Dave Ramsey, a financially smart fellow who cuts up credit cards for a living, once said that a budget is “telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went.”

Furthermore, it’s a pretty common occurrence to be going about your own busy life and hear someone somewhere bring up the old saying that “time is money.”

Therefore, if time = money, and money = time, then the concept of budgeting your time should be as commonplace as budgeting your money. But have you ever heard of someone physically creating a budget for their time?

Before today, I never had.

Oftentimes, in an attempt to figure out where my time is going, I try to track my time throughout the day. Thanks to technology, there are boatloads of methods out there for doing so, and I’ve tried a lot of them. However, despite my utmost attempts at consistency while using them, I’ve never had a ton of success at changing habits based on my findings.

I’m also quite familiar with the concept of tracking my spending. One summer I physically wrote down every single purchase I made for an entire month (and a half, but whatever). The results were quite illuminating: apparently I love food and coffee—who would’ve guessed?!

However, simply writing down all my spending and then analyzing it for trends was not enough to change the way that I was spending it. It was all just sitting in my account, and I was (mostly) spending less than I was making, so what did I have to worry about?

The key is that I wasn’t really saving anything. Granted, I took out a set percentage each month to save for Real Savings, but all that extra spending money. . . I was just spending. There’s nothing wrong with spending money you worked for, but there’s also something to be said for saving up the spending money for something grander than iced Americanos.

Once I created a budget for that money, with different Fun™️ savings goals set up along with the bills, I was able to actually change my habits. Money for the roadtrip to Alaska that I’ve always dreamed of got taken out of my paycheck just like the money for my phone and gas. I never even had the option to spend it on pizza.

Now, this is all fairly simple, straightforward, “Duh, Dana, that’s the point of a budget.”

Okay so we can all agree on what a budget is and why they’re beautiful!

So translate that to your time! Instead of simply tracking your time, seeing where it’s all going, and unsuccessfully trying to just do those things less, create a budget. Tell your time where it’s going before you spend it.

We’ve all got 24 hours in the day, right? We’ve got a more equal playing field than if we were still talking about money!

In the words of Dave Ramsey (again), “You must gain control over your money or the lack of it will forever control you.”

Again, time = money, money = time.

I’ve never felt like I’ve had enough hours in the day. Earlier this week I was bemoaning the fact that I feel like I’m always playing catch-up; that I’m existing in a constant reactionary state—never fully owning my time, schedule, or kind of life in general.

Today I was talking to my dad about the possibility of picking up another side project, and what the ramifications of that decision would be on the rest of my schedule. I mentioned to him that I would really need to track my time in order to stay on top of things.

He totally and utterly shut me down with, “No, you need to budget your time.”

Budgeting intrinsically includes tracking—you have to keep track of what you’re spending in order to stay within your budget. However, tracking doesn’t intrinsically include creating or sticking with a budget. Therefore, I need to create a budget—I need to tell my time where to go.

“But Dana,” you may ask, “isn’t that just. . . like, making a schedule? And sticking to it?”

Yeah, well, in my mind, a schedule is made to be stretched, kept fluid, and messed around with in order to fit everything in as it comes up.

A budget is concrete. Once money’s sent somewhere, you can’t just take it back. (I mean. . . you definitely can just go to that account and withdraw it, but hopefully the psychological factor of “you’re stealing from yourself right now; stop it,” is enough to stop you.)

Whatever little personal semantics thing that might actually work for me is what I’m going to stick with, okay? Take it up with my dad if you have an issue. Or Dave Ramsey.

Now you may be asking, “Dana, what do you do when you go over your budget like any normal human being has experienced?”

If you run out of food money, you just don’t eat—right? If you don’t have enough money for electricity, your lights are going to be shut off. It’s a less-than-ideal, sometimes pretty painful or embarrassing position to be in.

(We’re ruling out the existence of credit cards for this little analogy because there’s not an equivalent to a credit card in the world of time [unless you count staying up all night, which is neither healthy nor sustainable long-term {kind of like credit cards, I guess?}])

Either way, if I run out of time and fail to meet a deadline, finish a project, or have to cancel something, it would be very much less-than-ideal, painful, and embarrassing (and potentially even career-ruining).

I don’t like being painfully embarrassed. That’s going to be something I’m going to work very hard to not have to experience. That might mean relying on my Pulling-All-Nighters-Indefinitely credit card of doom.

Or, I might actually honor my budget and not overspend my time in places it’s not allocated. It even gives me a really good response to questions that I have a hard time not being a weasel about normally:

“Hey Dana, would you be able to pick up this shift for me?”

“Dude, let’s go toilet paper this guy’s yard!”

“Dana, you should mindlessly scroll through Instagram for five hours and hate yourself afterward because that’s what all the cool kids are doing.” (That’s my subconscious speaking, we don’t get along very often.)

To all of these I can simply respond, “Sorry friends! It’s not in the budget,” and then drop the mic and leave the room with relationships intact, because it’s not my fault for not wanting to help or hang out with people—it’s the budget’s fault for simply existing.

So there we have it. All my problems are solved, and hopefully yours, too!

To be honest, I’m a little scared for this month. Send prayers and check in some time to see how the whole budget thing works out. I’ll catch you on the flip side.