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Now that we have a diagnosis of too many projects, it is time to discuss remedying the problem.

Write your project list

To begin with, we will need to come up with a list of all our projects, similar to the one that I made in the diagnosis post. To be fair, here it is again for reference:

1. Programming a website from scratch;
2. Starting my career as a professional belly dance performer and instructor;
3. Continuing my web design business;
4. Writing on this blog;
5. Writing on my professional “Hey this is me” blog;
6. Opening a belly dance online store;
7. Planning my wedding, which is less than a month away;
8. Writing a book about starting a business;
9. Hunting for a job in Albuquerque and…;
10. Looking for a place to live in Albuquerque before…;
11. Moving to Albuquerque in order to keep on…;
12. Getting my college education.

Review your list

Now, some of these do not make a lot of sense in the context of project management. For example, I will continue my college education no matter what – that is one project I will not drop until it is complete.

Additionally, some of these become mini-projects when they are broken down. Looking for a place to move involves trying to get my credit score higher and putting together a nice references list. Getting a college education involves making money, which means finding a job, and finding scholarships, which involves a lot of things, including writing essays and participating in extracurricular activities.

Expand your list

So let’s take a look at all your projects. Break them down into a long list like this one:

• Find and join an extracurricular club or volunteer for an organization (for college).
• Write an amazing scholarship application essay (for college).
• Rewrite resume (for a job, for a place to live).
• Apply to about a thousand jobs (for a job, for a place to live).
• Check out credit report and correct errors (for a place to live).
• Pay down credit cards to increase credit score (for a place to live).
• Check in with client about website to design (to pay down credit cards, for a place to live).

Perhaps the most overlooked and yet most important part of this list is tacked on right at the end, where you tell yourself why you are doing what you are doing. It is important to productivity to be reminded what is supposed to be getting done, exactly, and also important to prioritizing, which is, conveniently, our next step.

Prioritize

The first major step to correcting a lack of time is to prioritize projects.

Find your context

What we want to do is figure out how we are going to prioritize. For example, a lot of my projects require the root of all evil: that is, money. So, it would be wise in this case to prioritize according to how much something will cost and how much money it will make. Blogging is, for the most part, free, but it costs a large investment of time, which is another commodity. If you have unlimited money, perhaps time would be a better solution. Or, if you are like me, and you lack money and want to use your time for the best return, perhaps breaking down the list by both would be wise.

Break it down

Now that we have chosen how to break everything down, it is time to actually do so. Every item on the project list should have a “cost” and a “return” next to it, if you have chosen a product that has such qualities – something like time, money, or energy.

My list looks something like this:

• Blogging – time intensive, little upfront return, medium return over time
• Writing on established sites – time intensive, some upfront return, little return over time
• Regular work – time varies, medium upfront and long-term returns
• Web design – time intensive, high upfront return, small long-term return

Your analysis may look completely different, but this is what I find works best for me.

Organize

The final step in prioritizing is to actually do so. Think about what you want to spend the most of in this situation. Do you want to dedicate a lot of time upfront for high long-term returns, or would you rather jump onto the bandwagon and plug away for somewhat similar returns over the course of a lifetime? Figure out which projects should make their ways higher up the list. But, do not do this all at once. Rather, think on a scale of 1 to 10 (the numbers are arbitrary) and assign a value to each project one at a time. This will help you to think in terms of the project, rather than relative to other projects. This is important for later.

Here’s my list:

• Blogging (8)
• Job (7)
• Writing on established website (2)
• Web design (7)

Analyze

As you can see from my list, blogging is my highest-ranked priority. This is because it provides reasonable returns over time, is almost free to do, and because it gives me  the most amount of joy. Although it takes a lot of effort, it will pay off in the long run.

What I ranked lowest was writing for an established website, such as Associated Content, because it does not provide a terribly high return, and I consider it somewhat soul-crushing.

In this case, ignoring all other possibilities for making money and successfully moving to Albuquerque, blogging looks like the best bet for my mental health. However, with such a short amount of time to earn a return on my time, perhaps a regular full-time job would be my best bet.

Putting it to work

So now that we have our projects prioritized, what do we do? It is time to select an item or a few items from our projects list which are most important to us and begin working on completing them. For example, moving to Albuquerque, continuing my college education, programming, and writing will be my handful of projects.

Additionally, it is important to select a chunk of time to dedicate to each project so that they will not become crossed and mixed together, which must be avoided at all costs.

For example, every few days, I review Craigslist postings for new jobs I could do in Albuquerque. Every day, I set aside about two hours for writing. I study at least twenty hours per week. I program with the rest of my free time, when I have the sanity for it.

After all this, I still usually have time to do other things, like planning my wedding or travel, and dancing. Because of all this, I consider my project management to be balanced and healthy.

What about you? Care to share your project list? Do you have to prioritize, or are you doing well enough managing everything at once?

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Medication

I maintain my mental health in a number of ways. To be honest, this includes medication, because I am bipolar. It also includes taking fish oil and a multivitamin because I do not have the best diet ever. I have admitted to myself that, for now, I need help keeping healthy. I am okay with this and I would hope my readers would be as well. To me, it is far better to be healthy and happy with help than to be unhealthy and in denial.

Scheduled Posts

I am definitely the opposite of a morning person. Actually, I’m more of a mid-afternoon productive type. But I want to have a post first thing in the morning for my American readers. Because of this, I schedule nearly every post you read on this site.

Jewelry

Yes, even a silver pendant has something to do with my routine. Every time I leave the house, I put on an om necklace I got as a gift for a little over $20 on Amazon. It is a constant reminder throughout the day to remain balanced, polite, and in a good mood.

I Have Friends

I have made friends during my life who have similar goals to my own, who want to remain in touch with their spiritual sides and treat others kindly and respectfully, and who have some ideas for how to go about it. They have helped me immensely.

I Have a Role Model

I have a person in my life who is the epitome of how I want to act, and seeing this person interact with others never fails to inspire me to be a better person.

I also have a new mentor, who I think will provide me with direction in my college and work careers.

Whether it is a necklace or a best friend, there are little things in my life I like to keep around in order to help me stay healthy and sane. What are some of the methods you use to stay balanced?

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Dedication

It takes dedication to be a balanced person. When obstacles come, one must keep persevering no matter what happens. One must know where he or she is heading, know why he or she is heading there, and how to get there.

Motivation

To reach this goal, one must be able to continue along the path at all times. No breaks and no exceptions.

Help

Regardless of how well-off one is, at some time, we all need help, whether from another person or not. We must know where to look for it and how to accept it, or else we will fail. Also required is the knowledge and ability to decide which person to select for help, and who is trustworthy enough.

Set the goal to be balanced, take the right steps toward it, and you will eventually get there. Whether or not you think you can, you are right. And no matter what happens, I want you all to continue along your paths, even if it hurts.

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Take a Break

Every hour, half-hour, or otherwise, stand up and take a few deep breaths. Let your mind and body refresh – hit the reset button on your body. Think of it as a cleansing, relaxing period to allow more work to get done in the near future. This is your time.

If you get into trouble for this, try doing it in the bathroom, or walk a memo or something similar to another person’s office on the other side of the building. Be ready to explain that you need to refresh your mind or your work will suffer. Any good boss will understand, and any bad boss will be too afraid to lose another employee.

Leave it at Work

Leave work where work belongs. Do not take a work computer home to finish a project overnight. Just as it is not okay to take your children in for a visit, it is similarly wrong to make your family or personal space suffer because of an unproductive day. Home is where you recharge – not where you catch up.

Talk to Others

As coworkers, you share common bonds with many of the people around you. You both experience the same things day after day, although probably with a different perception. Learn who your coworkers are and be sure to keep yourself active throughout the day. Nobody else will be around to provide moral support should it be needed, so work friends are very necessary. Be careful not to do too much talking.

Little Reminders

Stick a post-it into your lunchbox, or your monitor, or your door, so every time you see it, you’re reminded to smile, or think of God, or remember why you’re working. Little reminders throughout the day can make the difference between misery and cheer.

How do you keep your life on-track and balanced at work? Do any of the tenets of your life suffer while you’re away from home?

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From a business perspective, this is not such a bad thing. If people are complaining, at least the company is not being ignored – a far harsher fate than being despicable. But interruption advertising is a dying art, as Seth Godin et alii have said for years now. They are correct. People do not want to be disrupted. They want their advertising to be relevant and they do not want to know they are being sold to. This is why Google’s Adsense program has been so successful.

Now onto the advice. It is of no concern to you how people are perceiving your advertising. As long as it gets your name out, it is doing its job. After this, it is up to them to buy or to fly, and to share with others. Your only concern is that people are perceiving your advertising. You want to be seen. You also want to be liked, but that is up to your PR person.

Balance your advertising with actual, good value. Baking soda commercials should show tips for how to use it to clean or to bake, or to make your teeth bright and shiny. Never say, “Buy this product,” but rather, “This is what my product can do for you.”

Alas, many companies have failed to learn this lesson. Have you had your life intruded upon by advertisements lately? Anything particularly infuriating or otherwise upsetting for you?

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Balancing work with home life can be difficult, especially in this age of technological advancements that have led us to being able to work from home with relative ease. If you make money while you sit around in your pajamas, however, how do you balance home time with work time? It can be a difficult art, which is why I have put together a rough guide to balancing work with life, specifically meant for small business owners or college students who study often and study hard.

Know your limits

To begin with, know how much work you are capable of doing before you will go insane. This could be expressed in hours, to-do list items, or numbers of units processed, but either way, know how much you want to do. This is a basic rule for any work, but it becomes especially important while working from home. Know how much you want to do before retiring for the day.

Know your schedule

Do you work better late at night when the kids are asleep and the parties have died off, or do you prefer to do everything first thing in the morning, before the Sun is up? Perhaps you would rather work in between, during the afternoon when it is warm and you can easily go outside to stretch your legs. Regardless, know when you do your best work and plan around that time.

No interruptions

When doing work, make sure the children are away, the phone is off, the television is muted or powered down, the Internet is unplugged (unless, of course, you work online like I do), and there will be no drop-in visits. Just like working out of the home, anything unrelated needs to be gone and out of mind, or you will be distracted and your productivity will decrease.

Have a space

Similar to dismissing the interruptions mentioned above, it is also distracting to be in the same place for all activities. If you do not have a home office, try working at the dining room table, at a desk, or on a different computer which is separate from your personal usage. If you cannot afford any of these, try a different profile on your operating system and only install useful things for that profile. Remove everything else.

Clean it up

Not only is it important to have an official work space, but it is also necessary to have a clean one. Keep pictures of family and other personal items limited as if your boss will be coming over to check it out. Act like you are in a cubicle (albeit a much more cozy one) and you will work as if you are in one. On the other hand, however, some people do not work well when they feel their surroundings are cold and lifeless. If this is the case, and that is why you are working from home, especially, you should break this rule. Just keep distractions at a minimum without hampering creativity.

End the day

Have a ritual you perform at the beginning and end of your work time. Perhaps you switch on the radio, or turn on a fan, or open the blinds. Whatever you choose, perform it at the beginning and end of every period of work. When you do this, let your mind wander to the next phase (work or play) and do not return to either until your time is through. This is the most important part and also the hardest to perform. Many working from home either work all day or play all day. Neither is healthy. In order to be successful, this step must be fulfilled.

What are your tips for keeping yourself sane while you work from home? Do you work more efficiently at night or at other times? How about your ritual? What has worked for you?

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In adopting a new lifestyle, we also shed old activities and adopt new ones. Taking from Stephen Covey’s self-help series, I am here to address the six habits of balanced people – what they do daily to strive for their goals and maintain a happy and healthy life.

They plan ahead

Balanced people know where they are going and where they have come from. They can tell you where they will be in twenty years with the strongest conviction you have ever seen. They have goals and everything they do is a step toward one or another.

They are motivated

They know where to find motivation and how important it is to their success. They never have writers’ block because they can write about anything and everything. They want to succeed and they do, because they have the skills and knowledge necessary to accomplish anything. Those they do not already possess they will learn.

They learn daily

They are constantly on a question for personal development and growth and every day, they accomplish or work on mastering something, even if it’s as small as plucking a few keys on the piano. They keep moving because they know idle hands are not productive. Even their down time means something to them, keeping busy by being laid back and calming down after a long working period.

They are patient

They know that good things come to those who work and wait. They strive for goals, but they know that instant gratification is only another way to become a glutton. You can throw any wait at them and there they will sit, perhaps accomplishing something or another in the mean time, perhaps meditating. Either way, they can and will wait for anything good to come.

They work while they wait

Whether waiting for a bus or waiting for an opportunity to open, they know there are things to be accomplished. They work on these things while they wait patiently for whatever it is they need to move along to the next step. Balanced, successful people are those you see reading books at bus stops, organizing the kitchen while they bake, and meditating when the electricity goes out.

They are organized

Not only are their homes simple and free of clutter, but their minds are, as well. They do everything with a purpose and ensure their steps are always in the right direction. Remember: reaching success is not about who takes the most steps, but rather who steps with the most accuracy.

While not everybody will reach a balanced lifestyle – few people will ever even try with reasonable effort – many can learn from those who set a positive example. It is possible to learn by observation, and that is what should be done in this situation. You do not have to seek out a Yogi, but do have a few positive examples in your life of how you want to live. Good luck, as always.

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So if you have a small business, especially online, how do you get people to talk on your $0 advertising budget? The same way you got that good job you quit (or are working on quitting): networking. We won’t get into how to network right now, but rather why to network.

Marketing

Let’s start with a rundown of what marketing is good for. Marketing is a process based on expensive research – ideally, a budget of millions or billions of dollars – in the hopes that advertisements and trials generate enough attention and goodwill to achieve a 1/1000 rate of leads becoming customers.

Marketing is good if you want to target a very large audience across an entire nation – or country, or planet, as the case may be – and do not care where your leads come from, but only that they are coming.

Marketing is bad if you want to sell to a very specific population in a very small area. Sure, it is useful, but it can be very costly, and for many small business owners (including myself), if it can’t be done DIY-style, it can’t be done at all.

Networking

Networking is different from marketing because it is not the act of targeting, but rather doing something with a target. Networking is talking to others about yourself and your product and explaining why they need you and why you should be allowed to stick around for a while. It is generating a sale by creating a relationship, which is a major goal of marketing that very few advertisers seem to remember.

It is much easier for many people to build rapport one-on-one rather than hoping a 30-second television placement will be good enough to at least break even.

So why should you network if you have a small business?

Let’s say you talk to somebody about your duct tape wallets, and he decides he really doesn’t want one. But let’s also say he has a son-in-law who would love one, and that you conveniently slipped in your accounting classes and he needs an accountant. You could get freelance work plus generate business for both gigs just by casually talking about what you do.

Let’s also say you never network. Who’s going to buy from you when your commercial fails?

Nobody.

Balance your marketing with networking, or your business will not reach its full potential, or may completely fail. Remember: networking isn’t about selling your product; it’s about selling yourself.

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Whether you are a small business owner or a blue or white-collar worker employed by somebody else, the steps to achieving balance and the problems resulting from a lack of such are the same. You will have less time with family, derive less joy from living, and fail to work at your full capacity.

As for me, I am a student working part-time from home. I hope to get a second part-time job out of the home soon, but the future is irrelevant to the now. And right now, my life is unbalanced.

You see, I spend about 40 hours per week studying for school. The remaining time is spent doing other things, like programming, writing, and making money. A small fraction is when I spend time with my family and friends and have a social life, which means I rarely get out of the house or see the sun shining away from school. This has negatively impacted my life by keeping me from working at my full capacity because I rarely experience joy in life.

Now, I want every one of you to write something similar and share it with somebody else. If you are incapable of doing this, try this:

I spend most of my time doing ___. The remaining time is spent on ____ and ____. I never have time for ____. This has hurt my life by ___.

As soon as you have written these sentences, you have identified the problem. Now it’s time to find a solution.

In order to remedy this, I am going to ____ because it will ____

In order to get my life in balance, I am going to work harder for less time and socialize more because it will give me more enjoyment of my ample free time.

Now that we have a solution, we will begin working on achieving our goals next Sunday. Your assignment for the week is to thoroughly brainstorm every issue that is keeping you from achieving your full potential and a solution to each. If you need help, feel free to ask for it in the comments or by email.

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Over the next year (or longer), I will probably be talking about business a lot, as well as personal life. In the sake of balance, I have decided to begin writing about business now, rather than just introductions to personal subjects. Because of this, I am announcing a new, weekly series on this website which will be posted every Sunday: how to balance life with business.

Specifically, the series will talk about small business ownership and working from home. I hope to get into things like spending time with family, time management, getting motivated, staying motivated, and other related things.

If you have any suggestions for topics or think I am not covering something major with the series, I would like you to leave a comment on one of the articles or otherwise let me know (I’ll get it – I promise).

So look forward to the first article in the series next Sunday, and I’ll be sure to stick around for a while to take questions.

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