With so much going on at one time, it is often hard to find a balanced life. As we are all well aware, there are only 24 hours in a day ( 8 – 10) of which I spend sleeping…usually. So that leaves me with about 12 hours everyday to allocate between work, school, play, relationships, etc.
In order to be the most productive that you possibly can, you must develop a balanced lifestyle. Time management and time allocation are critical to success, happiness, and over all well being. Remember: how you invest your time, is how you invest your life. So invest wisely.
In accounting, we learn to develop flexible budgets in order to help allocate and predict costs. Flexible, rather than static, takes into account that things can change, often unexpectedly.
This concept of a flexible budget, can be applied to all aspects of your life, especially time management. Everyday, I have a flexible budget, which loosely outlines where I plan spend my time. This flexible time budget of mine is far from static, as life is constantly throwing me curve balls. So what good is a budget if you don’t stick to it? Well, lot’s actually.
The first benefit is predictability. While not certain, I can fairly accurately predict what I will be doing and when throughout the day because of this flex budget. While there may be slight deviations, the predictions are more often than not reliable.
The second benefit is comparison. At the end of the day, I can look back and analyze just how closely I stayed on track, or how far I veered off. I can then attempt analyze what went wrong, and decide what I could have done better and/or what could not have been avoided. Everyday is a learning experience, and having a flexible budget of time management, helps you to organize and analyze the your daily unpredictabilities and inefficiencies. The goal is to constantly create a more accurate budget. Your budget will never be perfect, as this is impossible, life is far too uncertain for that. But over time, you will realize that you can get quite proficient at allocating your time and accommodating for unexpected lifestyle fluctuations.
The third benefit is the true benefit of proper time allocation and having a flexible budget. The benefit is freedom.
Huh?
I realize it sounds a bit paradoxical. How does living a “budgeted” life grant you freedom?
Take the following into consideration…
How much freedom do you feel you have when you feel constantly stressed and anxious?
How much freedom do you feel you have when you are constantly trying to meet a deadline and constantly crunched for time?
Stress and anxiety are a contradiction of freedom. You can not live truly free and truly happy under stress and anxiety.
The flexible budget is not there to dictate your life, only to help organize it and eliminate as much unnecessary stress as possible, so that you can focus more on the things that matter most to you. Freedom from stress. Freedom from anxiety. A good, flexible budget can promote both if done properly. Allocate your time wisely. Wasted time, is wasted life.
Now, a few more updates.
I just finished the bent press section of my next ebook, which I will post a snibbet of soon for all of you to sample.
Training with my good friend Som Sikdar RKC has been going incredibly well. We upped the volume a bit this week, but kept the density low. Strength increases are becoming quite noticeable, and I am very pleased with the progress we have been making.
Here a video of two of our training days