Count your real hours
Start with the hours you actually have. Forty hours on paper is not forty focused hours. Take a normal past week, look at the calendar, and subtract meetings, travel, admin, messages and breaks. For many founders the number left is closer to 20 to 25.
This is your focused budget. It is smaller than you hoped, and it is the real constraint on your business. If you need help finding where the rest goes, track a week with Toggl before you set the budget.
Create four buckets
Divide the hours into the kinds of work that matter to you. A common split is building, selling, admin and thinking. Use your own names. Four is enough, and more than six becomes hard to hold in your head.
Put numbers on the buckets
Decide how many hours each bucket gets this week. With 24 focused hours, a first version might be 10 for building, 8 for selling, 3 for admin and 3 for thinking. Do not aim for perfect. The numbers will be wrong for a few weeks, and a wrong budget you correct beats a feeling you never measure.
Base the split on what the business needs now. If revenue is the problem, selling gets the largest share.
Keep a reserve
Hold back about 20 percent of the budget as unassigned time. Things go wrong every week: a client emergency, a sick child, a task that takes twice as long. If you spend every hour in advance, the first surprise forces you into overtime or into dropping something important.
In the example above, that means planning 19 hours and leaving 5 free.
Put the budget in the calendar
Turn the numbers into blocks. Use Google Calendar to create a block for each bucket, the longest ones for building and thinking. Then use the weekly routine from How to plan a week that actually happens to fill the blocks with specific tasks.
A task that does not fit in its bucket waits, or replaces something else. That is the budget doing its job.
Price every new request in hours
When a new request arrives, estimate its cost in hours and say where those hours will come from. "A one hour call plus 30 minutes of preparation is 1.5 hours from selling. What comes out?" Often the answer is nothing, and the request is declined or moved. The practice is explained further in Say no on purpose, because every yes spends the budget.
Compare plan and actual on Friday
At the end of the week, look at where the hours went. Write the planned and actual hours for each bucket in a small table. The gap is information: you underestimated admin, or selling got squeezed. Adjust next week's budget, and use How to close your week and improve your system to do this in a few minutes.
Do not punish yourself for gaps. Use them to fix the budget.
Common mistakes
- Budgeting 40 hours. If you start with a number you never reach, you start every week behind.
- No reserve. One surprise breaks the whole plan.
- Too many buckets. You will not remember them, so you will not use them.
- Setting it once. The budget changes with the season of the business, so review it monthly.
- Treating the budget as a target to fill. Leaving unspent hours is fine.
How you know it works
You can say, on Monday morning, how many hours each bucket has this week and what you are not doing. By Friday your actual hours are within a few hours of the plan in each bucket. Over a month, the share of your time on the work that grows the business rises, and the feeling of having worked hard with nothing to show for it fades.
