3 Steps to Creating Balance

It’s a new year. This will finally be the one we get it all together. Sound familiar? While 2009 may not bring everything into perfect alignment, it could be the year you achieve a new level of balance.

What’s Balance?
Balance isn’t about getting everything done, or doing everything right, but examining your values and goals, and accepting your limits. It has been said that your true values are exhibited in the way you spend your time. Make 2009 the year you pay attention to all the things that demand your attention.

Step 1: Review Steven Covey’s rocks and sand analogy. Are you spending time on the big rocks first? Write out a list of your rocks and post it somewhere you will see everyday. Or take advantage of a digital service like gtdagenda‘s vision reminders to keep important goals in front of you.

Step 2: Take time to plan. Most things don’t happen on their own. They don’t happen until you decide to make them happen. Set aside some time at the beginning of your week to identify and schedule the most important things you must accomplish that week.

Step 3: Honor your emotions. When you feel happy, scared, nervous, uneasy, or excited – stop. Take just a moment to acknowledge what you’re feeling. Paying attention to emotions is important because it’s nearly impossible to create balance if you’re just charging ahead all the time.

More posts you might enjoy:

2009: The Year of the Vision
How to Build a Home Organization Notebook
GTD For Moms and Other Homies: The Lists
Empty Your Email Inbox
Improve Your Life With Long Range Planning

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by BOCA.

2009: The Year of the Vision

Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? I don’t really, but the start of a new year is a very good time to work on new habits. I participated in a workshop yesterday where we talked a lot about planning – long range planning. A lot of us realized that we haven’t taken the time to dream up a ten or twenty year plan. We haven’t thought much about our livelong goals.

Do You Have a Vision For Your Life?

Think about how fast ten years goes by. And it goes by whether you’re doing what you want or just plodding along. So that’s my big New Year’s habit – to spend more time creating and reviewing long term goals and dreams.

In another part of the workshop we identified some of our strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is organization and planning. I’m SO good at setting goals, making lists, and getting things done. Speaking of GTD, part of an good organization philosophy is to make sure you’re getting the right things done. That is, working toward the big goals you’ve actually chosen for your life. We also talked a lot about organizational values yesterday and the need to clearly articulate what they mean to you.

What Do You Really Value?

For example, you may value say you value honesty, but how does that play out in your life? You may also value relationships. Sometimes those two values are going to collide. As when a friend does something you don’t necessarily agree with, but is nevertheless not really any of your business. Are you honest about it? Depends. Turns out you need to rank your values for just such occasions. If you rank honest above relationships, you bust out with the raw truth. However, if you rank relationships over honesty you keep your mouth shut.

The focus of the day was on professional situations, but the workshop facilitators encouraged us all to think about our overall personal values too. I kept looking at the wall where the center we were in had their mission and vision statements, right there next to their list of values.

So as part of my New Year’s habit to take more time for BIG planning, I’ve decided to create a personal mission and vision statement, and get to work on those values too.

Tools You Can Use

• David Allen’s brilliant book, Getting Things Done
• My new fave, Zen Habits
• I use gtdagenda.com to manage my tasks and as I work on the bigger picture components using that system I’ll report my results back to you. I use the premium version of this site, but there’s a free version that is essentially the same. You just can’t track as many goals and projects.
• Check out Parent Bloggers this weekend. Together with the Big Tent group organization site, they want to know how you’ll get your act together in 2009.
• PBN and Big Tent have teamed with and Compass Life and Business Designs to offer group leaders who start a group on or move to BigTent by December 31 a free one month membership ($19 value) to Compass Coaching Network. Plus group leaders will be entered in a grand prize drawing for a “Life Makeover” private coaching series ($1500 value). Groups must be of at least ten members.

Go, dream, get organized!

GTD for Everyone: Using Technology to Rank Your Priorities

Earlier this year I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and it really made a difference in my productivity and stress level. I’ve written a few posts on GTD since then, but I haven’t been using the system to its fullest. What has held me back was simply the bulk of items on my various lists. My general lack of big picture planning is also an issue. However, with my lists down to a manageable level, I’m actually starting to feel like I could get ahead of the curve! What a concept.

I started using an online application called gtdagenda.com and it’s been really good. It was kind of a challenge to switch everything over from my Excel based system, but it’s been well worth the effort. The first thing I realized was that I had not be assigning any level of priority to the things on my lists. The only way they got bumped up was dependent on due date. Now, of course some things need to be done on deadline, but so much stress can be eliminated by knocking out pesky tasks before they become urgent.

Although I have a long way to go, I initially have prioritized my tasks as a 1,2,3, or 4 – based on Covey’s idea of important vs. urgent quadrants. It’s something I wouldn’t have been able to do effectively in spreadsheet format. I’ll keep you posted as I continue refining this.

The other thing that’s really cool (so far) about using a web-based application is that (now that I have a cool new iPhone….) I have my lists with me wherever I go. So if I’m out running around town, I can go to my Errands context and see what needs doing! I love being a geek…

What about you? How do you get it all done?
I would love to know your best time-management tips.

My Favorite Ways To Say No

Can you say no? It’s hard, but it gets easier with practice. Here are my favorite ways to say no.

I have another commitment.
I do, really I do. And it’s none of your business what it is. This is a great way to say no. Nobody needs to know that your previous commitment is petting your dog, making dinner, or having a chat with your best girlfriend on the phone. You have another commitment. You don’t have to justify why you can’t chair the homecoming float committee or take your niece shopping for Webkinz this weekend. Not that those aren’t perfectly wonderful things to do, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

I’m have several projects on my plate right now.
This one seems to be always true for me. The truth is there are lots of things I would love to help out with, but I can’t do them all at once. If it’s really something you’d like to do, but can’t fit it in now, say so. Then leave yourself a note for a time you might be able to take on new projects. Schedules are constantly changing. This is where is helps to have lists of long term goals.

I don’t enjoy that kind of work.
There’s no crime in turning down things you don’t like to do. Even if you’re good at them. When I first joined the Junior League I was working as a CPA. I made it abundantly clear that under no circumstances would I serve as Treasurer, Assistant Treasurer, Assistant to the Treasurer or anything else that had to do with money and spreadsheets. I wanted to branch out, learn new things. It’s okay to state your preferences!

Now get out there and say no! (And let us know when you do!)

Could You Use a Virtual Assistant?

I’ve been reading this week about virtual assistants and how using an individual assistant or a service can increase productivity. My question is this: how can I make use of something like this at home? I’m curious if any of you have used a virtual assistant or a service. If so, which did you use and what were the specific tasks you had them accomplish?

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this post by Sid Savara.

Create More Habits

They say it takes 30 days for a behavior to stick, to become a habit you do without thinking. I can attest that some habits – like grabbing a handful of Doritos every time you pass the pantry – take considerably less time. However, the healthy and productive ones tend to take longer. Here are my top ‘created’ habits that get me through the monotonous motions of the day:

1. Get dressed in workout clothes.
I am at least 75% likely to exercise if I’m actually wearing the clothes. Otherwise I end up like today – it’s noon, I haven’t broken a sweat, and I’m embarrassed to check the mail because I’m still in PJs.

2. Empty the dishwasher and the dryer.
This is so cornbally/housewifey that I hate to admit it. The first thing I do in the morning (in my workout attire) is empty the dishwasher. That way the dirty stuff doesn’t land in the sink all day. I check the dryer. (The habit I haven’t yet mastered is to check the washer before bed to make sure I don’t leave stuff in there overnight to cultivate the mildew farm that is my laundry room.)

3. Clear to the granite.
I used to have a pile of permission slips, receipts, lip gloss, library books, and confiscated Nintendo DS’s on my kitchen counter at all times. It hid the pretty granite that accounts for at least $50 of the monthly mortgage payment. My habit? Clear off the landing pile every night as part of cleaning the kitchen. I so rock the housewife gig.

What keeps your life on track?

Divide and Conquer

This summer it’s been a huge challenge to get everything done that I’ve committed to. With kids underfoot, vacations to take, and new projects under every notepad I’ve had to get creative. While I love all my projects (or in some cases, the money they bring in) looking at a huge number of articles, a flowerless bed in the back yard, or the skeleton of a novel can be overwhelming. Add to that a bit of short attention span syndrome (aka SASS) and it could go either way. I might go nuts and finish everything I started, or freeze and settle in front of the Lifetime network just so I’d know someone out there is more pathetic than I am. I choose to forge ahead. But how?

I have to break everything into steps that can be listed and then marked off the list. Divide and conquer. It’s the only thing that keeps me going. I went to a writer’s workshop a few weeks ago and one of the sessions taught how to write the first draft of a novel in ten weeks, completing 10% a week. That doesn’t sound so hard does it? If you work five days a week, that’s just 2% a day. For a 350 page book that’s only 7 pages a day – weekends off! (See how I get myself into trouble?)

You know the financial advice to live below your means? The other trick I use in conjunction with my dividing and conquering is to live below my time means. I try to work ahead, just barely, so that when the unexpected occurs, I’ve got something of a cushion. It’s helped me to get ahead for our upcoming trip to the lake, where I plan to work little or none. Maybe a little…. just on the fun stuff.

Wish me luck.

Finding the Next Action

One aspect of GTD that I love is the emphasis on identifying the next action. The idea of the next action takes you from the abstract to the concrete. My project is ‘refinance mortgage’, but my next action is ‘call current mortgage company’. Once that’s done I might have something like ‘make a list of mortgage companies to call’, the ‘call mortgage companies’. It may sound like more trouble than it’s worth, but the truth is that if I break down the overwhelming prospect of ‘refinance mortgage’ into do-able steps, I’m more likely to get it done. Baby steps, small bites.

Remember that anything with more than on step is a project. Until you break it down, it’s just an idea. Don’t overwhelm or get ahead of yourself. You can only do one step at a time anyway. Sometimes the projects we really want to do are the ones we procrastinate on the most. We hold this great thing out for ourselves for someday instead of taking an action (however small) today. Because maybe we’ll fail. Other times we are putting something off that we think is going to be awful and so it just lingers there, being awful forever until we do it. Do yourself a favor – get started or cross it off the list.

Once you start to think in terms of concrete next action steps, not only will you start to accomplish more than you thought possible, you’ll also be able to lead groups to do the same. Try it today.

Keep a Timesheet

This may sound a little strange, but I recommend keeping a timesheet for yourself for a week. You can do it on a piece of paper or an Excel spreadsheet. You can keep track of actual time, or simply make tally marks for every 15 minutes you spend on something.

Keeping a timesheet can provide surprising insights into how you spend your time. (Duh.) I did this exercise several months ago and got two huge benefits out of it.

First, I was able to quantify the amount of time I spend on my primary responsibility, which is taking care of my kids. I spend over 40 hours a week in the care and feeding of my family. That jmade me realize that being a ‘stay home mom’ really is a  job and whatever else I’m accomplishing on top of that is great. I don’t have to be so hard on myself when I don’t get to everything n my list.

Second, measuring the amount of time spent on various activities made it very easy to see what I wanted to be doing versus what was a distraction. I was able to make informed choices about how to spend my most valuable resource.

It’s hard to deny hard figures in black and white. Try it – keep a timesheet this week. You just might learn something.

Get More Things Done By Receiving Less Email

We may think there’s not much we can do about the amount of email we receive, but we’d be wrong. The truth is there are a few simple things we can do that could drastically cut down on the number of messages in our inboxes. Here are two of my favorite:

1) Stop responding so quickly
Of course I’m not advocating you get rude with people, but lay off the trigger. If you let messages sit for a bit, especially if you are simply CC’d on them, you may find that issues solve themselves without your input.

2) Let people know you don’t need a reply
This one is so simple I love it. You know the wasted effort that goes back and forth – can you send me her phone number ? – thanks for the number – sure thing, how’s the dog – fine thanks and yours…. For crying out loud, go meet for coffee! To beat this, add a line at the end: No need to reply.

What do you do to tame the beast?

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