STEP 5

CALCULATE YOUR TIME NEEDED FOR ESSENTIALS

WEEK 4

TIME REQUIRED: 45 to 60 minutes

MENTAL “SPOONS” REQUIRED: 2 per hour

In money management, there is the 50-30-20 rule that suggests you put 50% of your after-tax income toward needs, 30% toward wants, and the remaining 20% toward savings.

In energy management, in order to help you live in your OPTIMAL ENERGY ZONE as much as possible, there is the 50-50 rule that recommends that you spend at least 50% of your time (or at least 12 hours per day) on essentials (on real self-care)- sleep, breaks, hygiene, nourishment, and other daily essentials - and the remaining 50% or less of your time on choice activities - work, exercise, relationships, volunteering, passion projects, leisure activities, screen time, and other choice activities.

Because… Everyone needs:

  • Sleep (7 to 9 hours per night),

  • Breaks/idle time (2 hours per day or 15 minutes for every 2 hours awake),

  • Nourishment (food & drink), plus

  • A minimum amount of daily hygiene & grooming.

Do you know how much time it takes YOU daily to take good care of yourself? To take good care of all of your essentials?

In STEP 5, you will determine how much time YOU need to set aside daily for all of your essentials.

STEP 1: To start, you will need to gather the following worksheets:

STEP 2: Then, you will transcribe your functional capacity scores (how well you functioned mentally & physically each day) from your Weekly SLEEP Journal from WEEK 2 onto your Time Spent on ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES worksheet in its two (2) bottom rows entitled “Today, mentally I was” and “Today, physically I was”.

STEP 3: Next, you will consult with your Daily ACTIVITIES Journals, and one activity at a time, you will write the number of minutes it took you to perform in the correct box on your ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES Counting Sheet. You will continue this until you have transcribed all of your activity minutes for the week onto your ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES Counting Sheet (see an example of a filled out ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES Counting Sheet HERE).

STEP 4: All the boxes on your ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES Counting Sheet correspond to one box on your Time Spent on ESSSENTIAL ACTIVITIES worksheet. To fill out your Time Spent on ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES worksheet, you will use the following formula: # of hours spent = total # of minutes ÷ 60. Once you have filled out all the boxes in the first 6 rows of your worksheet, one day of the week at a time, you will add up your time spent on all essentials to give you your daily totals (see an example of a filled out Time Spent on ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES worksheet HERE).

STEP 5: To determine how much time YOU need to set aside daily for all of your essentials, you will need to look at the information contained in your Weekly SLEEP Journals and in your filled out Time Spent on ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES worksheet to work on your Time Needed Daily for ESSENTIALS worksheet.

To decide the total number of hours YOU need to set aside daily for each essential activity, you will either:

  1. Write the highest amount of time it took you to perform the activity (from your Weekly SLEEP Journals and your Time Spent on ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES worksheet),

  2. Or, if you feel like you were generally rushed to perform the activity, write an estimated amount of time you think you would have needed to perform the activity without feeling rushed,

  3. Or finally, if you feel like there were one or more days where the time spent on the activity was way out of the norm for you, then you will discard all of the outlier values and write the highest amount of time remaining on your worksheet (see an example of a filled out Time Needed Daily for ESSENTIALS worksheet HERE).