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| Most of us are neither complete control freaks, nor completely lackadaisical with all aspects of our lives. We have responsibilities, which we sometimes take overly seriously. We also need spontaneous play to fuel our creativity and refresh our spirits. The balance we seek is somewhere in that murky middle ground.
In our Life Balance software, we keep a record of the past in terms of how much effort has been spent for certain goals. This record is persistent for a while. Tasks done beyond a certain threshold flow away into the past and lose their influence on current events. To the best of my knowledge, Life Balance is the only To Do list software that has a grip on this fundamental aspect of the way things really are here in the murky middle. We spend our lives in the present, and as adults we typically spend 8 or more hours a day working hard at one thing or another. Playing is considered childish, and hence not part of the present but the past. Nonsense! Making time to play is not frivolous, so if it helps, we suggest you to get hard at work and do it properly -- immediately if not sooner!
The outcome of our every day actions may seem uncertain especially when we hit some kind of iceberg in a major area of our lives. However our actions do add up over time. If we aim in a direction that we believe in with all our hearts, we can confidently remain committed to our goals over the long haul. It helps if we can see our tasks add up toward those goals every day, carving a future from the present even as we slog through mountains of email, pitch out mountains of recyclable junk mail, brush the dog, and make a tasty simple meal of barley and mushrooms. What I noticed back in 1993 when I was spending the evenings pawing over piles of brightly colored bricks, is that the small tasks of life make up the large ones just as a Lego brick makes a building. We can look at the building we want to build and ask ourselves -- what bricks do I need!? Do I have the right ones? I had mostly the little pirate ships. I l was partial to the parrots and the palm trees especially. But you can’t build the monorail with only palm tree parts! Looking over the bricks and seeing which ones are available and which ones you need is a crucial step. To make a dramatic change, you will need entirely different daily task bricks than you are used to. You will need to acquire... the monorail set! The more bricks available, the more tasks we can imagine that we might use, the more likely it will be that we can do what we hope to do. So having a task list full of many possible tasks, even if they are not all intended to be accomplished or deployed right away, is a necessary state for achieving our goals. The Life Balance software, allows us to have all that unwieldy stuff in our lists, and still find those few special bricks that we need right now to get that monorail up and running! When you are thinking about the top level tasks in your Outline, you are thinking about the monorail that you hope to build. You can break things into subprojects and brainstorm as many tasks as might contribute to the result you hope for. These are your bricks. The more the merrier! When you are in the To do list view, you are looking at the bricks themselves to see what is available. The To Do list view is about sorting and filtering. When you are looking at the Balance section, you are looking at the relationship between the time you are spending on your pirate castle and the monorail. You may need to gradually shift the amount of effort you budget in the Desired pie chart away from the familiar pirate castle to have a larger slice dedicated to building the monorail. And once you have built that monorail, you can start thinking about where it needs to go next. You just might need to get more track! |
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Which brings me, naturally to LegoLand. I love Legos and have collected more Lego sets than an adult should probably admit! I started playing with Legos in 1993 when Digital Equipment Corporation was doing its imitation of the Titanic, and I was thinking about starting Llamagraphics to have my own personal floatation device. 
