Imagine you’re a knowledge worker, preparing an outline for an upcoming blog post you are going to write for your firm. What is the budget on that task?
Often, such knowledge work tasks don’t have a budget. I’m specifically talking about a knowledge worker. Knowledge work teams have budgets of course, but for a specific worker, it is more often the case of “work until the thing is done” or “it doesn’t matter when you work or how you work, just get it done.” There may be broad deadlines (“get this to me by the end of the week”), but that doesn’t reflect the specific cognitive cost of working on the task to meet the deadline.
You could try to impose a cognitive budget on certain types of tasks. If you know you’ll only have 2 hours to complete a task, that artificial constraint can inspire action and ideas.