Yes I’ve been busy lately. In fact that’s what I wanted to blog about.

A while back, I was going through my finances to see how much I spent on different things. I wanted to know what my budget should be. When I’d go through the credit card statements, I’d see utilities, food, and other fixed costs. Restaurants, entertainment, etc. But there would always be one or two oddball one-off purchases (e.g. plane tickets one month, a new refrigerator another month, a new PC some other month, etc.) that I didn’t want to include in the budget. “That fridge was a one-time thing, I shouldn’t include that $500 in my budget,” I’d say. But each month there’s be some other random purchase that wasn’t accounted for in the budget I drew up. And so these one-time purchases kept blowing my carefully detailed budget.

I eventually realized that I needed some sort of $500 “Random” or “Miscellaneous” category in my monthly budget because it dawned on me that there was always some important — but new and unaccounted for — item being purchased. So after I restructured my budget to assume that I’d “buy a fridge each month” so to speak, things worked out better.

Since starting DevelopmentNow almost two years ago, I’ve come to a similar realization about what takes up some of my time — I can’t assume I’ll be able to spend 100% of my time coding, because there’s always something that comes up as part of running a business. Interviewing job candidates, talking with clients, purchasing things for the office, working with my accountant to incorporate the business, writing contracts, updating proposals, upgrading my site hosting — the list goes on. All that stuff needs to be done, and probably takes up at least a few hours a week, but it’s hard for me to know exactly what those 8-12 hours a month will be spent doing ahead of time. I can guess, but I won’t know for sure. And it’s different each month.

But I now know that I need to permanently budget for that time so that I don’t overcommit myself. So if you find yourself repeatedly crunched by unexpected timesinks, you may want to add a good ol’ 10-hour “Random Stuff” block to your monthly budget, too.

How to minimize the amount of random stuff, however, is a topic for another day.