Master Time Management with the Life Ledger: A 21-Day Experiment for Work-Life Balance
I was on a fast track to burnout, losing sight of why I started my journey in the first place, struggling with work-life balance and effective time management (and this wasn't my first time).
When you work from home, the lines between the two get blurry. And this is so common there's a name for it: Parkinson's Law.
It's the same law that governs a gas. Which will keep expanding to fill the size of the container it is in. The problem? When you work from home (or hybrid which is basically everyone with a laptop or phone), that container is invisible.
But the truth is we all have the exact same container. It's a 24-hour box.
However, the difference between people is in how intentionally they use it.
Where did the time go? You hear it at work, at play, and everywhere in between.
For the last 21 days, I used a Life Ledger. Here is my process:
I decided how many hours a day were reasonable (for me) to work.
Each day, I wrote down the time and the name of the task I began.
I set a timer for one hour (this is my favorite one).
At the end of the hour, I had a 2-minute exercise snack.
I then added notes to the previous line (unless doing deep work, I rarely only did what I wrote an hour earlier)
Non-work events were logged in parentheses.
When I hit my allotted time off work, that was it.
Pencils down. Hold your paper in the air.
Work/life balance begins with knowing where you are.
Productivity is less about shoving 10lb of crap in a 5lb bag,
and more about being intentional as to where your time goes.
