How do we organize life and keep all the plates spinning and ourselves in balance? Time management, obviously, is crucial. Today’s podcast episode is all about how to manage your time to keep up with your responsibilities.
If it seems hard, it’s because it is.
September’s theme topic inside Convivial Circle is balance, and one of our members, Julie, summed it up perfectly:
“I think that’s why so many programs and planners and classes or groups are appealing, because they often promise that key to life that we all feel like we’re missing.
I always feel most balanced when I am truly centered on the true Center — the more I abide in Christ, the more I am attending to His word and living out the truth of Scriptures, I feel more confident about the decisions I make throughout the day.”
Amen! There is no amount of balance that will make all you’d like to do fit into your day. Your time, my time, is limited.
This episode is an excerpt of a troubleshooting session I did inside Convivial Circle on September 2, 2019, all about time budgets. Several of the courses inside membership give directions for completing a time budget, so we dug deep into why it’s important and what traps we’re likely to fall into as we work on them.
Balance is such a tricky topic, because when we uncover what we mean when we talk about it, we uncover our unrealistic expectations that usually boil down to perfectionism.
We want the key to life that we all feel like we are missing. We want a way to make all we would like to do fit into our day. But there is no amount of balance that will make that happen.
Our time is limited. That is why a realistic approach to balance begins not with wishful thinking, but with assessing and managing our time effectively.
A time budget helps with that. Like a money budget, a time budget is not about wishful thinking. It is about looking at what is actually available and how best to spend it. It is not a schedule. It is a big picture sketch of the week.
What chunks of time are already spoken for? How much time do responsibilities actually take? Do we have that time available? Those are the questions that help us develop a realistic sense of our responsibilities and what we are actually doing.
The problem is that we all start with an idealistic version. Only after we gain some actual experience can we go back and make a more realistic time budget.
We forget things. We leave out meal planning, shopping, housework, or schoolwork because they do not always happen at a specific time. Yet they still have to happen. If we do not account for them, that time comes from somewhere else, and then we are left scrambling.
A helpful time budget is not the one that looks impressive on Pinterest or to an outsider. It is the one that works for you.
We need to plot the hard lines of the day, the non-negotiables, and then look honestly at the responsibilities we must make happen. We also need to make sure we are not assigning ourselves more work than we actually have room for with margin. We need time to sleep. We need time to read. We need time to take a walk or do something restorative.
If every hour is mapped out for productive work, then the whole thing becomes unrealistic and stressful.
That is why a time budget is not a tool to squeeze out the most work possible. It is a tool to help us stop scrambling. Writing it out on paper does not make it easy, but it does help us see where time really is.
Then we can step back, look at the big picture, and make better choices about how to use the pockets of time we do have. That is a far better path than push, push, push until burnout forces a stop.
So if we want to work on realistic balance, that begins by assessing and managing our time effectively. I do this by creating a time budget. Just like a money budget, a time budget isn’t about wishful thinking. It’s about looking at what’s actually available and how best to spend that.