#balanceapp

Dear TDB readers,

As you all know these past few days, weeks and months have been extremely tough, stressful and overwhelming.

As we collectively navigate our feelings of fear, anxiety, and isolation in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Elevate Labs team (the company I work for as a full-time designer) would like to do what they can to help you cope with some of the stress & anxiety we’re all feeling these days.

This month, we’re offering a free one-year subscription to Balance Meditation app to anyone who wants it.

Email [email protected] for instructions, and please share this post with others who might benefit!

Thank you and please stay safe! <3

I’m starting this up again!

How many hobbies do you have? And how many of those hobbies are built around certain skills that you have acquired over time or you are trying to improve over time?

By definition a hobby is “an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation”. We don’t necessarily choose our hobbies. Rather they come naturally to us. They are an extension and pursuit of our interests and passions.

If you look around online (try googling “turning hobbies into skills” to start), you’ll find a number of stories about how people have turned their hobby - passion - into a skill that was relevant to their ambitions in life. For example, you could have a keen interest in technology and you have a dream of building an app that could help improve people’s lives. You may have a couple of hobbies that revolve around this passion. Maybe you read tech magazines and engage in forums every week, as well as dabble in the odd bit of coding. For now it’s just a hobby, but you’ve decided you want to focus on improving your coding skills (ideally with the aim of being able to get to a level where you can build something or at least understand what needs to be done to build the thing you want) over the next 365 days, you could significantly enhance the choices you could make in your life a year later. All the time improving your skill set and overall enjoyment of a wider range of activities.

There is a great concept that I first came across when reading a Jim Collins book. It’s the idea of proactively pursuing ‘Creative Hours’ during a 365 day period. The idea is that you aim to have completed a specified total number of Creative Hours over any given 365 day cycle. Say you want to build in 1000 Creative Hours into your life over the next 365 days. That’s 2.7 hours a day of creative ‘stuff’ - could be anything that ignites your passions (e.g. painting, writing, learning a new language, golf, endurance training etc.), but it’s also something that you want to ‘get better at’. The goal is to log these hours every day, write down what you did in the day and how much time you spent on each hobby / skill in that day and then - very importantly - rate your day on a scale of +2 (Very Happy 😀) to -2 (Not Very Happy 😔) based on how you felt about your day. By logging all of these things you can look back on your previous 365 days and determine:

Am I keeping to the 1000 hours / 365 day pace, and if not how many hours do I need to make up to get back on track by tomorrow / next week / next month?

Which days did I feel best about and what was I doing on those days so that I can plan to have more days like those in the future?

What was my ‘happiness score’ for the past year and how can I make sure I improve that this year?

Am I able to afford more time to improve new skills and/or do I want to develop the already improved skill to an even higher level? Should I / Can I increase my 1000 hour target?

I’m very excited about this feature of Balance app. It can be used to keep you on track with your personal skill development and provide prompts to tell you if you are behind on your daily target in order to keep pace with your 365 day target.

Of course, not everyone has the luxury of being able to build in creative time proactively into a life that may be taken up by work, caring for others or any number of other obligations. But there is science to back up the claims that having creative hobbies is good for you, whether it results in improving performance at work, improving physical health or reducing stress.

Keeping fit and healthy both physically and mentally has become somewhat of a craze in recent years. Technology has helped spur on the frenzy, with new apps and wearables giving people reason to get up and exercise or take a moment to breathe.

The majority of people, however, do not rely on apps to get them moving. Young adults in the UK are more conscious of the benefits of a healthy diet and fitness regime due to elevated knowledge gleaned from scientific studies and the rapid spread of news on social media. There’s a reason fitness bloggers can make a living off social media - people want to be more healthy!

It’s easier said than done.

Many of us know how it feels to come back from a long day at work to then have to cook a meal that is relatively healthy and then be faced with trying to fit some exercise in.. all for that not to happen at all. You end up putting a pizza in the oven, having a glass of wine and kicking back and watching your favourite comfort TV on Netflix. No one can blame you for that, you need to switch off sometimes. Even if you fit your exercise in before work and cook your meals in advance so that you stick to a healthy diet and regulated fitness regime, you run the risk of missing out on other areas of your life, such as a meal out with friends mid-week, just because you all happen to be available and the weather is particularly good.

A healthy life is just about eating and exercising well. It’s also about making sure you take the time to allow your brain to recover from a stressful day at work or ensuring that any injuries or illnesses are seen to as a priority. It’s easy to get carried away with the day-to-day routine of life, only to find yourself suffering further down the line.

Having the time to keep on top of everything in your life is hard, but your health should always come first.

So, when it comes to leading a balanced life, you cannot start without making sure your health is in a good place. Rather than creating time to fit your health routines in to your calendar, you should start with it. Work around your health. Think about the all inclusive meaning of what it is to be healthy. Your fitness, diet, mental health and physical health.

Where all 5 elements of a balanced life lurk in the back of our minds, some of them can surface their heads more often - and some heads are uglier than others.

Keeping your finances in check while maintaining a balanced social life can be one of life’s harder tasks.

How many times have you woken up on a Sunday with a fear of checking your bank account?

It’s not just your social life that bears the brunt of your financial dilemmas. If you are leading a balanced life it’s likely that you’ll be saving money for other experiences, whether that be a holiday, learning a new skill or gym classes. Many of us will have some long-term financial goals that can sometimes be hard to keep track of, especially when the sun is out all summer and your friends are finding every excuse to get to the beer garden.

There are a number of apps out there that help you budget and keep track of savings. I’ve tried them all, literally. Having settled on one for now, I have come to realise that each one is good for a specific job - keeping track of your spending. Great. But what about seeing how the management of your spending and saving is impacting the other parts of your life? If you zoom out a bit, you can look at finances in much the same way as the other elements of a balanced life. You have goals for spending in categories such as groceries, travel and eating out and you may well build up saving ‘pots’ for holidays or a rainy day. Hitting these goals is pretty black and white. You either do or you don’t. But are you able to hit those goals as well as balance your relationships so that you are seeing the important people in your life as much as you want to each month? Or, if you look at my upcoming posts on Health and Personal Skill Development, are you achieving what you want across your life with your current saving and spending goals.

Sometimes financial worries can take up the majority of our thoughts, especially in London, given the cost of living and the price of eating or drinking out. We spend hours upon hours worrying and trying to get through to pay-day. Not everyone is like this, but the point is to be able to understand how your broader life and sense of balance fits alongside your spending and saving habits. In order to make the right adjustments for yourself, you would be better off looking at the broader spectrum and understanding how you can maintain a sense of balance when doing so.

Rather than build another budgeting app, I wanted to build something for myself that would fit into the 5 element balance. So, when I’m on track with my savings goals every month and spending under my budgets, I can actually see that my finances are on track (filling up 100% of their 20% share of the pie chart). This allows me to switch extra focus to the elements that might be slightly out of balance. Imagine a pie chart that shifts day-by-day relative to the monthly targets you have set yourself across all 5 elements. If you are off target you’d get a prompt to let you know that you are doing ok with your finances, but you should maybe book in some time with your brother this weekend, because you are two hours behind your target time spent with him this month. 

When it comes to the modern day young adult, work is often the biggest part of life.

Most of our waking hours are taken up by our job and we often find ourselves defining who we are by what our occupation is. Work-life balance has become a popular topic for ‘self help’ books and lifestyle blogs in recent years and the dangers of an unhealthy balance have been spread across social media and the news. There are serious long-term health and social issues attributed to stress at work and longer office hours that cause you to sacrifice a good nights sleep and down-time with your loved ones.

So, why don’t we do a quick review of how your work goals are fitting in to your life as a whole?

Everyone sets themselves different goals at work. Most people have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) assigned to them by their managers and they use these as a way of tracking if they are achieving success at work. However, progress at work can come in different forms. You may love the company you work for and are happy in your current role, with a track record of achieving well above your KPIs. Instead of sitting comfortable, there are goals outside of those KPIs that could help you grow further: 

Promotion

Pay Rise

Subject Matter Learning

Charitable Activities

Becoming a mentor or coach / Improving Leadership Skills

Others may not love their current job and may feel more restless about their job security and the effect that will have on their life. They will likely be setting goals that move them on to the next chapter in their career:

Training for a career / profession change

Interview practice

Networking

Applying to new jobs

Revision of their CV

Whatever your job situation, whether it takes up most of your daily thoughts or it is simply something that provides an income for you to live the rest of your life, it is right to make sure you are getting the right work-life balance for you.

An example might be a lawyer, who works long hours and has unpredictable workloads day-by-day, which can sometimes give rise to stress and cancelled evening plans. However, this individual might be happy to sacrifice some social and health aspects of their life, because they have financial security, enjoy their job (on the whole) and they are trying to establish themselves for long-term success at their firm. This person would have a long list of goals and tasks in the Work element of their life compared to maybe Relationships and Health.

The point here is to make sure there are at least some goals set in the other elements of their life. These must be achievable and manageable, given their focus on work. While they may put a 75% emphasis of their sense of balance on their work and a 25% emphasis on the other 4 elements, another person might put a 30% emphasis on their work and larger emphasis on their Personal Skill Development and Relationships outside of work.