I think the largest part of the problem with trying that is going to be granularity. Every dollar has a name is one of the tenets of the financial strategy. What's the equivalent of a dollar?
-wraith808
You could also do the same with your personal time. Just think of it as an inventory item, with an expiration date, associated cost, and sell price and you're on your way.
All that's important is that you understand your unit(s) of measure and consistently apply them. AFter that, budgeting and determining whether you're "gaining" or "losing" becomes relatively easy to do.
Now here's an extra credit exercise: How could the above concepts be applied to personal time management when not thinking solely in terms of financial opportunity and cost? Why would it be worth it for you to start thinking of it that way? How would you do it if you decided to? 
-40hz
Yes, I am thinking of it in terms of personal productivity, which I have been tracking for some time, to understand patterns.
One thing I did figure out is that the "unit" is a very complicated thing. What needs to be budgeted is not just time but a unit of "attention" or "concentration" (some kind of mental energy, though it depends on physical energy as well), which is not equally distributed across time.
My ability to concentrate and produce high quality work solving difficult problems is the highest on Monday morning, then it drops after lunch, might go up a bit in the late afternoon, and then goes down in the early evening. And this resource gradually depletes across the week. So it might take 2 or 3x as much time on a Friday to to produce the same quality of work as with 1 hr of Monday morning time (if at all possible).
So it doesn't matter what my hourly rate is, the fact is that the opportunity cost of Monday 9-12 might we worth the entire Friday.
One system I was trying to devise for this was to use different sized post-it notes to plan my daily tasks, to represent the diminishing value of hours in a day. The 9-10 or 10-11 post-it note would be the biggest, and then the others get gradually smaller. If you consider lunch and other breaks, we might be talking about 4 or 5 pieces of paper (the largest ones may represent bigger chunks of time, such as 60 min or 90 min).
The point of this is to remind myself that difficult and high value tasks should be done in the morning, and that I shouldn't even think of putting those on the smaller notes in late afternoon, as it's unlikely I'd have enough mental energy to finish the task or produce good quality work.
These different-sized pieces of paper then represent a kind of a depreciating financial instrument of different values. They represent different values in terms of possible return on investment and opportunity cost, if I waste them (don't convert them into a valuable output) or plan the wrong type of activity.
So I can take these "bills" and invest them into activities. I guess one could try to put a financial value on these notes, to express the different opportunity costs.
I have tried to re-create this electronically by using Gingko app's virtual index cards, but as they are all the same size, it didn't quite work.
Using two Google Calendars (budget and actual) could be one way to try to combine the above ideas with the YNAB method. One could plan out the day and week in the "budget calendar" and share those events with the "actual calendar," and then move the events in the actual calendar to the times (and durations) and dates when they had actually got done (if ever). At the end of the month (or at any moment, really) one could view both budget and actual side-by-side, and learn from it. "Not completed" tasks would need to roll over into the new month.
So a custom-made software would allow one to assign the higher monetary value to certain blocks of time, and then drop those blocks onto the budget calendar and assign specific tasks to invest those blocks in. Then the actual calendar could allow one to record how that investment was actually spent, and record the estimated value of the output (i.e. whether the unit of concentration was spent fruitfully). Perhaps total outputs and wasted effort could be somehow calculated at the end of each day, week, and month, and perhaps even monitor them as the day is progressing.
There would be a lot of advantages to do this in Google Calendar, so the ideal solution would be some kind of a browser extension or plug-in that could overlay the exta features.
The point of it all would be to get better at budgeting time and mental effort, to achieve maximum productivity with highest quality outputs. This of course also means that time for rest, exercise, or less demanding work would also need to be allocated appropriately.
I still haven't read up on YNAB though, so would need to do that first to see how all this could be related to it.
Recent Posts
There is a sufficiency of mystery in my life.