Define Your Life projects - Design And Implementation

Why defining your life projects?

The answer is simple – clear project definition sets boundaries and helps streamlining goals setting, task management toward the goals, and resources allocation for the tasks.

Your Life Projects

Define your life projects you want to develop yourself and achieve results. Mine are customers, family, finances, professional development, soft skill development, blogging, and few more. Everything that falls beyond these categories (life projects) does not deserve your attention, energy, and time.

Life Projects Design

Imagine swimming lanes. They are your categories, the life projects you run, ehm.. you swim. Your goal is to get to the end of each swimming lane. To do so you must allocate resources – time to be on either lane, energy your invest while swimming. You perform different tasks while swimming – you breath, you use different styles and strokes to move forward toward the goal. Once resources are exhausted you move to another swimming lane, using different strokes, moving yourself to another goal. Lanes are easy to switch, you do not waste your resources for the switching.

Using swimming analogy the design can be summarized as follows:

• Lanes encompass course of action toward clear goals.
• Lanes are easy to switch – no resource loss is allowed.
• Resources are allocated to each lane.
• Each lane contains definite set of tasks.

Life Projects Implementation Using Outlook 2007

I use Outlook 2007 to manage my life projects. Here is my simple implementation. Fire up Outlook 2007. In the menu bar choose "Actions" -> "Categories" -> "All Categories…". Delete all default categories and create your own using “New” or “Rename” buttons on the right.

Create Outlook 2007 folder and name it "Projects". Configure it to arrange items by Category. This is your life projects pipeline. Each action item in the folder is labeled with proper category. The action item can be an email, self post (Ctrl + Shift + S), or a blog post. Time will be proactively allocated to each category and each task will be prioritized according to the goals we set. You may want to refer to my post  "Keep Your Inbox Clean , Stay Focused And Productive – My 4 Simple Rules" to improve your inbox management.

Now you can clearly see your life projects, your swimming lanes. Use Up and Down arrows to easily switch between them. Use Left and Right arrows to expand and collapse each category.

In the upcoming posts I will be showing how to proactively allocate time, the main resource,  to each category. My post Time Boxing Is The Biggest Secret For Achieving Results shows few examples of why allocating time proactively is productive technique.