#file this

Quality of Life (looking after myself)

Immediate Obligations (work)

True Expenses (housework, admin, distractions - infrequent but inevitable)

Just for Fun (relaxing and fun for morale)

These follow the YNAB principles of 1) order by priority and 2) be realistic.

Minor Categories

Then I set up some minor categories, which (as with normal YNAB) took some experimentation to figure out what works for me. I currently have:

Quality of Life

Food

Sleep

Rest / Podcast Dark Time

Shower

Social Time

Fitness

Immediate Obligations (for my current project - my dissertation)

Primary sources

Scholarship

Discussing Project (more important than you think)

Writing Up

Organisation

Bibliography Management

Meeting with Supervisor

True Expenses (where sperge comes in)

Distractions

Recovery

Admin

Household Tasks

Reconciliation (for when I can’t remember what I did)

Transportation

Health

Stuff I Forgot To Budget For (still an important category, if hardly ever needed if you’re budgeting correctly)

Just for Fun

Film and TV

Board Gaming

Gaming

Blogging

Day Trip

Dining Out

Budgeting Time

So each time it gets to midnight, I have 24 “pounds” to spend of time. I try to allocate time realistically. It tends to look a bit like:

Sleep - 10

Rest - 2

Shower - 0.50

Social time - 2

5-6 hours split between relevant work categories (tomorrow will be something like Organisation - 4 and Writing Up - 2)

Distractions - 1

Household Tasks - 0.25

Film and TV - 2

Board Gaming - 1

Gaming - 1

That won’t add up to 24 but it’s just to give you an idea of the most common categories I use and how I weight them. I try to be realistic about what I’ll need. Also, I find balancing my time out like this makes me feel less intimidated about doing my work. If I do find the time allocated intimidating, sometimes I leave some time in ‘To Be Budgeted’ and then allocate it to work categories after I reach my short-term goal of 2 hours or something like that.

Transferring Time

Like normal YNAB, I move things around between these categories depending on what I actually do end up spending my time on (often there’s an extra hour in sleep accounting for extra time spent waking up or winding down for sleep, for example).  So I’ll spend 9-11 hours on sleep, maybe 2.5 hours on social time and only 1 hour on Film/TV/Youtube. Just like normal YNAB, it works because it is flexible.

I find I generally stick to the kinds of times I set myself, so in that way it’s really useful for setting out my intentions for my day, and reminding me of them during the day. I’m less likely to worry about spending an extra hour on Film/TV because I still have enough hours left in the day for my work time. The only thing which matters is that I get to it during that day. 

The mobile app is really useful for quickly transferring time between categories. YNAB is especially good for this because it’s designed for you to allocate all of your resources and then move those finite resources between purposes. 

Net Worth = Remaining Time

Now here comes the sneaky bit - I use my ‘net worth’ as a measure of how many hours remain unaccounted for, and match it to the remaining hours in the day. So if it’s 8pm, my net worth should be £4.00. I update it every half hour to two hours or so, so it’s not too hard to estimate (or even time exactly if I’m using my phone’s timer) how much time I’ve spent and remember what I did, because it’s recent. I also think more consciously about how I spend (or budget) my time, so I have plans in mind.

Inputting Transactions of Time

Each thing you do is inputted as a transaction of time. So if I spend half an hour typing out this blog post, I will put:

Amount: 0.50

Payee: Tumblr

Category: Blogging

Account: Time

Date: [leave unchanged]

Repeat: never

Remember to clear it, or you’ll have a really irritating uncleared balance which will take ages to go fix!

Time Conversion Table

When inputting transactions of time, you have to transfer units in base 60 to units in base 10, but it’s not too hard. 

15 minutes is £0.25

20 minutes is £0.33

30 minutes is £0.50 (I use this most often)

40 minutes is £0.66

45 minutes is £0.75

1 hour is £1.00

It’s harder to work out 10 minutes but I figure it’s around £0.16. But I hardly ever need it so I don’t worry too much.

The Mobile App

I manage this basically entirely on my phone. Partly, it looks weird in the desktop version because I’m so used to using the time one on my phone. Also because this is something where the mobile app is really in a league of its own - helping me keep track of things in real time, on the go.

I keep meaning to get around to look at the reports on the desktop version so I can see how I’ve been spending my time, but mostly I can see it because of how much I’ve budgeted for each activity.

Downsides

Not many, really. The only two are in relation to the actual money budget. I look at it less often, and sometimes I accidentally clear an uncleared payment due to muscle memory of inputting time transactions! But I still look at it every day, and the mistakes are pretty infrequent.

Upsides

Then again, some days I feel like my actual task is really very simple - pointing out that this evidence exists at all, and presenting some initial approaches to understanding it and where it came from.

I wish I could be more focused. What I needed to do was to be able to focus very specifically on a few sites and point out their connections and how they made sense.

I wish that I could interpret them to a deeper level.

What I can do is show what they were associated with in Byzantium, and the degree of longevity they held. My other big argument is about whether there were really that many differences between Latin Christendom and Byzantium at all in art. It’s already been suggested by Thomas F.X. Noble, where he found that attitudes towards art didn’t differ much in either area regarding iconoclasm. In the same way, arguments I’ve seen made about, for instance, Byzantine tendencies towards relief sculpture, are also true of Anglo-Saxon sculpture. I think this just became a lot more about 2D imagery in general. My other point is that I’ve been thinking about this as Byzantine art the whole time, but is there a lot more scholarship on this as early Christian art? Because they were basically the same thing. I don’t really have the time to research it, but conversion as a vector for Byzantine artistic influence is really interesting. Although ecclesiastical sources are only one place influence shows up, association with Christianity in politics was hardly a bad thing in that era.

I think that my project now is about seeing what I can say with what I’ve looked at. I was never going to be able to fully research it, but what I can do is demonstrate potential for further research, and try to question some of the assumptions that people have about it.