Last summer, I realized I was struggling with managing my time effectively, and I had an epiphany.

What if I managed my time like I manage my budget?

And I fell in love with the concept, and used it extensively. It was life changing. There’s something about the ever-present timer throughout your work day that helps me not only make sure I’m spending an appropriate amount of time on things like eating lunch, exercising, and taking regular breaks, but it also really helps contextualize how much time you have left to actually work for the day. So as you’re working on something, you’ll be like “oh crap I have 20 minutes, and I really want this done today. It’s crunch time!”

However, in the midst of me quitting my job and starting my own business again, the abrupt shift in my day-to-day life left me feeling overwhelmed with the work I needed to do. My cognitive load on where, what, and how I needed to work flipped nearly overnight, and as a result I broke the habit of using the time tracking setup for a few months.

Well, fast-forward to today – where I’m much better off than I was a few months back, having a lot more help, and a much better grip on my projects, my work, my processes, and most importantly – my role in my company.

As I start to settle into that role, I realized that I was still feeling overworked, and tired all the time. I was constantly hungry, and there was positively nothing stopping me from just…working more. In-fact, the contrary is true. As a self-employed person, I am my own boss. In-fact this is what made me stop doing this last time – I was a terrible boss to myself, and I promised I’d do it different this time.

And yet, here I was, falling into old patterns of late nights, early mornings, skipped lunches, and missed sleep. And for what? to burn myself out again? Not this time.

So today, I said “enough is enough”, and I grasped onto the last framework that worked for me – which was time budgeting. I fired up the app and put together a new schedule, this time focused on the key pieces of my day.

• A nice, long breakfast. I like to enjoy my coffee midway through my deep work schedule, and do a crossword with my wife.
• A short lunch. I don’t need a long one because I’m usually just recovering from a workout
• A solid chunk of time to go do something active.
• A 4 hour chunk of deep work, using 50 minute sprints. This allows me to get in flow, but affords me 10 minute breaks to go get some tea, stretch, etc.
• A solid 4 hours of shallow work, using 25 minute sprints instead of 50 minute sprints. I do this wheel in the afternoon, and is mostly focused on sniping the litany of things that accumulated on my desk in the morning.

And in a turn of events that surprises nobody – I had one of the best work days in months.

• I got more done in the morning than I have in a long time.
• I exercised
• I ate breakfast and lunch
• I had enough fluids
• I got all of the work I needed to get done today, with an hour to spare, and enough time to write this post.
• I’m finishing my day at a respectable 5:01 PM.

Compare that to yesterday, and a pattern I’ve seen the last few weeks:

• My mind is scattered, checking slack and notifications in the morning
• I’m taking care of tasks as they come to me, reactive instead of proactive
• I feel exhausted at the end of the day, but still feel like I didn’t do anything important.
• I’m hungry because I didn’t eat enough.
• I’m thirsty because I didn’t drink enough.
• My head feels “fuzzy” and I feel overworked an unable to do anything but disassociate for the rest of the evening.

All this to day…time budgeting works, and I can’t recommend it enough.