Life Balancing

David Allen's Getting Things Done helped me develop a methodology for capturing all the "things" I wanted to do. It eliminated a certain kind of stress that had bulit up from having piles of papers, and e-mails, and projects, and feeling so overwhelmed at times that I just got stuck and ended up spinning my wheels more than getting myself organized.

So at this point I had finally captured everything in one very large to-do list, but I still had to deal with "prioritizing" the order in which I did things. I tried several different List Managers and ended up using one called Life Balance for several years. I only recently stopped using it.

I liked Life Balance because it had a balancing feature so that you could group your tasks into focus areas. My 142857 Work has 6 areas that I based on Ken Wilber's Big 3: It, We, and I.

The Life Balance software would give me a certain amount of credit for each task I completed. However, if I neglected tasks in certain groups, the priority for those tasks would rise.

That seemed good in theory, neglected areas of pursuit would push higher on the list, but in practice it just never seemed to work quite right.