Area Balanced Living

The name I used for the types of Self Improvement process that nudges you to have "balance" in your life.

• is it better to have wide balance across 4+ dimensions, or have 1 primary area for excellence, and good-enough for the rest? Simplest Thing
• To Be or To Do?

(Other framings: see Tell Your Life Story Through Various Filters)

James Altucher's Daily Practice aims to hit 4 areas every day: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. And Every Time I’ve hit bottom (or close to a bottom, or I’ve been at some sort of crossroads) and started dong the above 4 items (1991, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2006, 2008) magic would happen.

• some people take those 4 areas and add "financial" or "material"

Howard Stevenson and Laura Nash's book Just Enough suggests a different 4 dimensions: happiness, achievement, significance, legacy.

Some people use the different layers of Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs.

There are plenty of other categorizations you can find.

Most gurus are OK with balancing areas on a weekly basis, rather than insisting on daily balance.

• Primoz Bozic is even more flexible than that. He defines a weekly time budget minimum-hours to maintain the core areas of his life, managing those with Habit-s and recurring Calendar events. Then his Weekly Planning focuses on a Project for the week to invest his remaining time in for the future. And the best part is, that your life won’t be boring any more. Every week, you will have an exciting new project to work on, and every week will be different. Once you look back at the last few months, you will be able to remember a lot of great experiences, which just won’t be possible if you try to balance every single day.

I find this kind of thinking useful for a periodic balancing of Goal Setting, but feel like short-term balancing results in either a Potemkin-CheckList ("yes, had positive interaction with my son today!"), or finding during your Weekly Review that you haven't actually "accomplished" anything (but that's my own filter in play).