1440

1440 minutes in a day.  Of those possible minutes I need to sleep 480 of them.  That leaves 960 minutes for productive activities.  Why, then, am I consistently complaining that there is not enough time to get things done?  Clearly it is because I fritter away time in unproductive activities.  My biggest culprit?  The internet.  I rationalize my time spent on the internet as "research".  But my problem is that I tend not to retain much of what I read online.  For instance, a fair amount of my time yesterday was spent researching sloth anatomy.  What did I learn?  They have a four-chambered stomach and their muscular structure is predominantly retractor muscles, not extensor muscles.  Anyway, I digress from the original intent of today's post; which I had intended to be more along the lines of the idea of a "time budget."  I am really careful about how I spend my money, proud to say that I am actually frugal with my money.  I've never actually set up a budget per se, but I track almost every penny that I spend.  Why can't I be that diligent with my time?  As I was sitting here, I deducted that it's because the money is tangible (although as we get farther and farther away from a cash society, that is debatable.  But a subject for another day!), but time is not.  So I am trying an experiment today. 



Here I have 32 little "buttons".  As captioned, one for each half-hour in "my" day.  (As stated above, I need 8 hours of sleep each night, leaving me with 16 awake hours.)  Breaking that into half-hour increments seemed reasonable, since most of my tasks run at least that long.  Breaking it into smaller increments seemed too cumbersome.  As each 1/2 hour ticks away, one more button is removed from the bowl.  So far, this has served to sharpen my focus.  Perhaps as I start to get more organized, I won't need the visual reminder, but it's a good start for now.  I do want to mention that I ran across a web site that I'd like to explore further... http://litemind.com/time-boxing/.  This seems like a concept that would work for me.  When I get time to try it, that is!  Next up is to refine my method for prioritizing and assigning times to my tasks, thus increasing my time budget's effectiveness.  As always, a work in progress; but I'm happy as long as there's progress!