Ever since managing groups of people and being introduced to targets and goals I’ve been hooked on to organizing my days and weeks and I LOVE planners and planning into the near and far future. From scribbled by hand to a ton of software solutions I studied different approaches – in the end it all boils down to get off your butt and do it. No way around that.
The art for me does not lie in making those todo lists and then following them (or not) nor in the huge amount of different ways to motivate yourself to get the things done from that list. The art is to get the correct balance between them all. Sitting 6 hours in front of the TV is NOT balance, even if you simultaneously chat online, answer a few emails and twitter away. What with all those other goals?
For me the difficulty has always been to find room to do all the stuff I do or where I want to get better in and to combine this all with the things I need to do or have to do. When I concentrate strongly on one area, the others drop and I get to the point of feeling disjointed and I lose momentum in those neglected areas. I remember well from back when I was staff and had several divisions to guide below me, the challenge was always to not only win and make good progress in one but in all of them simultaneously.
Of course I could just list all the things and then divide my day and in the end it would be 30 minutes for each of the things – and I would not get anywhere. For this reason I have been recently giving some serious thoughts of how to better organize and balance. There are areas you need to work on for several hours or days to accomplish something. Sometimes you need to pay special attention to an area to have it not drop into non-existence. But, again, getting too absorbed in one area is not good for the other dynamics. Especially working on the computer has brought on the danger of “just 5 more minutes” and next you know the day is gone. Who has ever been engulfed in 3D and animation or coding in any form has not run into this trap?! I definitely have. Thus my conclusion is to create a working solution that resembles a weaving pattern of actions which leads to a continuation of all of it but not all at the same time.
I was – and possibly still am – going to brainstorm on the subject by using Omni Graffle to clarify things I really have to do and is crucial, what I need to do, what would be nice and with which goals etc, to be able to prioritize and plan for it. But I was not all happy about it, it only answers part of what I am looking for to better integrate balance in my daily and weekly schedule and to see progress which would give me acknowledgement and a sense of success and accomplishment.
As Time Synchronicity works for me I stumbled today “by chance” across Day Grid Balancer.
I have used LiveBalance some years ago for quite a while and it had come close into helping with the balancing act and being more than a plain todo list, but there had been synchronization gripes for me which in the end out-weighted the usefulness, and I have written several postings on this subject. Since they came out with an iPhone version of the application I am once again tempted to go for it, but reading the reviews on it’s seemingly rather cumbersome interface have stopped me (for now) mid track and I’m not going to be spending the $20 for it.
I would love to see some iPhone developer come up with something similar to the Day Grid Balancer or a combination of LifeBalance and it – one which allows the user to adjust to ones one lifestyle (I, for example, don’t need 8 hours sleep to be wide awake and brimming with energy, so that’s not a goal I want to reach… but keeping me at 7 can be quite a challenge at times).
I’ve been considering of trying to have Bento do what I want. As I do own the iPhone version of it, it would make sense; more so than going down the path of creating a web application for my own use (driven with Ajax, Javascript and PHP) which I could access via the web or even (gasp) go down the developers route and learn how to program an application for the iPhone and do it myself. At this point I do not know yet what I will end up with using as my tracking tool, but one thing I know for sure, if I’m going to be writing it myself it will be one of the many things to tie into my whole balancing act
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Prioritize and Get Organized.
Ever since managing groups of people and being introduced to targets and goals I’ve been hooked on to organizing my days and weeks and I LOVE planners and planning into the near and far future. From scribbled by hand to a ton of software solutions I studied different approaches – in the end it all boils down to get off your butt and do it. No way around that.
The art for me does not lie in making those todo lists and then following them (or not) nor in the huge amount of different ways to motivate yourself to get the things done from that list. The art is to get the correct balance between them all. Sitting 6 hours in front of the TV is NOT balance, even if you simultaneously chat online, answer a few emails and twitter away. What with all those other goals?
For me the difficulty has always been to find room to do all the stuff I do or where I want to get better in and to combine this all with the things I need to do or have to do. When I concentrate strongly on one area, the others drop and I get to the point of feeling disjointed and I lose momentum in those neglected areas. I remember well from back when I was staff and had several divisions to guide below me, the challenge was always to not only win and make good progress in one but in all of them simultaneously.
Of course I could just list all the things and then divide my day and in the end it would be 30 minutes for each of the things – and I would not get anywhere. For this reason I have been recently giving some serious thoughts of how to better organize and balance. There are areas you need to work on for several hours or days to accomplish something. Sometimes you need to pay special attention to an area to have it not drop into non-existence. But, again, getting too absorbed in one area is not good for the other dynamics. Especially working on the computer has brought on the danger of “just 5 more minutes” and next you know the day is gone. Who has ever been engulfed in 3D and animation or coding in any form has not run into this trap?! I definitely have. Thus my conclusion is to create a working solution that resembles a weaving pattern of actions which leads to a continuation of all of it but not all at the same time.
I was – and possibly still am – going to brainstorm on the subject by using Omni Graffle to clarify things I really have to do and is crucial, what I need to do, what would be nice and with which goals etc, to be able to prioritize and plan for it. But I was not all happy about it, it only answers part of what I am looking for to better integrate balance in my daily and weekly schedule and to see progress which would give me acknowledgement and a sense of success and accomplishment.
As Time Synchronicity works for me I stumbled today “by chance” across Day Grid Balancer.
I have used LiveBalance some years ago for quite a while and it had come close into helping with the balancing act and being more than a plain todo list, but there had been synchronization gripes for me which in the end out-weighted the usefulness, and I have written several postings on this subject. Since they came out with an iPhone version of the application I am once again tempted to go for it, but reading the reviews on it’s seemingly rather cumbersome interface have stopped me (for now) mid track and I’m not going to be spending the $20 for it.
I would love to see some iPhone developer come up with something similar to the Day Grid Balancer or a combination of LifeBalance and it – one which allows the user to adjust to ones one lifestyle (I, for example, don’t need 8 hours sleep to be wide awake and brimming with energy, so that’s not a goal I want to reach… but keeping me at 7 can be quite a challenge at times).
I’ve been considering of trying to have Bento do what I want. As I do own the iPhone version of it, it would make sense; more so than going down the path of creating a web application for my own use (driven with Ajax, Javascript and PHP) which I could access via the web or even (gasp) go down the developers route and learn how to program an application for the iPhone and do it myself. At this point I do not know yet what I will end up with using as my tracking tool, but one thing I know for sure, if I’m going to be writing it myself it will be one of the many things to tie into my whole balancing act