Balance - The Holy Grail

I’m good at a lot of things, but balance is really hard for me. Hard for everyone I bet. I think this would be an area that can really benefit from mortality software. Todo, decide if this post should fork into energy and balance

• On Balance
  • Balance vs Productivity
  • Energy is finite, like really finite.
  • You need to decide how you’ll spend it
  • Golden Geese: Balancing Production and Production Capacity
  • Juggling Elephants: Balancing the roles in your life
  • Productivity vs addiction and resistance
• How to achieve
  • Realistic goals by role
  • Monitoring the roles in your life vs your goals
  • Review adjustment
  • Focus on Impact, not energy spent
  • Parkinson’s law and the 80/20 rule
  • Peak end rule and moments
  • Activation Energy
  • Recharging with Time off
• More resources

On Balance

Balance vs Productivity

This post is currently intertwined with productivity and energy, will spend time on how to pull them apart

Energy is finite, like really finite.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get 4160 weeks (80 years), and I’ve already spent 2400 of mine.

Todo inline photo, or auto-generate it.

You need to decide how you’ll spend it

Mortality software/essentialist/begin with the end in mind

Golden Geese: Balancing Production and Production Capacity

As said in the 7 habits

Juggling Elephants: Balancing the roles in your life

There are many roles in your life, and it’s important to monitor and balance between them.

We often simplify our roles as work and life, (see: I don’t want to spend too much time at work), but there are many more. I use my eulogy to define my roles (and do some composition - E.g. Magic and tech get their own category while biking is grouped into Hobbies)

Productivity vs addiction and resistance

How to achieve

Realistic goals by role

I think the most effective way to set yourself up for failure is deciding you can do everything. This is false; you need to choose. The super easy mistake to make here is to have an unrealistic goal in a role, for example - I can run a marathon when I can’t even walk a mile. But the almost as easy mistake is to set multiple aggressive goals at once. E.g., I’ll both run a marathon, and get a promotion at work and deal with an ailing parent.

So, Start by setting goals per role that are realistic. The unit here should be TBD.

Also, it’s easy to stress like crazy about your goals. Don’t if they’re wrong you can always change them at the next review.

Monitoring the roles in your life vs your goals

In some roles, I default to overinvesting, for these red is overinvesting, green is just right, and blue is underinvesting

For the other roles, in which I underinvest, red is underinvesting, and blue is overinvesting, which as you see, doesn’t happen that often ;)

A few notes:

• TODO: Need to make a better color mapping, default colors aren’t matching the intent.

• I find a correlation between work being green and the rest being green. If work is overinvested, everything else gets underinvested.

• I find sometimes even when work is in balance, I spend too much time on a role, like tech, and not enough on the others. For me, it’s usually family that suffers.

• The assessment here is a normalized ‘actual investment vs desired investment’ not ‘time spent’. For me, I want to spend about an hour a day on magic, while 8 hours a day on work.

• Desired time spent varies over time. For example, on holiday, my desire is to spend zero time on work.

Review adjustment

If you do some kind of review, I’m certain you missed your goals, either positive or negative. I think there are 3 reasons here:

1. Your goal was off
2. Your plan was off
3. Your execution was off.

Focus on Impact, not energy spent

We should not measure the success in our roles by the energy we spend. For example, our role of healthy can likely be achieved with an hour a day, while work likely requires many more hours than that.

Parkinson’s law and the 80/20 rule

Parkinson’s law tells us we’ll spend as much time as we have available to us on a task.

The 80/20 rules say you get 80% of the value from 20% of the time.

Peak end rule and moments

We remember an experience based on the average of the peak and the end. This is very important when it comes to time in relationships and energy spent. It does not matter how much time we spend together, but how we end it and the maximum pleasure.

This leads to a few best practices:

• Creating moments when planning your events.
• Think about the closing ceremony, make sure it’s great.
• Quit while you’re ahead - it’s very easy to squeeze out a few more minutes, which makes for a miserable end, and ruins the experience.

This also has some consequences:

• Time together in the same room both doing separate activities is not helpful.
• The duration of the event does not matter.

Activation Energy

Investing in a role requires activation. See Activation Energy

Recharging with Time off

More resources

Oddly, not a ton of books on the topic. Juggling elephants is a fun parable-style book on it.