Budgeting Time - A few points

While driving back home yesterday, a thought hit me. I think it was around the time I was hearing somebody talking on the radio about the business of selling money. The whole idea that for banks money was only a commodity that had to be sold to get more of the same back was pretty interesting. In many ways that puts me in the role of a person trying to budget time as a resource. Now this concept is a bit vague in my mind and probably I would expand on this as we go along but its interesting nonetheless. For any project, budgeting time works on many levels similar to budgeting money. You have to identify the activities that would consume time and then allocate time to it. So alongwith money and manpower and equipments etc, time acts as a resource. You need a certain minimum amount of time to do a job. This is expandable to a certain extent without affecting the other activity. However the one aspect that is different here is that time can be overlapped with activities working in parallel and still the total time spent would remain the same. This is a unique aspect that makes it more flexible than other resouces. If money were to behave like this then we would have situations wherein the cost of the project would be the cost of the longest activity and nothing more. So in effect time does not work in the strictly cumulative sense that money does.

The other aspect of time is how the projects work on an external calendar and how that affects the way time is distributed across an activity. This has a slightly lesser impact on the other resources. For example – a set of unforeseen holidays in a project would directly stretch the affected activity’s budgeted time but would have no direct effect on the cost, manpower and other resources. Its when we start quantifying time in cost terms that we start seeing a knockon effect on cost.

The other thing that skews the nature of our dealings with time is that even though we budget time, we are not remunerated back in time. We are remunerated in cost. This is the primary driver of the concept of the cash flow. If for a hypothetical case, remuneration were to be allowed in time too, we would have had a scenario of having time surplus and cash profit at the same time. Again this is a vague concept, but it is not totally new. We get salaries for our work but we also get holidays for every day of our work. The issue with time is that there is always a saving on time but never a time profit. So currently there is no system by which I can claim time or ask for a time credit for a task done early. Interestingly, sometime back I was reading about the concept of time debt wherein I would owe somebody the time that I promised and then wasted.

Another thing with time and the manner we do stuff and the issue of procrastination is to do with risk. Yesterday while talking to Ashwini, I again had a brainwave ( funny how most of these come when I am talking to her). The assertion that I make here is not new but we never perceive it in the manner I am putting it forward. And my assertion is that procrastination after a point of time exponentially increases the risk sensitivity of your budgeted time in the future. Let me make it clear with an example. If I had 4 days to pack my stuff up for a road trip, then by putting it off to the last moment would surely increase the risk sensitivity of my last moment. Any small impact on that last moment would have huge disproportional impact on my project completion. So while it is very convenient and tempting to procrastinate, it is a very costly strategy