What To Do When Your Time Budget Gets Off Track

We’ve all been there: You get the dreaded phone call from school that someone has thrown up. You get sick yourself. The car gets a flat tire. Life happens. And the best laid time budget can easily get off track. But the good news is that a time budget is flexible. As an Enneagram One, flexibility isn’t my strong suit. Having a tool like a time budget helps me keep calm and carry on when my plans get thrown off. Here’s how I adjust!

When Things Go Wrong

Remember what we said about determining how many hours to budget? Reality is your friend! When things go wrong, update your time budget to reflect your new reality. When someone gets sick, chances are you’ll need to cancel some plans. Bad news: you might be cleaning up vomit. Good (?) news: you’re deleting the 45-minute line item for piano lessons out of your budget, so you have time for that!

Take a look at the next few days and see what’s inevitably going to be canceled. Consider what you can consolidate. If one kid needs to get picked up early from school, go ahead and pull the other one out too. If you need to run to the grocery store for Tylenol, can you grab grocery essentials for the week?

What if you’re the one who gets sick? I confess that I am not great at prioritizing rest. I am working on it! My husband usually tries to frame it as my “job” to help keep me on track, as in “please complete this task of resting so that you can get back to your other tasks.” I go through the same steps of looking to see what’s going to get canceled because I’m sick and deleting those. Then I consider what I can outsource. Maybe Dad or Grandma does the piano lesson or Publix run. And then I think about what I can do while I’m “resting.” Since I budget time to read every week, I’ll probably prioritize that. I’ll watch the show I budgeted for. If I’m up for sitting at my computer, I’ll try to knock out some admin stuff.

Sometimes, after a couple days of sickness, whether it’s me or the kids, I’m far enough behind on my time budget that I know I’m not going to be able to “catch up” that week, even with deleted activities. That’s ok! Because I want to be working with reality, I try to adjust my expectations—and my numbers—for what feels realistic for the days left in the week.

As I’m adjusting the numbers, I try to prioritize the things that will stay done. For example, I like to spend about 20 minutes picking up my house every day. But if I don’t do that three days in a row, it probably won’t take me an hour to catch up. That’s because I’m usually picking up the same things every day (sigh). So I might skip the clean up for a few days and make a batch of waffles so we have breakfast available instead.

When Something Fun Comes Up

As an Enneagram One, the pivot to fun can actually be harder for me than confronting a crisis. Actively choosing to disrupt my plan can feel really stressful in the moment. But I’m almost always glad I did it—and I usually find that my plan can flex to accommodate it. For example, I got a last-minute lunch invitation recently from some school friends. I hesitated about saying yes, but I knew that I would enjoy the time with fellow grown-ups and my kids would enjoy seeing friends. I also knew that I had 45 minutes budgeted for lunch and 30 minutes budgeted for being outside with the kids. The restaurant the friend suggested had a great patio, so I suspected we’d be eating outside.

Sure enough, we had a great lunch on the (covered!) patio, and the kids had fun splashing in the puddles after the surprise rainstorm moved on. All told, we were gone for about two hours. So it took a little more time than I budgeted for lunch and outside, but we were within the buffer I build into my day. And it was well worth it to get out of the house and enjoy the company and fresh air!

Some days, something even more time-consuming can pop up. But I’m learning that saying yes to fun almost always pays dividends in happier kids, better-napping toddlers, and brighter moods. And “my mom was always on top of the laundry” isn’t really what I want my kids to remember about their childhoods. So I apply some of the same pivot principles as I do when things go wrong: what’s going to be covered anyway by this activity? A meal? Time outside? What can I move to a different day? If it’s not all going to happen, what will stay done that I can prioritize? If I give these hours a different job than I had originally planned, will I get a better return on my investment?

When Things Get Cancelled

Sometimes, you aren’t the one rearranging the plans. Someone else’s kid gets sick. A light dusting of snow shuts down the city. A friend has a last-minute emergency. Cancelled plans are an introvert’s love language, and they can definitely benefit your time budget. Yes, there might be disappointment (so the extroverts claim). And yes, you will probably “spend” that time in a different week if you reschedule. But for now, go ahead and delete the item out of your time budget and enjoy the windfall.

What do you do with the extra time? Something fun, hopefully! If you’ve gotten a little behind on what you budgeted for the week, this is a good chance to catch up. If you just have extra time, consider whether you had anything fun you were hoping to do that you weren’t able to fit into the initial budget. I like to keep a short list of items I’m hoping to fit in if time allows. Hopefully these activities will soften the blow for the extroverts among us!

Remember, a time budget exists to help you—especially to help you have more fun! You don’t exist to make your life perfectly match the time budget. If something fun comes up, try to go for it! If plans change, let reality be your guide and see what you can still do. One cancellation doesn’t have to ruin all the fun!

How do you respond to changed plans? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Do you know how to drive in the snow? Let me know in the comments!