I've been basking in the afterglow of our third family cruise, which happened last weekend. We did it this time with our friends from Chicago, and we had an epic good time. In fact, I had the single most fun day on a beach ever, which is saying a lot because I'm not a beach fan. I keep reminding myself that I need to blog about the experience, because it's worth writing about.
The truth is, I haven't, because it hasn't been a priority. Writing in general hasn't been a priority, and while it bothers me, it's one of a number of things (like watching movies, learning about new things, exercising more and other personal issues) that I simply haven't placed in the right order of things. A friend of mine was asking today about how you balance all of this stuff, and I realized that I don't follow my own advice. When my life was more, to be kind, turbulent, I wrote about and thought about life balance all of the time.
In the software world, specifically where we do things in an "Agile" fashion (capital "A" because it's sort of almost a proper noun), we look at all of our work and put it into a backlog. I happen to think that you don't even bother differentiating between kinds of work. A task to implement a feature goes right along side of a bug. We prioritize the backlog, and decide what's most important. Then we look at a given period of time, maybe it's a week or two, and schedule items from the backlog into that period of time (often referred to as an iteration or sprint). For the most part, we predictably get the results we were looking for when we're done.
Life is surprisingly like a backlog. We all have a finite amount of time to do stuff. For the most part, I think people figure out what they can do in any given amount of time. Where we do not succeed is in the prioritization part. We get too fixated on certain categories of tasks in our backlog. Some people believe that even the smallest detail at work requires full attention and extra time, even if it's something that in reality could be cast aside or handled by someone else. Others put every moment into their children, missing out on time with their spouse or other family. Still others may disappear into a life of leisure activities while nearly everything else is neglected. None of these scenarios has a positive outcome.
I'm not suggesting that we have to plan out every "iteration" of life. I'm actually suggesting that we live more in the present and find a balance between the things in our life backlog. The risk of being one-dimensional and focused on a narrow part of life is high if we don't step back and look at how we spend our time. If you turn 50 and look back, do you want to have the realization that all you did was work? You ignored your needs entirely so you could provide for a child? You partied and ignored your professional life? None of these extremes are necessary, but it seems like I encounter people all of the time who lacked this balance, and they can't get that time back.
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