What does it mean that load balancing across time?

Distribute work evenly across days and weeks rather than clustering it.

Example: You have five client deliverables due on Friday. Monday and Tuesday are light — a few emails, a short meeting — so you coast, telling yourself you'll get to the real work on Wednesday. Wednesday you start one deliverable but lose the afternoon to an unplanned request. Thursday becomes a 12-hour marathon: you skip lunch, cancel your evening plans, and grind through four deliverables in a state of mounting panic. Friday morning you deliver the fifth, half-finished and under-reviewed. Meanwhile, Monday's empty hours evaporated into nothing productive. If you had allocated one deliverable to each day — Monday through Friday, roughly equal effort per day — every piece would have received your full attention, you would have finished by 5 PM each day, and the quality across all five would have been higher. Instead, you converted five days of capacity into one day of crisis and four days of drift.

Try this: Pull up your calendar and task list for the current week. Map every committed deliverable, deadline, and obligation onto the specific day it is due or scheduled. Now count the total hours of committed work per day. Write the numbers down: Monday = X, Tuesday = Y, and so on. Calculate the variance — the difference between your heaviest day and your lightest day. If the heaviest day exceeds your lightest by more than 50%, you have a load balancing problem. Redistribute: move at least one task from your heaviest day to your lightest, setting an artificial intermediate deadline for it. Repeat this exercise every Sunday evening for the next four weeks until the redistribution becomes automatic.