think about it, as well as their own time. This will help the whole environment become more balanced for you and everyone.
Conclusion
Remember: you have 8 work hours (or a limited amount of time) every day and that doesn’t change, so you gotta use them wisely.
Managing time as a budget is no silver bullet, but it helps you understand what you should be spending time on and how much, as well as what gives if you run out of time, so you can make good decisions and accomplish a good balance of everything you need to do at work without dropping balls, not to mention keeping a good work/life balance.
Like I said in the beginning, I cannot stress enough how important this is, so be conscious, in control, and manage your time wisely!
