Agile Personal Development

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….

Last week was National Volunteer Week here in the United States. If you’re thinking about giving some of your time for a cause, I’ve compiled 7 of the top questions you should ask, and ideas on how to get answers.

1) What type of organization to support? There are a lot of different types of non-profit organizations to pick from. Typically charity organizations like those that help the homeless or provide after-school mentoring for at-risk teens are the ones that come to mind. However, there are a lot of other types of non-profits to consider. For example, you may want to volunteer for a political campaign, or a business league, or an organization focused on promoting social welfare. Choose a type of non-profit that aligns with your personal values and vision. Here are some other ideas for more charity-focused organizations.

2) How to find a specific opportunity? Once you have an idea of the type of organization to support, you’ll need to determine what specific opportunities are available. There are a number of websites that list volunteer opportunities. If you live in the United States, there is a good listing here. This includes some more popular websites like USA Freedom Corps and VolunteerMatch. You can also find local volunteer action groups through Points of Light. If you are looking for volunteer opportunities internationally, check out World Volunteer Web. Most of these include opportunities for charity organizations. If you are looking for opportunities for volunteering for other types of non-profits, contact the organization you are interested in to find out what opportunities they have.

3) What types of skills do you want to use / learn? Volunteering can be a great way to do something different from what you do for a living. It can also help you explore a new career, or an opportunity to gain more experience with your current skills and help a non-profit. Some volunteer websites such as IdeaList allow you to search for specific opportunities based on the type of skills needed.

4) How much time can you commit? Non-profits rely heavily on volunteer support. You don’t want to commit to something that you can’t follow through on. Make a realistic estimate of how much time you can commit to volunteering. There are plenty of short term projects (over a weekend) that allow you work around a busy career schedule. However, you may have a lot of time on your hands, and spending 6 months helping out an organization might be something you can commit to.

5) How do you know the organization is legitimate? There are several ways to evaluate the legitimacy of an organization, including Better Business Bureau evaluations, or searching for opportunities on Network for Good. Network for Good combines the VolunteerMatch database (mentioned previously) with GuideStar evaluations of non-profits.

6) Should I volunteer in person or virtually? There are a number of opportunities for Virtual Volunteering. This type of volunteering allows you to support organizations electronically, rather than being there in person. While you might think that this would require less time than doing something in person, that is not necessarily true. This is just one myth about virtual volunteering. The reality is that many people volunteer both in person and through virtual means. However, you may not be able to support in person, maybe due to geographic reasons, or physical disabilities. In that case, virtual volunteering may be a perfect opportunity for you.

7) Should I volunteer in my local community, or someplace else? If you have the time and ability to travel to other parts of the world, you might consider an organization like GlobalVolunteers. They have many opportunities across the world for you to help out. Some people even choose to volunteer on their vacations/holidays. Alternatively, your local community likely needs your help as well. What could be better than helping out the area where you live?

UPDATE: Thanks to a comment from CVTips.com, here are some links to interviews with key members of many of the volunteer websites mentioned above (and some additional sites) - Idealist.org, Projects Abroad, Latin America, Global Crossroads, WorkingAbroad, NFOAbroad, Starfish Ventures, Cross Cultural Solutions, and Ecoteer - Volunteering. There is a lot of good information in the interviews about how they operate and what to consider before volunteering.