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.

Time budgeting vs money budgeting

You can budget a week of time the same way you budget a month of money. The shape is identical. You list the categories that matter. You assign a number to each. You log what you spent. You read the totals on Sunday and adjust for the week that comes next.

For a long time I thought that was all there was to it — that time budgeting was just money budgeting with hours instead of dollars. The mechanics map cleanly. A "rent" line in a money budget is the same shape as a "sleep" line in a time budget: a number you assigned in advance, a real number that shows up at the end of the cycle, and a variance you read with some combination of pride and embarrassment.

The longer I lived with both, the more I noticed where they part ways. They part ways at the part most people don't talk about: what overspending costs.

Money overspends are loans against your future self

When you overspend a money budget, the cost is structured. You go over on groceries this month, and something tightens next month — you skip a dinner out, you defer a flight, you carry a small balance you'll pay off. The math is unkind, but it's forgivable. The category survives. The future arrives. The next month, you get another budget.

This is not a small thing. It's what makes money budgeting bearable. The budget is a prediction, and a missed prediction is recoverable. The dollar you spent badly today can be earned back next Tuesday. The story stays open.

Time overspends are not loans. They are gone.

When you overspend a time budget, nothing arrives next month to make up for it. The hours you assigned to family and gave to work — those particular hours, the Tuesday afternoon in the year you were forty-two — aren't waiting somewhere to be refunded. Next week's budget contains next week's 168 hours, brand new. It does not contain the ones you missed.

This is a sad thing about time budgeting. It's also the part that, once you accept it, makes the practice serious.

A money budget asks: can I afford this? A time budget asks: what am I willing to never get back?

The questions sound similar. They aren't.

Why I budget time anyway

There's a version of this thought that leads to fatalism — the hours are gone either way, why bother counting? I don't think that's right.

It works in the opposite direction. Money budgeting works because seeing the number changes the spend. The receipt at the end of the month isn't a punishment; it's a description that becomes the next month's input. You can be a worse budgeter or a better one. You can let the categories drift, or you can hold them honestly.

The same is true of time, with one important shift. With money, the budget is for the next dollar. With time, the budget is for the next hour — and the value of the budget is that the next hour is the only one you actually have. The lost ones are lost; the present one is still up for assignment.

So you write the budget. You read the receipt. You sit with the variance. Maybe the variance is honest and reassuring; maybe it isn't, and you grieve a little, and you write the next budget anyway.

It's not a happy practice. It is a real one.

Further reading from Vol. 01:

Essays

Guides

168 is a weekly time-budget app for iPhone. Get it on the App Store.