In case you didn't know, I write several short posts like this each week on Instagram - check them out @diegofooter.

IMPACT-BASED TIME ALLOCATION

In the past, I had trouble getting everything done.

Part of the problem I realized was that I was over-allocating time to tasks that didn’t pay*. I don’t know why I missed this. I had talked to enough farmers to know this should be the case, but somehow, I missed the disconnect in my life.

*Pay is how I am currently prescribing value for work-related tasks. My businesses are value-based, so accounting for “work that matters” is already baked in.

One example would be spending eight hours on something one week, the tenth most important thing to do. A task with less impact was getting a disproportionate share of the hours - Zone IV.

This realization was huge because it gave me a set of boundaries to fit my tasks into. I did this exercise using my income streams as the primary impact factor. The more income a stream brought in, the more attention it got.

I looked at everything that generated my income and gave it a rough percentage on a pie chart. I could group everything into three slices of pie: 60, 30, and 10. Income stream A gets 60% of the time.

Now, I have a set of constraints to overlay onto my weekly calendar: the constraints have to fit into the total amount of time I have available.

Applying to a Schedule

The next question is how you apply those percentages. To figure that out, we need to know how many work hours are available that week.

Knowing your total availability is important because the 80 hours you have to work within a week determine how many hours you can work in a given category. 60% of 80 is much different than someone who has 20 hours to work with.

From my own experience, I have around 35 hours of productive work each week. Productive work is defined as focused, dedicated work time. One hour of productive work time is surprisingly long.

I know that once I go over 35 hours, I am much less productive, and those hours are only good for low-value work—cleaning my office and deleting files. We won’t count the low-value work for now. Often that can get done when it gets done - think fill time at the end of days.

Allocating Time

Now we have the two parts I need to start allocating time—the total time available and the percentage of time each income stream gets. 60% gets at least 21 hours, 30% gets 11 hours, and the 10% category gets around 3 hours.

This framework lets you visually see if things are in range. Often, our brains are uncalibrated and based on emotion, so we do what we want and deal with the consequences later. Now we have structure. Everything has to fit into that. There is no time binging a tasty, chunky, task-filled pint of Ben and Jerry’s Fun and Busy because we know that will push us way out of range.

#toorigid

#nofun

#toocomplicated

These are guides, just like the yellow and white lines on the road. No one is saying to stay exactly between them or twelve inches to the right of the white line. Stay between the lines.

In my example, the key is that I can’t have a 10% category use up 50% of the hours just because I want to do the activities in the 10% category. My 10% category needs to be around three hours per week. That could mean two or five, but it can’t mean fifteen.

An example is a business owner trying to start a YouTube channel and spending half their time on that to earn 1/20th of the income. Sure, it could work one day, but you are better off putting the effort into the thing that actually earns you money now and trying to grow that.

Why not? I have already decided (with myself) that A is more important than B, and B is more important than C. If I give C more hours than it should have, I will likely use emotion to justify it, and emotion usually makes the wrong choice. C eats last. Rigid but fair.

I can only throw extra hours at that category if everything else is done or if I have the chance to greatly increase its output. Maybe I think I can double the output of C after a month of dedicated work. That might be worth considering if it doesn’t hurt A and B too much.

Every week can be broken down differently, but this gave me a rough framework to use for scheduling.

A farm example could be based on crops. Zucchini is our 10th most popular crop. If that’s the case, they should take up 10% of the total time you allocate to crop care (seeding, cultivation, harvesting). For this example, let’s assume you have unlimited land because that math could get tricky if you have limited land, and it becomes a growing A or B in the same space question.

You could also break it up by perceived importance. I question using the word perceived here because your perception could be wrong.

Hypothetical categories for a farm could be: Growing - Fieldwork - Cultivation: 20% Harvesting and Packing: 30% Sales and Marketing: 25% Business Planning and Administration: 10% Farm Cleanup: 5% Farm Improvement - In Season: 5% Non-critical Repairs and Maintenance: 5% *These are my made-up percentages - don’t use them as a source of truth.

You have 120 total labor hours (including staff) to work with weekly.

Harvesting gets the most hours and the first pick on the schedule. It eats first.

Farm cleanup gets some of the least - done at the end of the day as fill.

This framework eliminates the random I want to get chickens and feed them with black soldier fly larvae. Cool, but do it in your non-work free time.

Execution

Now, I have a total number of available hours and constraints on how I should use those hours.

On Sunday, I can sit down and review what I need to do for the week and try to schedule those tasks in the correct time slots.

First, I look at my week and see how many work hours I have available each day - schedules change.

Monday - Mostly A Tuesday - Mostly A Wednesday - Mostly B with A

If it’s late on Monday and you finish all of your A tasks with no room or brainpower for more, you can use that time for something else in a different category.

Don’t worry about being crazy rigid. The percentages can expand and contract, the key is prioritization. A eats first.

If you want to get really nerdy with it, you can track your time in a time tracker—I use Toggl Track.

This is Simple

This framework provides a solid template for most people to use for scheduling. It’s simple, easy to understand, and low-tech.

Sure, once you get into daily planning, you can get all fancy with tech and software, but that’s less important than correctly allocating your time.

Overall, this changed my life in a way. It decreased stress because it took a whole category of to-dos off the list. The least important category doesn’t have much room, so I no longer have to worry about the 500 things on that list. Essentially, I decided they don’t matter that much. That is incredibly freeing.

Specialization is another benefit we can explore in a future letter. When you prioritize something and do more of it, you get better at it. Ideally, you want to be the best at what matters most to your business. This avoids becoming an expert in something that doesn’t matter.

Let me know if you want to learn more about this subject.

Thanks for reading; I hope it helps.

Diego

P.S. If this will resonate with someone, please share it.

Did you know I have several podcasts?

Carrot Cashflow here.

Farm Small Farm Smart here.

Farm Small Farm Smart Daily here.

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