Time Budget Calculator

Spreadsheet & guided video ‧ Instant download ‧ Pay what you can

No idea where time goes in your business?

It’s hard to think strategically when each day feels like a hurried blur, the to-do list is a mile long and everything feels like a priority.

Then some marketing guru insists you must somehow also post several times a week, send weekly newsletters, write two blog posts a month, do SEO, run ads… on top of the real work with your clients.

It can feel impossible to fit everything in without constantly rushing or working after hours — or feeling like you’re never doing enough.

You likely know marketing is key to a financially stable business, but have no idea how much time you can realistically dedicate to it each week, or what’s even the right amount.

 

The first step to creating a sustainable marketing strategy is figuring out how much time you actually have to work on it

The Time Budget Calculator is a simple yet powerful tool that helps you step back from the endless list of things you could be doing and look at the bigger picture.

You’ll map out your available working hours, see where your time is currently going, and discover how much time you truly have each week for billable hours (y’know, the stuff that brings money in the door), versus sales and marketing… and… everything else.

Think of it like a financial budget, but for your time.

Getting clear on the numbers helps you stop ‘spending’ time where it’s wasted and cramming more things into your day. It uncovers the broad patterns of your work week, empowering you to create a minimalist marketing system that fits your lifestyle and real-world capacity.

 

This tool won’t create your marketing strategy for you.

But it will spit out the definitive number of hours you have each week to work on marketing – so you can add time into your schedule and get realistic about which marketing activities you do and don’t have capacity for. (Byeeee, time-sucking platforms that don’t contribute to your biz bottom line. 👋)

Many of us underestimate how long things take, thus shouldering too much and feeling like a failure when we can’t get through it all. Time budgeting brings all those shadowy corners to light so you can identify problem areas and make conscious decisions to reclaim and redirect your time.

 

 

Plug in your numbers and learn where your time goes — so you can make more intentional choices

This fillable time-budgeting spreadsheet and guided how-to video help you:

• See your actual working capacity and avoid designing a business and marketing system around unrealistic hours and workloads.
• Get a bird’s-eye view of where your time goes each week across six key business areas, including billable hours.
• Work out what percentage of your working time is currently going towards marketing, and how that stacks up against recommended amounts for your phase of business.
• Identify where you’re over-allocated and trying to fit more work into your week than you actually have time for.

And because this is a permaculture-informed tool, you’ll be using observation before action — looking at patterns in your business before deciding what needs to change. (Aka: practising permaculture’s ‘design from patterns to details‘ principle.)

 

This calculator is perfect for you if:

✅ You’re a small business owner, freelancer or sole trader who knows marketing is important but feels certain it shouldn’t swallow your whole life or steal so many precious hours from your core work.

✅ You’re tired of conventional marketing advice that assumes you have unlimited time, energy and resources, or that unrealistically estimates how long things take. (Like, who’s really able to batch-create a week’s worth of social media content in just one hour? Not me.)

✅ You’re a parent, carer, chronically ill or just bloody tired, and 40-hour work weeks — or even 30-hour ones — are out of the question.

✅ You’re feeling harried, rushed, like there aren’t enough hours in the day, or like your business requires more hours than you realistically have to give.

✅ You’re building or refining your marketing strategy and this time, you want to make sure it’s realistic and sustainable to implement. Which starts with knowing how many hours you can dedicate to it each week.

✅ You want to make more intentional decisions about what to keep, simplify or ditch in your business.

 

But it’s not a good fit if:

❌ You can’t be bothered thinking about where your time is currently going. This is a permaculture approach to time budgeting that responds to your unique context and needs — it can only tell you how much time you can spend on marketing each week after you’ve input information about your current working approach.

❌ You want a productivity system designed to help you squeeze more work into your existing hours. This is more about getting clear on where the time is going, so you can strategically lighten the to-do list load, if you need to.

❌ You’re determined to cram every possible marketing channel into your strategy, regardless of your capacity. That’s a one-way ticket to burnout, my friend…

❌ You have a large team. The tool works best when you’re accounting for one or two people’s hours. (It can easily accommodate non-standard work weeks, though.)

 

 

Inside the Time Budget Calculator

You’ll get access to:

• A ready-to-use spreadsheet to calculate your working hours and business activities.
• A guided video and pre-filled example showing how the calculator can be used in a real-life small business context.
• A simple Weekly Summary that automatically shows how your time is distributed across six key areas of your business.
• A ‘capacity check‘ that shows whether you’re currently over or under your available working hours.
• Guidance for how much of your time should be dedicated to billable hours to ensure sustainable income.
• Recommended percentages for how much time to spend on marketing, depending on your stage of business (new, growing, established).
• A solid answer on how many hours you need for marketing each week, calculated according to your unique circumstances, so you can schedule time in your calendar.

All delivered instantly via a 4-page guide, 18-minute how-to video and a fillable Excel spreadsheet. No AI is needed to run any part of this calculator (yay).

 

✱ What ‘pay what you can’ means

This guide is offered as a ‘pay what you can’ resource because I truly believe every ethical small business owner needs and will benefit from it. I don’t want money to be a barrier to accessing this crucial knowledge.

That means it’s free, if that’s what you need.

But I encourage you to throw some dollars into the kitty when purchasing, if you can. I can only keep offering accessible resources like this because most folks choose to give a little.

The recommended payment for this calculator is $7.

You can read my full Accessible Pricing Policy here.