Overspending Your Time Budget?

Leadership Coaching Notes FEBRUARY 2010

Overspending Your Time Budget?

Roxanne clearly understood the painful consequences of ignoring her financial budget, but she’d never thought about her time budget. When she did, she realized she chronically avoided considering one and certainly didn’t manage to one. She carelessly made commitments and routinely suffered unintended stress, disappointments and discouragement as a result. What’s your time budget? Check if you are reckless with it and how using three practices can help you build new success and happiness.

What Worked:

Stop Pretending You Have More Time and Capacity than You Do: Roxanne hadn’t faced the facts that time and energy truly are limited resources. No matter how skillfully she listed her “to do’s” and set ABC priorities, these didn’t change the reality that there are not more than 24 hours in a day. She accepted that she could not be the leader she most wanted by working undisciplined hours and ignoring good self care.

What You Can Do: Sacrifice Your Lies: If you pretend that working endlessly harder and faster will leave you feeling proud of your leadership, productivity, family and personal life, take a deep breath and let that deception die. If you are surprised by a sense of loss and fear, it isn’t unusual. You will most certainly disappoint some people and you may not accomplish all you’d like to as fast as you want.

Check: What consequences might happen if you create and follow a reality-based time budget? Decide if avoiding these risks is more important than living what you say you value…inspired leadership, healthy relationships and personal vitality. Courageously define what “success” truly means to you and then budget to achieve it.

Own Your Time Budget: Roxanne built her weekly time budget around her personal definition of success. She owned that setting and following her budget was her job even if no one else supported her. She accepted that others would try to tempt her to overspend because of their poor discipline, competing priorities, urgency and fears. She chose to notice these as seductions, take a deep breath and make resourceful choices for herself.

What You Can Do: Make Sunday Your Budget Day: Create a ritual of reading your personal definition of success and then budgeting your weekly list of to do’s and want to do’s, personal and business, before you start spending your limited time on Monday. Physically take out a mix of bills that add up to $100 (real or imaginary) to represent your time budget. Hold out $20 for a “surprise” fund that helps you cover opportunities and crises that will happen. Now allocate your finite dollars (and time) to the rest of your list. Choose to control or be controlled. Think ahead: how will you cancel, decline, delegate or delay items that don’t fit into your budget this week.

Track and Prune: Roxanne was never 100% successful, but that didn’t stop her from consistently improving. Each night she took 10 minutes to review her daily results, adjust the next day and recommit to achieving her budgeting goals.

What You Can Do: Coach Yourself Like a 6 Year Old: Ever watch coaches teach 6 year olds to sing, dance, play soccer or baseball? They are endlessly optimistic, encouraging, celebrating and comforting. Remember you are learning far more difficult and important skills. Enthusiasm and readiness to try again will sustain your improvement until you not only aren’t running at a deficit, but have some time “in the bank” to enjoy.

Business Impact:

Roxanne’s clarity and commitment to use her time budget helped her avoid frittering away valuable time, focus and deliver stronger results. Budgeting shortened and increased the value of her meetings and helped her become a leader who modeled healthy work-life balance. Time with friends and family became a source of new energy vs. guilt and more fatigue.

What’s Next:

If you or leaders you are developing feel overwhelmed and exhausted, climbing out of the “hole” of overspending your time budget takes effort. Skillful support can help a lot. I am happy to explore your situation, goals and a way to start creating a new future. Your first call is always free.

Liked the article? Didn’t like it? Have any questions? Additional ideas? Drop me a line mkimbell@corporateadventure.com. I’d love to hear from you!

All the best,

Meredith Kimbell
Executive Advisor,Strategy Consultant
Corporate Adventure

Leadership Coaching Notes uses real or composite client examples drawn from 25 years of coaching and consulting with leaders committed to solving their toughest personal, interpersonal and organizational issues.
Unless otherwise attributed, all material is copyrighted by Meredith Kimbell © 2011. All rights reserved. You may reprint any or all of this material if you include the following:
“Leadership Coaching Notes © 2011 Meredith Kimbell, Corporate Adventure, Reston, VA. Used with permission.”