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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host. Thank you for being here. This is a special episode of the show, recorded while I am away traveling. Just a very short essay on a concept that I think will be useful to you.

If this is your first time listening to the show, feel free to listen to today's content. But if this doesn't do it for you, check back in the archives for some of our more normal format. And hopefully you'll find that interesting. This is a very unique format of the show.

Today I'd like to share with you another concept that I think is important to think about. We recently talked about the importance of tracking your money, as that being the primary foundation upon which all good plans are built. Today I'd like to talk to you about the importance of tracking your time.

If you want to see where a man's priorities are, look at where he spends his money and where he spends his time. So for any of us, regardless of what we say our priorities are, if we just simply look at our checkbook register, or whatever the equivalent of that is that you happen to employ, and also at our calendar, if our calendar has some information in it, you can see where our values and priorities will lie.

Well if that's the case, then I think that we should have a budget for those things too. If we're going to budget our money, I think we should budget our time as well. And I view time and money as being very closely linked. In my mind, money primarily represents stored up time.

After all, most of us have to spend time of some sort or another to create money. Hopefully we can sever that connection more and more as time goes on, but I'm still in the position of using time to create money. And if you look at the connection there, it's very strong.

Money without time, of what value is it? If you have all the money in the bank, you can't enjoy the nice stuff that money can buy you if you don't have the time. So in budgeting, and even in financial planning, that's what we're constantly doing is making that trade-off between money and time, time and money, money and time.

The resource that we have, that we all have, is time. The time is what we can use to invest, and then the money can be our return for some of that time, which then will allow us to buy freedom, which is ultimately control over our time. So I'd like to encourage you with something.

If you've never tracked your time, or even if you have, I'd encourage you to track your time in some way. Few people track their money. Fewer people track their time. I would bet that if, I can't prove this, just a personal hunch, I would bet that tracking time would probably be more valuable than money.

Now, I'm not going to prescribe for you a specific method of doing so. I've done so in various ways at different times, and I like to do this regularly. I'm just getting ready actually to do this again. I'm going to go through and start tracking, when I get back from my trip, I'm going to start tracking every hour of my day for a few weeks, because I just want to check to see whether I'm being productive with my time, whether I'm being focused, and what I'm using my time for.

So I'm going to be doing a consistent tracking for a couple of weeks just to see, so I have an accurate idea of how many hours per week I'm spending on various projects. I've done this several times, and I've always found it to be helpful. And in the same way that tracking your money can be helpful in how you spend, in adjusting how you spend without necessarily making a big decision over changing your spending, I think it can be the same way tracking your time can be helpful.

Another example, kind of a comparison, would be tracking the food that you eat. I've seen people talk about the value, if you were interested in dieting, just simply starting not by saying, "Here's what I'm going to eat, and here's what I'm not going to eat," but just by being more aware of what you do eat, whether that is taking a picture of it or writing it down, keeping a log, something like that, and just simply forcing yourself to be fully honest and fill out that log or take those pictures in a complete way, not trying to adjust the results.

And just the awareness can lead to behavior changes. And I think the same thing can be true in tracking money and in tracking time. A couple of the ways that I've done it over time, that I've tracked over time, that I've found helpful, and then a couple of other ideas that I've not tried but you might want to try.

I have at times just kept a manual journal in a notebook, and I've found that to be a good method. If you are constantly moving or if you're in a place doing work that you can just write things down, I find it to be helpful just to write things down in a notebook.

And you could do that either when you notice yourself switching to a new task, write down the time and what you were switching to, or if you wanted to do something where you wrote it down in a every 15-minute period. So, for example, you had a timer set on your phone for 15 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour, whatever you want to do, and you just simply make a quick note of what you're doing, that works out great.

I've done that and enjoyed that. At one time, I used a system of spreadsheets where I would start the spreadsheet and I would just write in what I was doing at a time. These were some things I found online. It was a time tracker spreadsheet that was used for people who needed to track their time for project-based work.

And I would just write it down, the time I started, the time I finished, and filled it in like a flow chart. Sometimes that worked for me. Sometimes I wanted to do something different. When I spent time mainly being at a computer, I enjoyed keeping just a simple Excel spreadsheet.

And all I did was I had three columns. I had a start time, an end time, and a description. And what I would do is there is a function on Excel. I think it was "control-shift-semi-colon," but I could be mistaken about it. Maybe it was "control-shift-L." Google it. And there is a function, a shortcut, that would automatically insert the current time.

So I just simply put the current time in, put the task in that I was working on, and then when I was done, I put the current time and put the next one in. And what I did at that time was I would connect my task to the time, and that worked out really well.

Now, if you are on the computer a lot, maybe you would want to look for a software solution, something like RescueTime, I know is the most famous one, although I know there are others. And so RescueTime is one of those things that will track what programs are open on your computer.

That may be helpful for you if you're tracking more specific jobs, things like that. I have tried tracking my sleep and different things with some smartphone apps. There are lots and lots of those out there, and they're more and more coming all the time. This is a big area of research.

And I've also tried some of the apps on my phone that are designed for, again, people who are doing project-based consultants. I just put in whatever I'm doing, hit start, try to remember to hit stop. Pick something that works for you and try to commit to it for maybe a week, something like that.

If you know you're going to get driven nuts by doing it every 15 minutes, don't do it every 15 minutes. Do it in hour chunks. We're not worried about every five minutes here. It's just valuable to get an idea of where is the time going, and then you can take a look at it, and you can judge it for yourself to see whether or not you're satisfied with it.

Once you have that data, you'll be able to take that data, and you'll be able to do some other things with it. You'll be able to say, "How can I get maximum value out of that time? Am I getting maximum value out of that time? And is there a way that I can get more value out of it?" I won't go into a lot of examples.

I'll just leave it there for now. So I'd encourage you, if you've never tracked your time, do it. I'm going to be doing it again, and I think it's a good idea for most of us to do maybe once a year, maybe twice a year, or any time we're embarking on a new stage of business, maybe a new project, and we need to see how things are going.

If you've just taken on increased responsibilities at work--for example, that's where I'm at-- is I'm trying to juggle more things than I've ever juggled before. So in that juggling, I want to make sure that I'm doing a good job, and I want to make sure that I have an idea of what's actually taking my time.

If I'm going to outsource some task that I have, if I don't know how long I'm actually spending on it-- I've made this mistake, and I've screwed this one up big time. I write down all the things that have annoyed me, but I didn't have good, accurate records of how long they were taking.

And then I hired the work done, and then I found myself without that much of an impact for myself, and yet I had someone that wasn't being useful because they weren't fully utilized, and it didn't work. I experienced at one point--this is actually while I was working as a financial planner-- I just felt completely overwhelmed, and I felt completely behind, so I hired this person to work for me.

And I wanted them to come in and take some of the tasks off my plate, because I felt like, "Man, I can't get it all done." So I brought them in, and while I was training them, I just said, "Well, let's work on it together, and let me show you how I do these certain tasks." And I started doing them.

Well, basically at the end of the first day--I think it was literally a day and a half of our working together-- I had done all of the tasks that I was planning for them to do that I felt completely behind on, and I was basically caught up. And what I learned--I felt so dumb--but what I learned was that I hadn't-- I didn't need--it wasn't a lack of time, it was a lack of focus.

And the problem was I never could force myself to sit down and focus, because it was work I didn't particularly like doing. But in a day and a half, I was completely caught up, and I wound up having the person work for me on an ongoing period of time.

But then I was just so underutilizing them as a resource, and I didn't have other things that I was ready to delegate. And so I wound up having to let them go simply because I didn't have the work. And I learned a lesson, though, and I recognized that sometimes maybe I need to just hire somebody to sit over my shoulder and ask me, "What are you doing, Joshua?

What are you doing?" I'm easily distracted. So those are my thoughts on tracking your time. I would encourage you to try it if you haven't. Last thing I wanted to cover is--actually, I'm not talking about budgeting your time. Now, I think that budgeting your time is a valuable concept.

And the one time where I've really experienced this really, really well is when I was in college and I was working my way out of debt at the time. And I was working a 40-hour-a-week job. I had 19 hours of scheduled class at college. And then I had commuting time, I had working time, and I had study time.

And I knew the things that I needed to get done. Now, that was a busy semester. It was a very busy semester. But what I learned--now, at that time I was single, I had full control over my schedule, and I just learned how if I would budget my time in advance, I could make a big deal to me.

Well, I think this is a key for all of us. And I've never--not since that time have I ever budgeted every hour of my week like I did at that point in time. But if I need more capacity, I need to budget my time more specifically. And so putting in the big things--this is the time that I'm going to be home with my family, this is the time that I'm going to be at the office, these meetings are the ones that are the most important.

So budgeting time on a forward-looking basis is a very valuable thing and important. But maybe just like with money, it's a good idea to start with tracking the time. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. Be back with you tomorrow. The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

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