168 is a weekly time-budget app for iPhone. Every week you start with 168 hours and assign them to four to eight accounts you care about — sleep, deep work, family, drift. You log what you actually did, and read a Sunday receipt that shows subtotal, drift, and balance.

How is 168 different from other time trackers?

Most time trackers are stopwatches. 168 is a budget. You decide the shape of the week before you spend it, and the Sunday receipt frames the week as money spent — not minutes counted. No streaks, no shame loops.

How much does 168 cost?

Nothing — no purchase and no subscription. No ads.

What devices does 168 support?

iPhone running iOS 17 or later.

How to budget your time like money

Budgeting your time like money is a five-step weekly cycle: allocate, log, review, adjust, repeat. It treats the 168 hours in a week as a fixed pool you assign to categories before the week starts, then reconcile at the end.

The mental shift is small but powerful: stop asking "do I have time for this?" (the answer is always no) and start asking "what am I willing to trade for this?" (the honest answer.)

Step 1 — Allocate

Pick 4–8 categories that matter to you. Common starting set:

Sleep
Work
Family / partner / kids
Health (exercise, doctor, cooking)
Friends
Reading or learning
Drift (phone, TV, scrolling)

Assign hours to each. Force yourself to make the numbers sum to 168. If you can't, you are over-budgeting — start cutting. The cuts are the point.

A budget that doesn't force a trade-off is not a budget; it's a wish list.

For a baseline, try: Sleep 56, Work 45, Family 20, Health 6, Friends 6, Drift 35. That is 168 exactly, and most people find it more honest than what they thought they were doing.

Step 2 — Log

Every day, log roughly what you did. The goal is honesty, not precision — half-hour granularity is plenty. Two formats work:

Tap-to-log — at the end of a chunk of time, tap the category and approximate the hours. Ten seconds.
Live timer — tap "start" when a session begins. Useful for deep work blocks where you genuinely don't know how long you'll go.

Don't log everything. Log the things you want to see in the receipt.

Step 3 — Review

At the end of the week — Sunday evening is traditional — read the receipt. For each category:

Subtotal: how many hours you actually spent
Variance: actual minus budget
Drift: hours that didn't fit anywhere

The variance is where the week tells you the truth. If you budgeted 6 hours of exercise and logged 1, that is real information. So is logging 18 hours of "drift" you don't remember.

Step 4 — Adjust

Two failure modes, two fixes:

You missed a category by a lot. Either the budget was unrealistic (cut it next week) or your week ran on autopilot (raise the friction — schedule the gym, put the book by the bed).
A category took more than you planned. Decide whether that was right. Sometimes a 60-hour work week was the correct call this week. Just say so in next week's plan.

The adjustment is not punishment. It is the ledger correcting itself.

Step 5 — Repeat

Monday morning, start clean. The week resets. There are no streaks, no carryover, no compounding penalties. Whatever happened last week is information for this week's budget, and that is all.

Why "like money" matters

Money budgeting works because the unit is commensurable — twenty dollars for groceries is genuinely the same kind of thing as twenty dollars for streaming. Hours have the same property: an hour of sleep, an hour of work, and an hour of scrolling are all hours. The math is honest in a way that "tasks completed" or "habits checked" never quite is.

The tradeoff becomes visceral. You don't cheat on a budget; you just see, in real numbers, what you chose.

Essay — On the budget of time

Guides

168 is the cycle above as an iPhone app — allocate, log, review, repeat, every week. Get it on the App Store.