The post got me thinking, though, about some of the pitfalls I've seen in how people approach the concept, and I decided I want to share my thoughts on what life balance means to me. Here's what I think it is... and isn't.

A balanced life is a life where you live your own values and priorities... not someone else's.

A balanced life is a life where you are aware of how you use your time and energy and how you want to be using them... so that you can make changes.

A balanced life is a life of fully conscious choices... not easy, safe choices.

A balanced life gives time and energy to the full diversity of what matters to you... but doesn't necessarily allow you to give equal attention to every thing each day, week or month.

A balanced life is supported by taking good basic care of yourself... but doesn't mean you won't challenge or push yourself to the edges of your endurance at times.

A balanced life is full of many emotional states... it's not always peaceful and serene, nor always free of stress, struggle or overwhelm.

A balanced life is still messy and imperfect at times... just like everything else in this world.

A balanced life looks different for everyone because we all have such different needs and desires... there's no simple one-size-fits-all solution.

A balanced life is dynamic and ever-evolving, growing and changing as you grow and change, constantly being re-created... not a static thing that you achieve just once and then have only to maintain.

Balance in life is about finding flow and joy in the many things you do, and feeling as if the pieces form an amazing and highly varied collage that you love, even though they don't fit neatly together like the ones in a puzzle.

It's not the balance of two objects of equal weight sitting on a scale. It's the balance in movement that a trapeze artist or a tightrope walker finds, a balance of sweeping motion and constant shifting adjustments and adventure. It's not about never falling down. It's about having the roots and foundation laid down so firmly that you can confidently trust in your ability to regain your footing.

If you don't pay deliberate attention to balance, it's all too easy to lose sight of the full wide range of things that matter to you. You can become mono-focused and gradually yet dramatically skew your use of time and energy towards just a few aspects of your life.   If you weren't looking, by the time you realize something's not working, you're already close to or beyond a breaking point. You may even have lost something or someone important through neglect... and it might be too late to fix it.

I think I feel some more posts coming on this topic in the future, about how to assess your life balance and how to bring yourself back to balance if you've gotten badly out of whack.

How do you define life balance? Do you seek balance in your life or do you feel it's a concept that isn't helpful to you?

Photo by Hamed Saber 

For today's Three Small Things, I needed to remind myself to stop and smell the roses - so I'm going to focus on gratitude and the here-and-now:

• What is one small thing that you are grateful for about this very moment you are experiencing in this very place?


• What is one small thing that you experience every day that adds joy to your life?


• What is one small thing in your plans for the day that you will take the time to savor and do slowly without rushing?

So don't forget to take three deep breaths and enjoy the moment this weekend... as well as do all the wonderful work and planning we all do for the future. Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

But that doesn't mean you can't be supported every step of the way - you just need to find ways to effectively support yourself. Take charge of this area of your life by spending some time thinking about how you can support yourself best when you take on this role. Here are some ideas:

1. Think about the very best managers, teachers and mentors that you've worked for or with.

2. List the qualities and behaviors that a manager would have that would help you the most.

3. Make a list of some common challenges and pitfalls that often throw you off when you are trying to accomplish things.

4. When you are actually working and run into a real tough moment, take a deep breath and imagine that that ideal boss is right there with you.

5. If you are feeling stuck in your work, pull out a notebook and write down a question for your ideal manager.

It's up to you.

Ultimately, whether we work for someone else or not, we are all in charge of our own selves and hence must take full responsibility for managing, mentoring and motivating ourselves to be the best we can be. Imagining a powerful part of yourself as a separate person is one way to access and learn to trust those parts of yourself.

What would your ideal boss be like? Have you ever used a technique like this to help manage yourself better?

Photo by Victor Bezrukov

It's all too easy to get caught up in the old, safe and familiar. Often time management can involve creating tools and routines to make everything happen more consistently, but ideally that consistency serves as the solid basis that enables you to do more things that are creative, new and daring-- not the boring crystallization of your work and play into set, stolid stasis.

So, here are a few little things to think about to change it up a bit if you're feeling stale:

• What is one small thing that you can ask a basic beginner question about in order to learn something new?


• What is one small thing that you can try for the very first time just to see what it's like?


• What is one small thing that you always do the same way but can try doing differently just to experiment?

Have fun and have a wonderful weekend! And please comment with your thoughts on these questions, if you are so moved.

Also, in the spirit of changing it up, you might notice that for the very first time there is a picture in today's blog post. I'm experimenting with using images in my post - hope you like it!

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day... "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child... REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

--Velveteen Rabbit by Tracy Phaup

Some projects are so large that they are intimidating to begin, to keep working on, or to finish. If they are projects that provide value but lack an external deadline or other outside pressure to finalize the work, it can be easy to convince yourself that you are making progress when in fact you are just thinking about it. If the project means a lot to you emotionally, you might become so invested in it that you can't bear the idea that it might not be perfect. You might hold yourself to such high ideals that the project never becomes reality, because you never get far enough towards your shifting goal of perfection to actually let it go out into the world and become real.

Is there a place for daydreaming, brainstorming, planning and perfecting? Of course! But at some point, your project is only real if you do it... and finish it.

I believe that it's generally best to make your project real as soon as possible. The easiest way to achieve this goal is to make your scope smaller for the first version and add more later, instead of trying to finish everything over a longer period of time: create a a basic, functional, good-enough iteration that works and launch or implement it.

If your project will eventually be shared with others or with the public, make this good-enough version available to some or all of its future users. If your project is a process, you can launch it by starting to implement some aspects of it right away, knowing that you will keep the things that work, add more new pieces and make changes over time... instead of waiting to start the new process till you're sure you've decided on the perfect system.

Once you've gotten that first good-enough version out there and running in the world, you can continue to add improvements and additional functionality over time until you are happy with the final results. However, if you wait and wait till the perfect version is done, you might never get there. Also, working in iterations in this way gives you the added advantage of early feedback-- learning more quickly what will and won't work, so that you can correct your course as you go. Since most projects need more change when they start being used in the real world, this head start on those changes is a huge advantage that keeps you from wasting time. In some rare cases, you may even discover that the good-enough version is in fact all you need... and that you can start working on something else new and exciting.

Examples of projects large and small that can be completed in "good-enough" full drafts or iterations, then improved over time:

• Launching a new website or blog
• Drafting a communication plan for your department
• Re-organizing a room in the house
• Writing a resume, cover letter, or school application
• Creating a new email processing, filing or task-tracking system

Have you ever overcome inertia on a project by making a complete good-enough version and then perfecting it over time? Or, do you have a project now that might be made real sooner rather than later? I'd love to hear about it.

• What small thing will you do this weekend to invest in your own personal growth and learning?
• What small thing will you do this weekend that will have a positive impact on your life long-term?
• What small thing will you NOT do this weekend because you will do something more valuable instead?

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

The first technique is to set aside enough time to overhaul the entire thing in one pass. I rarely recommend this approach for several reasons. First, it's often extremely overwhelming to contemplate, which can lead to a delay in getting started. Second, many people will find it hard to set aside this much time for such a project compared to working on other priorities instead. And lastly, if you succeed in doing it, you might feel so exhausted by the end of your stint that you burn out on organizing entirely, and then whatever you've cleaned up falls back into disarray.

The second technique, and my suggestion to you, is to start small and bring organization slowly into one aspect of your life at a time. You can really start doing this anywhere, but if you are starting from a place of extreme overwhelm, my suggestion is to begin by creating a center, an oasis of sanity which will radiate outward into other areas of your life as you continue to gradually set up systems that help you become more efficient, productive and organized. For physical organizing projects, this can be a room, such as an office, family room or bedroom. For more abstract time management systems, this could be your task list or email inbox... whatever you consider to be your base of operations, a space where you are spending a lot of time. Get that one space cleaned up... and get in the habit of keeping it clean. From there, gradually start working to improve other areas as well.

I had to come back to this advice myself these last few weeks. While I feel organized overall, the physical space of our home has gotten fairly unorganized lately because of the renovation work being done on our house. The remodelling has necessitated moving things around and squishing them into much less space than we are used to in a very short amount of time. I really enjoy open spaces and messiness bugs me. Some of this clutter is pretty unavoidable right now, but some of it is a result of having shifted things around so quickly while lots of other things were going on. And so I decided to approach first the room I spend the most waking time in: the home office that my husband and I share. Once it was back to normal, I could feel normal again doing the majority of my work. From that sense of peace and efficiency in a space that works the way I want, I can more easily move outward and into a few other organizing projects to lessen the chaos... and in my case, also just be patient for now about the fact that some of the furniture and boxes will need to stay where they are for a while longer.

Is there a part of your home or your organizing system that can function as your center and help give you more energy to keep the rest of your life organized in a way that works for you? What part of your home or more symbolic "space" is your center, your oasis of peace and calm?

• What small thing will you do this weekend to take really good care of yourself?
• What small thing can you do this weekend that will make the entire next week easier and more productive?
• What small thing can you do that will bring joy to someone that you care about?

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

Note: Three Small Things is a four-week series that will be posted each Friday, focused on questions about little things that can go a long ways to make the next week a great one. Hope you enjoy it!

This advice has always seemed simplistic to me. The first question is, which email address are we talking about here in the first place? People who work desk jobs for an employer typically have at least two email addresses, a personal email and a work email. Secondly, what kind of responsiveness are you looking to achieve during what hours? If self-employed, the answers to these questions may depend on your client expectations and your own willingness to meet those particular expectations, as well as how well you do at setting shared expectations with clients. For instance, I am currently self-employed. My client agreements state that I will respond to email within one business day unless I'm on vacation, and informally I would like to respond to most emails in more like four business hours.

At most of my previous workplaces, I needed to respond to email much more quickly than that, and thus needed to check my email far more frequently as well. If employed in a corporate environment, it can be a lonely path to not check your email every 5 minutes during the workday and then be on-call to your Blackberry all night, responding to emails within 30-60 minutes of receipt-- if that's what most of your fellow team members are doing and what your manager, clients and stakeholders expect.

You can still set your own boundaries of course, perhaps setting boundaries that are a compromise of some sort. You might even be able to change the work culture's approach to email entirely over time if you make that your goal, but being a change agent is not without cost and you'd have to decide whether that's an initiative you want to invest in. Or, you can of course leave your job and carefully scrutinize this aspect of your corporate culture when you decide to accept a job. But unless you have a job that doesn't use email much or are lucky enough to have an assistant screen your email for you, most people who work in the corporate world will need to check their email more than once or twice in a day.

Personal email is more simple in some ways, and more complex in others. Personal email and the many social media tools out there that we also use to interact online are not just basic communication tools, but also social scenes and sources of entertainment. Many people turn to their email or get onto Facebook/Twitter whenever they are lonely or bored, firing up various programs or websites hoping to connect with someone emotionally for a brief moment or see something interesting and absorbing pop up. Others will just check their email/social media sites whenever they feel momentarily frustrated by a task - a form of procrastination that can waste a staggering amount of time if you do it a lot. In other instances, family or friends might send you time-sensitive updates on logistics and assume you'll see them immediately, or send you dramatic news and assume you know it immediately and will respond right away. Some people just check their email constantly and have forgotten why-- they've gotten used to doing so over time changing the habit can be painful and challenging.

You definitely don't want to be one of those people who checks their email constantly as a habit and feels pressured to respond immediately to everything that comes to you. At the same time, I personally decided that I didn't want to check my email just once a day either. As with many things, a more relaxed and balanced approach works best for me. I process my email at intervals throughout the day, sometimes focused more on quick scanning for anything urgent and others focused more on methodical, disciplined processing and sorting. I am still fine-tuning how I want to work with both email and especially social media sites now that I am self-employed. The allocation of my time is considerably less structured now, and my clients don't expect instant email responsiveness as a matter of course. At the same time, I note that I've gotten used to checking my email more often than I currently need to, and habits like that are tough to change. So, I expect a new email balance to emerge for me in the next month or so as I fully adjust to how I want to use these tools now versus how I have used them in the past in different settings.

To find your own email balance, I recommend considering the following:

• Responsiveness.

  What turnaround time are you comfortable with for email? What minimum responsiveness do others expect from you right now, and are you willing to challenge or renegotiate those expectations if you don't like them? Consider different contexts here, such as work vs. personal, and daytime vs. nighttime.



• Impact on your productivity.

  When you are doing creative, thoughtful work, how long do you prefer to work in before you take a break? You probably don't want to interrupt yourself more often than that, unless you've decided that responsiveness is more important to some degree than productivity.



• Purpose.

  For personal email on your personal time, the question of purpose might be less about productivity and responsiveness, and more about lifestyle choices and priorities. Most people really don't need to be wired into their personal email/social media throughout the day, but if you enjoy it and are comfortable with how it impacts the rest of what you accomplish in a day, perhaps that's okay with you. Or, you may decide that you are using your email to procrastinate, and need to set limits for yourself and cut back.

In my opinion, setting successful limits on email use is all about clarifying what you want from email, doing a thoughtful cost/benefit assessment, and making mindful choices. The one very specific tip that I will offer is that if you have pop-ups or sounds that notify you when new emails come in, turn them off! Even if you decide that in some contexts you will be checking your email extremely often, I encourage you to choose a time interval that you check proactively... rather than allowing every new email that comes in to stop you in your tracks and change your focus.

How often do you check your email... and why? Do you think your approach is the right balance for you, or does something need to change?

There are four main ways to keep your list manageable in size. The first one, of course, is to be careful of how much you take on in the first place. The second way is to periodically purge your to-do list of projects that, when you're being honest with yourself, don't truly need to get done. The third way is to be so disciplined and diligent that you are moving through your list steadily and thus prevent it from creeping up on you-- but even those of us who pull this off most of the time will still inevitably go through the occasional crunch period when our overall workload increases for a time. Then, as we begin to emerge, we may find that our list has somehow gotten unwieldy.

This brings me to the fourth approach, and the focus of this article, which is to periodically trim your list way down just by doing lots of stuff. Normally I would not encourage you to focus on quantity like this when you work. Instead, I might encourage you to focus on priorities when you choose what to work on, focusing the bulk of your effort on the projects that will have the most impact long-term. Often people will first do what is most urgent, focusing on completing first those things with the most imminent deadlines. Sometimes, I'll encourage people to "chunk" like tasks together and work on them one after another on that basis, because it can be easier to do similar tasks without having to mentally change gears when they jump around.

Today, though, I'm going to talk about doing something a bit different as an occasional change of pace: setting aside a block of time to knock out as many fast and easy tasks as possible to keep your lists to a manageable size and help you focus the rest of the time on what's truly important to get done.

1. Decide which tasks you'll do during your sprint.

2. Gather up anything you need.

3. Decide how long you'll work.

4. Set your timer if you're using one and go!

5.Update your master list.

6. Savor your success!

Have you ever focused on doing a sprint through the small easy easy stuff on your list to cut it down to size? Tell me about it in the comments.