Musings

Reflections on life lived by a coast

  • Home
  • Travel
  • Yoga
You are here: Home / Archives for game of life

Working Toward a Balanced Life

May 25, 2010 •

Lately I find myself engaged in con­ver­sa­tions about people’s desire for a more bal­anced, nour­ish­ing, or pur­pose­ful life.

With friends, fam­ily or even pro­fes­sional col­leagues, cer­tain top­ics keep crop­ping up: exer­cise and well­ness, yoga (or my friends’ pas­sion for Nia), life/work bal­ance, rela­tion­ships that nour­ish, mean­ing­ful work. On the flip side: frus­tra­tions with dispir­it­ing, soul-suck­ing jobs, heart­less employ­ers, bro­ken promises, not enough “qual­ity time” for fam­ily rela­tion­ships and so on.

Based on my cir­cle of friends and col­leagues, well­ness and life bal­ance, or the lack thereof, are now top-of-mind. Like many Boomers in that regard.

We actively seek options, try out new pos­si­bil­i­ties, and explore self-help resources. Fueled with the best of inten­tions, we take steps toward get­ting our lives back in order. Book clubs, diets, gym mem­ber­ships, yoga classes. We start with a burst of enthu­si­asm, keep our new com­mit­ments for a while, and then…

…Iner­tia sets in. Our good inten­tions fall by the way­side, buried under the pres­sures of overly sched­uled lives, too much work-related travel, or the lat­est work or fam­ily cri­sis.

How can we get our­selves out of this pre­dictable rut?

Are There Any Useful but Likable Resources?

One promis­ing option is an online ser­vice called Mind­bloom. Mind­bloom, say its devel­op­ers, is “an online well­ness-cen­tric life game.” Quite a mouth­ful…

To me it’s a “promise keeper” — a way to man­age per­sonal com­mit­ments, the actions “I should” or “ought to” take. It keeps me focused on tasks I often post­pone or over­look, things that tend to remain on to-do lists indef­i­nitely.

Mind­bloom offers a use­ful but play­ful way to set good inten­tions, stay on top of your com­mit­ments, and fol­low through on your promises. It also helps you iden­tify the parts of your life that need more atten­tion to be paid. I’ve been using it since Decem­ber, at the urg­ing of col­leagues who know the founders (it’s a local Seat­tle com­pany).

My feel­ings about it are mixed, but I like it well enough to talk about it to friends and explore how they might use it.

How It Works

Mind­bloom is an inex­pen­sive online ser­vice that lets you man­age key dimen­sions of life by your­self, or with the help of trusted friends, fam­ily mem­bers, per­sonal coaches, etc.

The inter­face is play­ful, easy to learn, and not too time-con­sum­ing. It incor­po­rates “game mechan­ics” if you pre­fer exter­nal moti­va­tion to rein­force self-dis­ci­pline while get­ting your life back in bal­ance.

Mindbloom wellness management

Using trees and col­ors as a visual metaphor, Mind­bloom helps you visu­al­ize goals and objec­tives, group related activ­i­ties into a branch, and plan how and when to take action on your inten­tions. If you’re dili­gent about tend­ing your tree, you earn the right to change the land­scape and other aspects of your envi­ron­ment (like what you hear when you’re tend­ing the tree).

Branches are an orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple; each branch rep­re­sents an aspect of life, such as “rela­tion­ships,” “health,” “money” or “career.” You decide which branches and how many leaves you want on each branch.

Each leaf’s color reveals how well you’re man­ag­ing this aspect of life. Healthy, well-man­aged leaves are green and vibrant. By con­trast, neglected ones turn yel­low and then shades of brown.

When things are seri­ously out of whack, your leaves turn red. This can hap­pen when you skip too many inten­tions, or don’t pay enough atten­tion to an aspect of your life that you’ve cho­sen to man­age with Mindbloom’s help. Clearly, Mindbloom’s devel­op­ers want to dra­ma­tize the fact that this aspect of your life appears to be out of bal­ance.

Alone or Together

So far I’m using Mind­bloom as a solo endeavor (per­haps a reflec­tion of a New Eng­land upbring­ing). Mind­bloom has been designed, how­ever, to encour­age peo­ple to work together. The devel­op­ers have incor­po­rated a num­ber of “social” hooks so mul­ti­ple trees can be man­aged within a fam­ily or net­work of friends.

Some of my friends are chat­ting about adapt­ing the ideas they like best from the Weight Watch­ers pro­gram to share with each other via Mind­bloom. (Appar­ently, they’ve had unin­spir­ing Weight Watch­ers coaches, so this “social” approach seems more attrac­tive.)

Mindbloom’s founders have learned that pro­fes­sional life and well­ness coaches are intrigued by Mindbloom’s pos­si­bil­i­ties. These coaches are envi­sion­ing how they could graft their frame­works onto a Mind­bloom con­text so they can facil­i­tate online inter­ac­tions with their clients.

What I’ve Learned So Far

There’s an art to design­ing and struc­tur­ing your tree: decid­ing what to tackle with Mind­bloom, and what to man­age with other approaches.

I’m still work­ing out the kinks of what to man­age with Mindbloom’s help, and what to tackle else­where. It’s easy to end up with an unhealthy tree if you choose too many or the wrong things to man­age.

With my tree, I chose to man­age goals and objec­tives like:

  • To-do items that are cap­tured on Pos­tIt notes, but dis­ap­pear before they’re acted on — things like sched­ul­ing a med­ical appoint­ment for pre­ven­tive care or rou­tine main­te­nance for my car;
  • Ideas that lurk in the back of my mind, often tinged with guilt or anx­i­ety, but rarely set down on paper — like “lose # pounds this sum­mer”;
  • Things I intend to do daily, but may skip when feel­ing lazy or pressed for time (floss­ing, going for a walk, med­i­tat­ing, etc.);
  • Things like phon­ing par­ents or friends on a reg­u­lar basis, mak­ing time to meet col­leagues over lunch — just to “catch up.”

For now my tree is very sim­ple, with just the “leaves” that most need atten­tion, so I can tend it with just a few min­utes of effort each day.

Things to Avoid, Lessons Learned

At first I inter­mixed pro­fes­sional and per­sonal inten­tions within my Mind­bloom tree; how­ever, I dis­cov­ered it’s bet­ter to keep Mind­bloom cen­tered on key aspects of my per­sonal life.

When it comes to man­ag­ing work or career inten­tions, I already have effec­tive sys­tems and tools for those pur­poses. Adding those goals and objec­tives (and date com­mit­ments) into Mind­bloom became duplica­tive, and there­fore eas­ily neglected. Inad­ver­tently this made my Mind­bloom tree appear sicker than it actu­ally was.

My take: For com­mit­ments you already man­age effec­tively with Out­look, a GTD sys­tem, online to-do lists, etc., there’s no point in dupli­cat­ing your effort with Mind­bloom.

Hav­ing said that, the parts of your life that don’t lend them­selves neatly to Pos­tIt notes, Out­look reminders, iPhone to-d0 lists, etc., are good can­di­dates for Mind­bloom.

It’s also wise to avoid set­ting up leaves for activ­i­ties that are really being man­aged by some­one other than your­self.  For exam­ple, I pay the bills and man­age house­hold finances; my hus­band man­ages our invest­ments. When I made the mis­take of defin­ing invest­ment-related leaves, they quickly turned yel­low and became sickly. Due to that role mis­match, those leaves needed to be “pruned” and removed from my tree.

There are things about the UI or the way you “sched­ule” inten­tions that I find annoy­ing or awk­ward. But I won’t list them here as I’ll be pro­vid­ing feed­back directly to the devel­op­ers.

Net net. If you’re look­ing for a way to get your life back in bal­ance, take a look at Mind­bloom. Per­haps it can help you focus on the areas that most need atten­tion, or that would bring the great­est joy to you, your fam­ily and friends.

About This Blog

Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

Recent Posts

  • Wet Sand, Wet Boots, Birds
  • Living with Vintage Items
  • Slowing Down
  • Reflections on My Camino
  • Going Off the Beaten Track in France

© 2020 by Christine Thompson. All rights reserved. • Log in