If we have a budget for our money, why shouldn’t we have a budget for our time? As the saying goes “Time is Money”, so we might as well treat it as such and budget it.

Considering that we’re all given 24 hours in a day, everyday, there are people that are rich in time, while there are others that are time broke. What does it mean to be rich in time? Well, I would consider being rich in time to mean having ample time to do the things you want to do, after investing your time doing the things you have to do. It means you are ready to sacrifice or invest your time clearing your schedule in a particular day, as early as possible, so you can create time or have ample time to do the things you want to do, ranging from hanging out with your friends to watching a movie, sleeping, etc.

In a long term time plan, being rich in time could mean investing your youthful age working, creating, building, failing, winning, etc. so you can have more time when you’re older, to live a work/stress free life. You have more time and resources to go on a vacation, to explore the world, to live as you want and not as you must. It means putting in the work while you’re young now, so work doesn’t become a necessity but an option when you’re much older.

What does it mean to be broke in time? You guessed it! It’s the exact opposite of being time rich. It means not prioritizing the tasks you have to do, but spending your time doing what you want or feel like. You spend your days based on your feelings. You say “I don’t feel like getting out of bed today.” Well, you wouldn’t be able to feel anything else if you decide to stay in the bed. You become broke in time when you realize that you’ve spent your whole day thinking about what you have to do today and not actually do them. This causes you to feel overwhelmed and that pressure influences you to find some ways to calm yourself by doing what you feel like instead. Acting this way can stir up a vicious cycle which can affect your mood long term and make you feel depressed when you enter into social media with that mindset, seeing all the work others are doing.

In a long term perspective, being time broke means investing your youthful age doing mostly what you feel like, without prioritizing other important tasks. You eat, Netflix, sleep, repeat. Or maybe you do something else that makes you comfortable all the time. You know there are things you should be doing or get done, but because you’re neglecting them now, it shows up later in the future as something you can’t run away from. Those tasks become a necessity and not an option.

While my opinion on this subject matter is just an idea, you could see real life examples from people who can’t afford to stop working. It could probably mean that they weren’t prioritizing work when they were young. And there are people who just seem to have time to go to concerts, hit the gym, get a vacation, and you wonder how they got so much time to do all that stuff. It could mean that they prioritize work when they were young, so they can afford to retire early. So choose today whom you want to be – Time Rich or Time Broke.

So how do we budget time? Well, we could start by doing exactly what we do when we budget money – we plan out our time. We write down a list of all the activities we intend to do in a particular day (planned time budget) and then record a list of all the activities we actually did in that same day (actual time budget). This gives us a basic description of how we spend our time and what we spend our time on. When we decide to stay aware of what we spend our time on, and set our priorities accordingly, we end up building a future with a lot of free time.