I was trying, the other day, to explain to a friend why one homeschooling scheduling method (Managers of Their Homes) completely turned me off, while another (A Mother’s Rule of Life) appealed so much to me.
The first (MOTH) entails making a detailed, regimented schedule for each child in the family and for the mother, budgeting time in tedious detail, the way a money-conscious family might budget spending down to the last penny. If I could follow it, it might work magic, I think. It really is rather amazing how much time the author manages to carve out for her own projects, considering the demands on her time as a homeschooling mother of… was it eight? Hers is a program that promises you will be able to "get it ALL done."
The second entails setting up a rule modeled after the Benedictine rule, focusing on transitions from one activity to the next and on making time for five basic priorities, in order of their primacy.
What is wrong with the "time budget?" Time is a limited resource after all. Why can’t it be budgeted and tracked like money? Why does the analogy break down?
Trying to articulate it helped me figure it out. Despite the saying, time is not, in fact, money. In many ways it’s very unlike money.
You can imagine a family’s money supply as a kind of reservoir. Income enters, filling it up; expenditures deplete it. It is indeed possible to count every penny that comes in and control every penny that goes out. Furthermore, though some families’ options are more limited than others, an earner can change the money inflow, speeding it up by working more or by doing higher-priced work. And a family can alter the outflow, by spending more or less.
A family can reduce the effects of a variable or unpredictable inflow by saving up enough of a buffer that the outflow can remain steady while the contents of the reservoir fluctuate. And if large expenditures are foreseen in the future, a family can save money, building up the reservoir, during the times that expenditures are low.
In short, money is conserved. As we used to write in Chemical Engineering 100:
IN – OUT + GENERATION = ACC
That is, the paychecks minus the spending, plus the growth in value of what you already own, equals the accumulation of wealth.
But time is not conserved. It is impossible to accumulate. It is impossible to generate. And most importantly (neglecting the effects of superfast vehicles and proximity to large masses), every man, woman, and child in the world acquires it, and spends it, at the exact same rate. No self-help technique, college degree, or choice of career ever changes that. We each get one thousand four hundred and forty minutes every day.
One’s supply of time is not, in short, like a reservoir. It’s more like a river, and we stand on the bank. We can turn wheels with its momentum, we can dip our faces in and drink, we can throw in a line, we can climb aboard and float downstream; but we can never have what has already flowed by, nor grab what the current hasn’t yet carried within our reach.
And that’s why the budget analogy must ultimately break down.
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