Life Balance, Big Rocks, and Now versus Future
A few days ago, I was chatting with a friend over dinner about productivity methodologies. We talked about Getting Things Done, Franklin Covey, and a handful of other approaches and schools of thought. One that I mentioned, and which started an interesting side discussion, was a system called Life Balance.
For a while, I used the Life Balance software zealously, because it asks you to assess your “big rocks” type of life goals and focus areas, and then apply continuous balancing, as aided by the software, between the actions that help you progress in those areas. As someone who juggles quite a few avocations (blogging, obviously, and songwriting, just to name a few) in addition to my professional career and personal life, this made a lot of sense to me.
Unfortunately, as I told my friend, I found myself gaming the system. When the software dutifully reminded me that it had been three days since I last checked off “Spend time writing a song,” I knew I had other things I needed to get done first, and would raise the priority of other tasks to compete with songwriting, or whatever else was at the top of the list. My reaction to what the software showed me about my own prioritization and follow-through was that I was hopelessly out of balance and a victim of my own overcommitment.
And possibly that was true. But what my friend and I agreed was that priorities are often in flux, and being “out of balance” for a relatively short period of time to accomplish major goals can still be in balance, in the greater scheme of life goals. So when you’re, say, starting up a business and you regularly sacrifice evening and weekend leisure to ensure your new venture’s success, you could argue that what you’re really doing is prioritizing the leisure in your future ahead of the leisure in your present. And all in all, perhaps there’s still a kind of life balance in that.
(For the record, some time ago, I switched to using Remember the Milk for all my task organization, which with its highly customizable tagging and smart lists, allows me to be a little more fickle about the particular organization methodology I employ at any given time. I’m also a huge fan of Evernote for all my note taking and mental organization needs. Yes, I’m kind of a productivity tools geek.)
What time management approach do you use? How have you dealt with imbalances in your life? Tell us in the comments.
