Priorities in the To Do List
Problem:
Why aren't the most urgent tasks at the top of the to do list?Solution:
A task may be urgent, which means that it is scheduled soon, but still be unimportant, meaning that it does not contribute to your life's ambitions and goals very much. Just because a task happens today does not mean that you should necessarily strive to accomplish that task. For example, there may be a party after work. But if your heart's desire is to start a new career as a zoologist specializing in studying wild Llamas in the Andes, then going home to do your zoology homework may be the better course of action.In many traditional time/task management systems, you make a (non binding) contract with yourself to tackle tasks within a certain timeframe. Everything goes into a notebook or file, from which you manually pull tasks. Periodically, you review this list and schedule target dates for some of them. You might have several lists to cover the next few months ("goals"), then a more detailed one for this month ("plan"), and a more specific one for this week ("schedule"), then usually try to squeeze some of those onto your list for the day. Then at the end of the day, you have to copy those tasks forward, or throw your hands up in defeat when the situation around you changes suddenly.
Life Balance takes a different view of these things. Life Balance does not put artificial dates on things, and we never require you to do the quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily breakdown.
If something is truly important to you, then presumably you want to push that project ahead as your energy allows.
Your Life Balance to do list allows you to focus your energy on the things that are important to you, and those things will float toward the top of the to do list view as conditions are favorable (stores open, right place, right time) etc.
This probably represents the heart of the shift that is necessary to make good use of Life Balance. Life Balance actively brings important tasks forward to your attention, rather than sitting there like a lump, requiring you to fetch things out of it to manually place them into a different set of arbitrarily scheduled lists.
One of the pitfalls of the traditional approach is that it often leads to failure, guilt and remorse. If you don't get a new job as a zoologist by the arbitrarily scheduled deadline of next Tuesday, you tend to feel awful about it, even if you really had no way of knowing in advance if the deadline of next Tuesday was reasonable because the opportunities that would get you that position might be hard to track down.
Life Balance takes a more positive approach, which is that learning everything there is to know about llamas is possible and you can work toward those big tough goals with each day until you make them happen. If you hit a setback, you can work through it, because the important tasks will stay in focus toward the top of your list.
