Time Budgeting 

‘In Australia, we rack up one of the longest working weeks in the world’ – Carolyn Barker, Love at Work – Australian Institute of Management 2006

So…. some thoughts about Time Budgeting, as we gear up for 2008. By Time Budgeting, we mean working out the key areas of our work, the expectations under these, and then how much time they require. Utilising our time wisely only works if we have enough time to allocate!

Through our work in a wide range of organizations, and our coaching work we see people being expected to take on more and more work without any increase in their available time. They are simply expected to ‘manage their time’ to fit it in. Organizations do financial budgeting but are often poor at time budgeting.

Here are some ideas we use in our training and coaching, that might help you get on top of your time management issues before the year gets away from you!

• Organize your work tasks under 5-7 Key Work Areas. Eg - it might include Staff Management; Administration; Direct Client work, etc 
• Under each of these Key Work Areas, define all the relevant Performance Expectations
• Performance Expectations are developed by asking ourselves what do I do, how often, or how many in a particular time period. This means we define Performance Expectations in specific, behavioural and measurable’ terms.
• Check this against your formal job description, or other relevant documents.
• It is useful then to check with your manager, to ensure you have an accurate and agreed understanding of your work expectations and boundaries.
• Take time to reflect on each Key Work Area and Performance Expectation and ‘guesstimate’ how much time you need to spend on each area to do the job well. You can then check these ‘guesstimates’ against how you are actually using your time. This is best done over a 6 week period, under each Key Work Area. This task can be very helpful, and is less tedious than you think! Compare the results with the amount of hours you are paid for (this can cause some surprises!).

You are now equipped to begin Time Budgeting. If your working hours are much less than your assessment of the time required to fulfil your work expectations - you have the basis for negotiating/prioritising to achieve a better fit. If new work or programs are required, you can negotiate with your manager to work out the Time Budget. If you are to do new tasks - where will you get the required time?

Yes, even finding the time to do what we are suggesting here is a challenge! However, people we work with find that Time Budgeting gives them a greater capacity to ‘manage up’ – to clarify their role, and overall save time and stress.