Professor Jordan Etkin explains how “time-first budgeting” can help people improve performance and set smarter goals

It’s a familiar pattern: You begin your morning with a lengthy to-do list and a plan to complete it, and somehow the day ends with unfinished tasks and a sense that time slipped away. Is there a better way?

Professor Jordan Etkin, a consumer behavior scholar at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, explores why people consistently misjudge how much they can accomplish. Drawing on her research on motivation and performance, she proposes a simple shift: “time-first budgeting.” Instead of starting with goals and assuming the time will follow, she suggests beginning with a realistic assessment of how much time you have, then allocating it across tasks. 

Etkin finds that people routinely overestimate how much they can do because they ignore real time constraints. In experiments, participants’ estimates of how long tasks would take exceeded their available time by as much as 50%. When people instead budget their time first, they set more realistic goals and report greater progress. 

Etkin explains that people often fail to account for everything a task involves, from transitions to competing priorities. “If I'm thinking about a workout, I might not account for the getting to the gym piece, the washing my hands afterwards piece, needing a few minutes to clean up and move on with my day,” she said. Time-first budgeting works because it flips that process: “What if we start by thinking about what time I have available, and given that available time, how much time am I willing to spend on those different types of goals?”

The approach applies broadly, from managing personal workloads to professional settings where colleagues depend on what you deliver. As Etkin puts it, “we can’t do things we don’t have time for,” making it critical to treat time as a finite resource when setting expectations.

Duke Fuqua Insights features digestible conversations with our faculty about the most impactful research from their careers, including studies they teach in Fuqua classes. New episodes every other week in season.

For more from Duke Fuqua, visit us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and the Duke Fuqua Insights newsletter.