Skill Builders

The Power of a Personal Time Budget: Seeing a Year in Hours

Whether you are an accountant by profession or just looking at your own personal spending habits, you’ve probably made some type of financial budget—estimating where your money will go and how much you’ll have left. But what about our most precious, nonrenewable resource: time?

Most people manage time reactively, planning their days or weeks as they come. A daily planner might keep us on track, but it doesn’t necessarily show us where our time actually goes over the course of a year. That’s where a personal time budget—at the annual level—comes in.

Why Think in Years Instead of Days?

When I look at my schedule in daily increments, small inefficiencies don’t seem like a big deal. Ten minutes lost scrolling social media, a few extra minutes on email, one more episode before bed—it all feels trivial. But when I started the practice of scaling those habits up across 365 days, the picture changed dramatically. Looking at how I spend my time over a year didn’t just highlight my personal time management. It put a spotlight on what I actually value.

I’m very goal-driven and constantly working toward something, so New Year’s resolutions aren’t a milestone for me. On any given January 1st, I’m already working on a handful of goals and planning something new once I hit those finish lines. Instead, I’ve started the habit of using the New Year to create a new annual time budget. I not only look at how I want to spend my time, but I look back on how I’ve actually spent my time in the past year. Mindless phone scrolling is an easy example to target because most of us indulge in this regularly, AND our phones easily give us the data on how much time we’re really spending (hint – we all tend to underestimate!). 

Consider this:

• 30 minutes a day = 182.5 hours a year — that’s more than a full work month.

• 10 minutes a day = 60 hours a year — enough time to read several of the books stacked on my nightstand or learn a new skill.

I’m trying to learn French. Day to day, it’s easy to say I don’t have time. But if I spent 182.5 hours mindlessly scrolling socials last year, how hard would it be to convert half that time to Duolingo next year and be 91.25 hours closer to having a conversation in another language?

Seeing time this way makes habits visible. It’s not about guilt—it’s about clarity. Going through this exercise annually, and then checking in a few times a year, has been a gamechanger in understanding the real trade-offs I’m making in where I invest my time.

Building Your Annual Time Budget

Creating a personal time budget is surprisingly simple. We’ve linked to an Excel template that can be used to get started. 

Start with your total time.

There are 8,760 hours in a year. Subtract sleep (say 8 hours a night = 2,920 hours), work (around 2,000 hours if you work full-time), commute, and daily hygiene. Add a line item for phone surfing and actually look at your history to see how much time you spend a day on average – use that real number! Add a cushion of ½ - 1 hour per day for all the little unexpected things that come up and take a few minutes here or there.  What’s left—3,446 for me when I did this exercise—is your flexible “life budget.”

1. Categorize the essentials.

Add in categories like:

• Family or relationships

• Exercise and health

• Learning or creativity

• Personal administration (errands, cleaning, appointments)

• Leisure or entertainment

Add detail for the things that are the most important to you. For example, as a primary parent of three kids, I broke out groceries/food prep, homecare/chores and driving kids places into their own lines. My relationship with my partner, kids and a small group of close friends are incredibly important to me, and so I broke those out and estimated how much time I wanted to reserve for dates, activities, and moms’ nights out separately in my budget.

2. Estimate realistic time allocations.

Be honest. How much time do you want each area to get? How much does it get now? If the task is daily, take that estimate and multiply it by 365. Estimate weekly activities and multiply by 52. Take something that only happens about once a month and multiply by 12. Be realistic, but don’t get too complicated – this is high level estimating. During the year, you can compare your overall budget to what you’re actually spending time on and make adjustments next year.

3. Spot your time leaks.

Those 15-minute phone checks or “just one more episode” moments add up. Identify the habits that quietly consume the hours you’d rather invest elsewhere.

4. Reallocate intentionally.

The magic happens here. Once you see the numbers, you can make conscious decisions. Did your time budget add up to 10,000 hours? There’s work to be done because the hours in a year max out at 8,760. Maybe you reclaim 100 hours from social media and invest it in exercise, reading, or simply rest. 

• Mark the items that you can reduce. Just bringing awareness to those areas will help as decisions on time spending are made day by day.

• Mark the items that you can combine (I love to read actual books with pages, but as a working mom, I settle for audio books – if I can listen while commuting or working out, I can combine two activities in one. My youngest child loves to read, so we may spend quality time together going to the library or book store and get a little reading-hobby time and quality-parenting time in the same hour.)

• Decide what you can delegate. Mark items that you’d rather invest money that time in. Take out dinners or housekeepers can replace cooking/chores (unless you really like doing those things – everyone’s decision will be different!). If fitness is important, hiring a personal trainer might help you create more effective workouts that take less time.

The Mindset Shift

Thinking annually shifts you from managing time to designing time. You move beyond daily busyness and start living with a long-term awareness of where your energy and attention go.

You’ll find it easier to say “no” to distractions—not because of discipline, but because you understand their true cost. You’re not just giving up 20 minutes; you’re trading away 120 hours a year.

The Payoff

An annual time budget won’t make your days longer, but it will make them clearer. It gives you a sense of agency over your hours, showing you the gap between the life you have and the one you could be building—one minute, one habit, one choice at a time.