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.

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.