This isn’t yet another bit of productivity advice though. For a change, I’m breaking through those narrow boundaries and writing about something you can do that will change the entire way you live your life. Period. As Thomas Merton once said, “Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”

Balance isn’t easy to achieve. It’s so much easier to jump in at the deep end and work your ass off every day, or lounge  around in the sun not getting much done, than to try and find the balance between the two. It’s much easier to be reckless with your money and max out your credit cards all the time, or be a frugal tightwad than it is to find an healthy middle ground. It’s much easier to focus on everything in black and white terms rather than it is to view life in different shades of gray. It’s easier… but it’s not better.

Once you’ve got it, it’s also easy to lose it. You might find a new hobby and you indulge in it so much to the detriment of time spent elsewhere in your social life. You might even buy a new computer game and spend so much time on it you don’t bother to think about your diet or your college work. You may spend all your time at work to the detriment of your relationship. Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep looking to steady the ship. Consider the following examples:

• Getting things doneOn one end of the spectrum you have out-and-out productivity, getting as much done  as possible. On the end other end you laze around and chill out all the time without getting much done. We all need regular breaks and time-outs to get things done, so why can’t we find the balance? Being able to do what’s important and have the time to relax in the evening is ultimately where you want to be.
• Health and fitnessWhen it comes to health, many people either simply don’t bother and sit around all day scoffing on fast food, or they treat their body like a temple, taking ten mile jogs every morning and feasting on fruit and veg everyday. With all the best intentions in the world it’s no wonder the average person fails at the first hurdle when trying to get healthy? But if you try and get the balance right, you can eat and exercise regularly without beating yourself up over the occasional fatty treat.
• Work/life balanceIt’s the most common example of balance in life. Few people want to spend all their time at work, but if you were to win the lottery and never have to work again, would you be truly content without a purpose in your life? Next time you take on yet more work in the hope of getting a pay rise, consider how it effects your work/life balance. As long as you’re making enough money to live in, wouldn’t it be great to be able to finish work early every day and pick your kids up from school?

A next action is literally the next physical, visible step you need to take to move something forward. It invariably means that whatever it is you are doing is broken down into small, manageable chunks. These aren’t the stereotypical items you might put on a to-do list, it has to be clearly actionable. A to-do list tends to be a bunch of thrown together thoughts and information. For example, an old-school type of item on a to-do list might be to clear out the garage. What am I meant to actually do with that? The garage is a dump, where do I even start? If you treat it as a project instead and work out next actions for it your focus will become much clearer. For instance, my first next action for garage cleaning could be to visit the DIY store and buy shelves for my tools. Then, the next action could involve putting the shelves up. Then it could be to actually arrange those tools on the shelves.

Some people have argued that you can’t make massive strides in a project if all you are doing is working on small chunks of work. However, it’s quite the opposite. Sure, doing bits and pieces of a project without a clear plan won’t get you very far, but don’t mistake that for working on next action. The key to defining one is to make sure it has a distinct end and that you are clear as to what it takes to declare it as completed. That way you actually get things done.

Thinking in terms of next actions has three key benefits:

• It makes work more manageable which leads to higher productivity. Work that previously seemed overwhelming suddenly becomes simple. It’s so much easier to get your head around a project when it is split down into smaller, distinct chunks of work. When you have a huge list of work you have to get through, where do you start? What do you actually do? Working out next actions will answer all those questions.
• It’s easier to do unpleasant/unwanted work which helps to lower stress levels. Sometimes we have crappy things we have to do, it’s part of life and we can’t avoid it. However we can make it easier to get through it by working purely on the next physical action. I’m currently painting my bedroom. I didn’t want to do it, I certainly didn’t want to spend all my time on it. But I broke it down and focused on one wall per day. That’s an easy chunk of work that doesn’t take too long to do, thereby overriding all the reasons I didn’t want to do it in the first place.
• It’s more satisfying to do the work, which leads to greater motivation. When you work on a massive project the big payoff only comes at the end when it is finally complete. There is a lot of work to do in the meantime, and where is the motivation to keep doing it? if you break it down into next actions, that is a small chunk of work that can be achieved in a few hours at the most, and you can tick it off when it’s done. Suddenly that huge project has lots of checkpoints/rewards along the way.

Here is a story from one of my previous jobs that stuck with me ever since. One month we failed to hit our targets for that period. Our manager, who was not one for motivating staff anyway, decided to lay down the law and made some idle threats about removing privileges, pay rises etc. She also decided to put up a big poster which detailed exactly what was expected of us and how we should hit out targets.

Three months later we failed to hit our targets again, by a bigger margin this time. What did she do? Made bigger threats, clamped down harder on any privileges we had left, and amusingly put up an even bigger poster. Lo and behold, yet another three months passed and our team performance and moral deteriorated even further. She ended up putting up a poster so big it covered an entire wall.

The point of this story? What really struck me from the whole experience was that at no point during that year did she look at herself or the situation in general and ask why things weren’t working. If she had she would have seen a clear correlation between her actions and our performance. In fact not once did she ask why the team failed to hit its targets in the first place. It could simply have been a blip or an issue with staff numbers. She wasn’t curious, she didn’t explore the issue, she just used her default response to any managerial problem. Needless to say, I left that job and am now much better off.

So many people end up on unhealthy paths or develop destructive mindsets simply because they don’t stop to ask why or how. Why are things the way they are? Why am I drinking so heavily every night? Why do I struggle to communicate with my boss? How can I find the motivation to go to the gym regularly? How can I improve my productivity system so it doesn’t keep falling apart? How can I save money on my groceries?

It’s the basic building block for improving anything, whether it be with turning around a struggling project or when focusing on your own personal development. Ask why something isn’t working and how it can be improved/fixed. Try doing it now. Open up your productivity system and look at one thing that isn’t functioning how you want it to. I’ve always tried to deal with cutting back the amount of times I would fall off the GTD wagon, and by asking “why” and “how” whenever it happened, I’ve slowly evolved my system to the point where having it fall apart is a rarity rather than the norm.

Another benefit of this habit is it plays into our natural curiosity. Curiosity is one of the strongest traits you can have, and it’s unfortunate that as people get older they tend to neglect and even suppress it. Just because curiosity killed the cat, it doesn’t mean you will suffer the same fate! Quite the opposite in fact, some of our greatest minds were extremely curious and inquisitive. It’s great for developing your brain to ask how something works the way it does or why things behave the way they do and you never know what sort of useful information you might discover.

The first habit I will look at is to be proactive (also the first habit in the 7 Habits book, which may tell you the significance of it). Being proactive is a common feature in personal development and business management. Definitions can vary slightly but I choose to essentially interpret it as consciously taking matters into your own hands and always looking for ways to move matters, issues, projects and your life in general forward.

The key to being proactive is to ultimately develop a mindset that looks to solve problems (as much as possible before they happen) and take matters into your own hands. Evaluate your processes and procedures. Find out what works for you and what doesn’t, and adjusts matters accordingly. My previous job was dragging me down emotional and physically, so I decided to look for new positions. However, my initial approach was to apply for anything that came onto my radar. This meant I was only applying for one or two jobs a week and I ended up procrastinating on my search so I developed a new procedure, where I would look for five jobs (a reasonable number given the time I had) at the start of the week, then apply for each one a day at a time.

While I am on the topic of my previous job, the company went through a period were targets were being missed over consecutive months. With each month, more threats were made, bigger posters were put up explaining what were expected of us and longer emails were sent out to each department demanding improvement. As the threats/posters got bigger the missed targets increased. The management did not once stop to think about their processes, until an outside consultant came in and pointed out what the rest of us had subtly suggested; that their procedures of big posters, long-winded emails etc were flawed.

Note that being proactive does not necessarily mean acting on things every single time. It’s knowing when to actively do something. Sometimes it can be just as constructive to wait and see. Too many people though, take this approach as their natural, default response to opportunities in their life. They are reactive rather than proactive to events, only doing something when it directly affects them. For instance, that’s why so many people get into debt. They only act on the problem, when the bailiff is knocking on the door.

If you use GTD or similar productivity setups to manage your life, you are already on the proactivity ladder. You are taking charge of your time, projects, goals etc and managing them in a way that betters your life. People without systems only tend to deal with issues as and when they float onto their internal radar, rather like a boat drifting aimlessly in the sea.

Promoting my blogs has been a prime example of being proactive for me. I regularly look for ways to improve the experience for the reader, and opportunities to promote it and get more people visiting. I don’t wait around hoping these opportunities present themselves, I go and find them myself.

One way to encourage yourself to be proactive is to score your performance regarding each of your roles and responsibilities (read more here) in your life on a regular basis. Taking my blogging as an example again, I give myself a score from 1-to-10 each week during my weekly review. I objectively determine whether I did as much as I could possibly do that week to proactively advance my blogging role. That way, each week I have a motivational marker to push further.