Home Management: Simplified and Streamlined, The Time Budget

Last week's Home Management project was to create a time budget for yourself based on the information you gathered while tracking the use of your time the week before.

We all have 24 hours in each day. The idea behind a time budget is telling your time where to go so you can make sure to spend your time on the things that matter, rather than frittering away precious minutes on nothing. Much like money, time will get spent regardless of whether you decide ahead of time what to do with it.

Using the five days of time-tracking I did, I came up with the following time budget for myself:

::Sleep - 8 hours
::Margin time (diaper blow-outs, discipline, phone calls, etc.) - 2 hours
::Devotions - 30 minutes
::Exercise/shower/'primp' - 45 minutes
::Meals/Prep./clean-up/eating - 3 hours
::Home Management (cleaning, laundry, etc.) - 2 hours
::Work - 2 hours
::One-on-one time with Ben - 1 hour
::Family worship - 30 minutes
::Time with children (playing, reading, etc.) - 3 hours
::School (that is, my schooling) - 45 minutes
::Blog - 30 minutes

This is for a normal week day. Obviously on days we have to run errands, etc., I'll have to "steal" the time from another category. But generally, this is a realistic picture of how I want my time to be spent.

I am already noticing the benefits of this in that I've been a lot more intentional about setting aside other things to play with the children. Knowing I have a significant amount of time 'budgeted' for this gives me the freedom to enjoy them with the knowledge that I do still have enough time in the day to accomplish the other things I need to accomplish.

Week 3 Project:
Now that we have a realistic look at how we want to be spending our time, we'll be devoting the next couple of weeks to developing a workable routine based on the time budget we've created.

Next week, we'll begin with establishing a morning routine. To do this, choose 3-5 things you want to do first thing in the morning and do them every day in the same order.


Be sure to visit Rachel at Intentionally Simple to read her post about this week's project! 

For those of you following along with us, we'd love to hear about your progress in the comments.