Agile Personal Development

I’ve been traveling a lot for work lately (which explains the lack of posts). I’ve always been a big fan of “packing light”. With the latest plans for the airlines to charge even more money to pay for checked luggage, it is especially important now to be able to carry everything on.

I have a great bag (similar to this one, but larger) for business travel. I especially like the ability to convert over to a backpack mode - great for moving quickly through an airport. I normally roll up my non-dress clothing to avoid wrinkling. For dress shirts and slacks, I’ve folded them up inside of an Eagle Creek Pack-It Folder. For the most part, this roll and pack method worked, except I still ended up with large wrinkles in my shirts. I usually wrap them in plastic dry cleaning bags which keeps the small wrinkles from appearing, but I still have the large folds and creases from being folded up. I noticed this seems to be a bigger issue for shirts that have some starch in them.

On my latest trip, I’m checking out “bundle packing” from the OneBag.com site. I’ve been a fan of OneBag for awhile, there are some good tips for what to take and what not to take on a trip. After packing for this latest trip using the bundle packing method, I definitely felt like I got a lot more clothes stuffed into a smaller space that usual. At the same time, it seems like I’ll probably end up with similar large wrinkles to what I got with the folding and rolling methods. Another downside is that it definitely took longer to pack.

Even with the downsides though, the fact that I crammed so many clothes into a small space has me really excited about using this new method in the future. I love having a little extra space in my bag (and being able to easily carry it on), since it seems like it is always harder to fit everything back in on the way home.

For the past two months, I’ve been evaluating the Toggl tool for keeping track of how I spend my time relative to my life budget.  While the initial iteration of the tool worked great, the latest version has taken away a number of the features that I really need. I’ve now decided to move on to another tool. I think the Toggl tool is great for the purpose it was designed for (real-time tracking of tasks), but without features such as being able to easily input a number of tasks that have already been completed or keep tracking tasks if you shut your computer down, it is now too hard to use for life budgeting. This would still work fine if you are tracking your freelance activities while working, but it makes it more difficult to capture tasks when you are not on the computer such as sleeping. I’ve found that since the transition to the new version occurred, I stopped using the tool to track my time since it took too long.

In keeping with the ‘Agile’ part of Agile Personal Development, I’m now trying another tool, 1Time, for doing something similar. I’ll keep you posted over the next two months as I determine the best way to use this tool for Life Budget tracking.

After tracking your life budget for awhile, there are a number of issues you’ll probably find. Here are some of them, and some ideas on how to work through them.

1) Difficulty Tracking your Time. Even if you use a tool like Toggl, it is difficult to keep up with how you spend your time. This is especially true if you have to catch up on it after you get home from work. If you miss a few days, I recommend you input some typical times for your different life budget categories just to keep things moving along. Keep in mind that the main point isn’t to get everything perfect, just that you understand where you are not spending enough time (or too much).

2) More Detail Needed for Categories. The standard categories may need to be adjusted for your own use. For example, you might want to measure how much time you spend on a specific personal development area, like self-reflection, versus just the general category. It would make more sense to split the Personal Development life budget category into smaller chunks. I recommend not having more than 10-15 categories total, and that you should not have a category with a budget of less than a few hours a week.

3) Duplication of Categories. You’ll find that some activities in life fall into more than one category. For example, mowing the lawn could be considered as house upkeep, as well as exercise. It is fine to “double-count” this time against both categories, but it gets difficult to track this. To handle this situation, I recommend making a note against each activity, and then reviewing at the end of each week (or day if you have time) and make sure you have counted the time against all appropriate categories.

4) Different “Quality” of Time. Sometimes an hour of your time doing a task seems like it should be worth more per hour than your budgeted time. For example, the calculations of how much an hour of exercise is worth is based on a moderate level of exercise (walking, mowing the lawn, etc). If you go out and run a 5K, you are working out at a higher level than moderate. This reduces the number of hours you need to exercise against your budget. However, this gets tricky in practice. I recommend that you modify the hours you spend on higher level exercise to the equivalent hours at a moderate level. This keeps you from having to recalculate your hourly rate for the higher level of exercise, and yet still ensure that you are meeting the required goals for your health. You may also find that due to multi-tasking or other distractions, you need to reduce the actual time spent to better reflect reality.

5) You Spend Your Time Differently Than Expected. After establishing your Life Budget, hopefully you will continually think about how you are spending your time, and whether it aligns with your personal vision and values. However, you may find that it is really hard to change how you spend your time. For example, week after week I continue to spend more time on work than budgeted, but have yet to find a solution to it. I also find that I spend a lot of time on personal development activities, but they don’t always have tangible benefits (like checking something off my life list). You also will find that hours may go by and you can’t even remember what you spent them on. While this may be a difficult feeling to have, I believe that tracking your Life Budget at least helps you to recognize that you are not spending your time as you expect. And knowing is half the battle, as my favorite childhood cartoon burned into my brain….