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.

Money is renewable. Time isn't.

You wouldn't spend forty thousand dollars without thinking about it. You probably spent that many hours last year without once writing them down.

We built whole industries to count our money. 401(k) projections, financial advisors, gas station receipts auto-imported into apps, the IRS asking every spring exactly where each dollar went. The smallest movements of a checking account are observed by software you don't even remember installing.

For time, we built almost nothing. The calendar is an appointment book — it tells you where you are supposed to be, not where you actually were. Most adults, asked what they did at four o'clock last Wednesday, cannot answer. The hours are spent without a ledger, without a category, often without a witness.

The asymmetry is total. The renewable resource gets the surveillance. The non-renewable one gets nothing.

Money is the renewable resource. This is easy to forget, because it sometimes runs out. But money compounds. It can be earned back. People go bankrupt at thirty and end up millionaires at fifty; that is unusual, but not impossible. The dollar you spent badly today can, in principle, be replaced.

Time can't. Every hour you spent today is gone, and the universe does not refund. Next Monday you will be issued a new 168 hours, but this week's 168 — the actual sequence of moments you just lived through — has expired. There is no version of next week that contains this Tuesday afternoon.

"Time is money" is the lie that broke the relationship. It suggests the two can be traded freely. They can't. Money buys time only at the margin: delivery instead of the grocery store, business class instead of coach. Money cannot buy youth. Money cannot buy a Tuesday in your forties back. Bezos at seventy is seventy.

Money is what you can earn back. Time is what you can't.

And yet we built the entire apparatus of personal finance to manage the resource that recovers, and almost nothing to manage the one that doesn't. This is not a moral failure. It is a category error — a basic miscalibration about which thing is actually scarce.

What would it look like to run your week the way you (claim to) run your money?

It would look familiar: a weekly budget allocated by category, logging through the day, a sit-down on Sunday to compare what you planned with what actually happened, a quarterly reallocation when the numbers drift from your priorities. The whole pattern is borrowed wholesale from financial planning. It works for the same reason: forward-looking allocation beats backward-looking explanation.

Most people don't actually do this for money either. Budget apps die in March every year. The good intention runs out before the practice does. Fine. That is normal.

The difference is that with money, we at least feel guilty about it. We know we should be doing it. With time, we don't even feel guilty, because we've been told that hours just happen to us.

They don't. They are spent. By you, or to you.

You will not run out of money this week, no matter how badly you spend it. You will run out of time.

Further reading from Vol. 01:

Essays

On the budget of time

Guides