The LIFE Project

Chapter 3: Further Adventures in the Matrix

Now that I'm a little clearer on the themes and how I should prioritize them, I can start brainstorming. No holds barred. There is no such thing as a bad idea. Basically, when I look at the theme, I want to think of what I can do to improve/strengthen that theme in my life.

For example with the financial stability theme, I know the biggest part around this is to first stabilize my income because I can't really do anything else effectively if I'm perpetually cash strapped. (As happens when one is freelancing and you... ahem.... focused all your energy on one contract, which came to an end and now you need to build your client base again.) 

The obvious solution here would be to either find a job or find more freelance work. I'm definitely doing the latter. The job thing... is complicated. I wouldn't mind the stability per se, but I did serious damage to my health over the past few years, so I need the flexibility to sort that out or the longer-term damage would be a lot worse than what I'm dealing with now. 

So for now, contract and freelance work is the better option, so I have to prioritize lining up enough work that I can even out my income at a level that covers my requirements. That handles things for the short term, but I want to sort out the long term as well. And this is where the brainstorming comes in handy. See, as much as I enjoy the work I do, I would like to free up some time in my life by making it less necessary to work to maintain a certain level of earnings. 

I would keep working, yes, but I'm feeling a significant amount of anxiety around the fact that my biggest source of income depends on my ability to work x amount of hours a week. What happens if I can't? What happens if I break my hand (I'm a writer/editor/graphics person)? What happens if someone decides not to pay me? I'd sue them, but what happens in the meantime? As a small to medium enterprise owner, I can't afford for things to go wrong, and that makes me stress. 

I will be working on mitigation measures later, but for now, I'm taking a positive approach. Instead of saying "How can I prevent this thing?", I'm asking myself "How can I improve my financial stability so that it doesn't matter whether the thing happens?" 

The answer is two-fold: 

1) Diversify

2) Generate passive income

With income diversification, it's necessary to find and generate several sources of income. Under this principle, I would rather generate $2 from five different sources for a total of $10 from one source. That way, if any one of those sources fail, I only lose $2 of income instead of the $10 I would have lost if I only focused on one thing. 

Ideally, I want for at least some of those sources to generate passive income. That way, I need to do some work, but I'll keep earning income long after work is finished. Interest and dividends are good examples of passive income. You do some work when saving or investing your money, but after that, your money grows without you needing to take further action. 

When brainstorming what I could do to improve my financial stability, I thought of various possible sources of income--some passive, others not. I took a similar approach to all of my themes. Not going to go into detail because that would be super tedious, but I ended up with almost 60 sub-projects. DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNN!!!!!

This would have looked daunting, but I knew I was heading back into the matrix. Actually, two matrices. First, I chucked all of the sub-projects into an Eisenhower matrix again because, even though one theme might be less important, some of its sub-projects might have greater importance or urgency. (One thing I noticed was that some sub-projects, like my meditation practice, impact two or more themes. I measure those as more important by default.) 

After I ranked the projects by importance and urgency, I put them into an effort-impact matrix, this time to rank them by effort and (immediate) impact. Priority one are those projects that are low effort, high impact. High-effort, high-impact projects come in second. Third come the high-effort, low-impact projects. This probably goes counter to project management advice, but because I didn't know what impact they would have, most of my more speculative projects (like starting a business or writing a new book) fell in this group. So I want to keep working on these projects because some of them might pay off in a big way. I just... don't know yet and I need to focus on the things that feel more certain right now. Last of all are the low-effort, low-impact things, which tend to be more like chores I can do as filler when I have a moment free. 

After this process, I could rank my projects according to the priority of each theme, the priority of each individual sub-project, and each one's effort vs the impact it would (or could) have. And you know what? It almost immediately made me realize that I've been making a few mistakes when it came to what I spent time on. More than once, I asked myself, "This is really important to me. Why haven't I been spending time on this?" or "Really, this has been annoying me and isn't really making such a big impact on my life, so why has it been taking up so much of my time?" 

Now that I know what's the most important for me to get to at present (I plan to re-evaluate in January), I can plan out each sub-project--or at least the most important first steps in the project. Back to my original example. With the Freelance Work project, I have three ongoing contracts that I need to juggle. In addition, I want to build up my freelance business. Each of these things can be broken into individual tasks and then scheduled. But I think writing about scheduling is a task for Tomorrow Misha. 

Thanks for reading! How do you go about prioritizing things? Let me know in the comments or feel free to let me know what's on your mind in general! And as always, please do give the chapter a vote if you found it interesting!