My RAGE model compared to The Wheel of Life

 

[I asked ChatGPT to report on the differences between Meyer's Wheel of Life and Mo Khan's RAGE]

Comparative Report: Meyer's Wheel of Life vs. Mo Khan's RAGE Model

Introduction

This report provides a comparative analysis of two influential personal development tools: Meyer's Wheel of Life and Mo Khan's RAGE Model. Both models are designed to enhance self-awareness and personal growth, yet they differ significantly in their approach and methodology.

Meyer's Wheel of Life

• Overview: The Wheel of Life is a holistic self-assessment tool designed by Paul J. Meyer, a pioneer in the field of motivational thinking and self-improvement.
• Components: It typically includes segments such as Career, Personal Growth, Health, Family & Friends, Finances, Spirituality, Recreation, and Physical Environment.
• Function: Users rate their satisfaction in each area, visually representing life balance and identifying areas for improvement.
• Application: Widely used in coaching and self-help, it guides personal development and goal setting.
• Learn More: Success Motivation Institute

Mo Khan's RAGE Model

• Overview: The RAGE Model, an acronym for Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations, is a framework for personal development conceptualized by Mo Khan.
• Components: It involves introspection across various life 'personas', assessing the current reality, setting aspirations, establishing goals, and managing expectations for each persona.
• Function: The model uses agile management techniques and a detailed scoring system for prioritization and tracking progress.
• Application: Khan’s approach is detailed and systematic, suitable for those who prefer an analytical approach to personal development.
• Learn More: Mo Khan’s Blog

Similarities

1. Holistic Approach: Both models provide a comprehensive view of personal life, emphasizing multiple areas or aspects.
2. Self-Reflection: They encourage self-assessment as a means of identifying areas of focus.
3. Goal-Oriented: Each model promotes setting and pursuing personal goals.
4. Personal Development: They are tools for enhancing self-awareness and guiding growth.

Differences

1. Complexity: The Wheel of Life is simpler and more visual, while the RAGE Model is more complex and analytical.
2. Approach: Meyer’s model is qualitative, focusing on self-rated satisfaction, whereas Khan’s model is quantitative, employing a scoring system.
3. Focus Areas: The Wheel of Life has predefined life segments; the RAGE Model allows for personalized 'personas'.
4. Tracking: The RAGE Model includes rigorous tracking mechanisms, unlike the Wheel of Life.
5. Background: Meyer's model stems from motivational training, while Khan’s is influenced by agile product management.

Conclusion

Meyer's Wheel of Life and Mo Khan's RAGE Model, while sharing the goal of fostering personal growth, differ in structure, complexity, and application. The Wheel of Life is a straightforward tool for periodic self-assessment, ideal for a broad audience. In contrast, the RAGE Model offers a detailed framework for systematically setting, prioritizing, and tracking personal development goals, appealing to those who prefer a more structured approach. Both models provide valuable insights into personal development, and the choice between them depends on individual preferences and the desired level of detail and structure in personal growth planning.

Wrap up '23 with my Personal Scorecard RAGE / Wheel of Life review

In 2016 I started to be more intentional with designing my lifestyle across my personal and professional streams. Without studying deeply the literature or taking personal development training courses, I used my  own work experience as a professional engineer to guide me in designing the framework, which I've called "RAGE" that stands for Reality Aspirations Goals Expectations. At the time, I treated myself as a product I'm building, using similes from agile software development, using the concept of Personas (typically products are designed to meet the needs of different user types, i.e. "personas"). Bringing these concepts into personal lifestyle design, I described my aspirations, goals and expectations in the form of agile user stories. 

This helped me in framing my goals to realise tangible outcomes. Almost eight years later, I've maintained discipline in applying the RAGE framework, year-on-year in my pursuit of the various aspirations defined in each persona, i.e. as a Husband, Father,  Professional, Friend, Individual, etc. Coming from an engineering background, I dived deep into prioritising these streams of life, first starting with 20+ personas, having stabilized on a handful of core personas from 2020 onwards.

Interestingly enough, this post, led me to learning about something called "The Wheel of Life". It so happened, according to ChatGPT, the exact date of the creation of the "Wheel of Life" model by Paul J. Meyer is not well documented in public sources -- but it is known that Paul J. Meyer founded the Success Motivation Institute, Inc. in 1960. Honestly, I'm not sure how I missed Meyer's model all this time, but I'm also comforted by the fact that I've created my own model from scratch through my own attempts in crafting a better version of myself through my RAGE model. Anyway, ChatGPT has helped summarize the differences between Meyer's model and Mo Khan's RAGE model in this post. I do like the radial diagram, which is something I hadn't included in my personametry insights as yet.

I'm writing this post in December 2023, the last post for the year - as I break away from the world and embark on a journey making the minor pilgrimage to Mecca (Makkah) for the first time in my life. I've waited a long time to save up for this journey, I made intention at the start of 2023 to do the Umrah, and by the grace of Allah (God), it is about to come true, finishing off 2023 with my most important '23 goal realised - Subhanallah (Glory be to Allah)! And aiming for Hajj (the major pilgrimage) in 4 years time insha Allah (God willing).

Work-wise, my last week was spent completing end of year performance reviews. At Amazon, we treat performance reviews with such seriousness, due care and attention to detail -- that I've never seen done before in other companies I worked with (a post for another day).  For some time now, I have taken mechanisms from my work life and adopted to my personal life. Just as in my RAGE model, breaking down the different domains of life-work streams, I've used business performance scorecards in my tracking progress through the year of my personal performance. If we maintain work logs, performance cards, "baseball cards" for our jobs, is not more important to track our all our streams of life?

Why should we only focus on professional performance reviews and not spare a moment to deeply reflect our performance as a human on this earth? How are we doing personally? How are we performing across the various dimensions of our life? If we live by a value system, how do we know how we're measuring up to that value system? When the year has come and gone, how do you measure progress? Is it only career that matters? Surely not? If not, then why don't we spend as much time, if not more time, doing our own self-assessment and scorecards?? Are we afraid of the reality check? How serious are we in terms of changing ourselves for the better? How are we improving? Do we need to improve? When someone asks you "How's life? How you're doing?" - what's your frame of reference for answering that question? What's the first thing that comes to mind? Is it our work, career? If we're going through a bad patch at work, does this mean our whole life is negative? Often this is exactly what happens. People anchor on the immediate negatives, closest, most recent experiences because without a holistic value system to reference, how should one respond to "How are you doing, really?"

So how am I doing, really - what's my 2023 Performance Scorecard like?

I am sharing my own personal tracking here, not as a means to show off - but as a means to help people, providing an example of how I've managed to use a system that is working for me. This system, called RAGE, may not work for you - but it should give you an idea of the kind of work you need to do, the kind of thinking you need to apply, and the kind of discipline your should consider -- if you are indeed determined to make a concerted effort at changing your current situation, and creating a new trajectory you can aim for to improve the quality, outcome and other aspirations you desire. 

Inspired by Vaugan from Scary Management Playbook's LinkedIn post, here is my Wheel of Life, unpacked in detail, according to my RAGE model. In January '24, I will follow up with the data analytics on time spent in my personas. Given my RAG status, it looks like my wheel of life pretty balanced and aligned with my life-work-stream choices.

2020 review, major decisions & re-invention

Around this time last year in January 2020, I shared (in this post) how I tracked against my personal & professional aspirations of the previous year 2019, accounted for my time spent and narrowed down the major questions (and hence decisions) that remained open. 

This was all before Covid-19 happened, but despite that disruption, I remained committed to holding myself accountable for realising my aspirations. I track these aspirations through a framework I created roughly five years ago, aimed at lifestyle design, something that is always a work-in-progress and is never complete. This framework is called my RAGE (Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations) model. It has seen multiple iterations and has remained my guiding compass, even as I enter 2021 - the year of massive change for both myself as well as my family.

Looking back to 2020, it started with these open questions:

1. How do I get my work hours of the previous three years under control? What am I willing to walk away from?
2. Where next do I take my career? Do I remain with Pay TV moving further up to Group CIO/CTO or should I do something else altogether at the risk of going down a couple steps in the ladder?
3. How serious am I about working with, or starting my own NGO/NPO non-profit?
4. What am I going to do with my growing list of product / business start-up ideas?
5. Should I leave South Africa and return back to the UK; or should I relocate to another country whilst still working in Pay TV?

We all know how 2020 turned out - but - despite that black swan - I nevertheless wanted to be antifragile and took bold action to not play it safe! Instead I dove head first into uncertainty, however, I did lay out a detailed plan. Those questions I needed to answer were Type 1 decisions (according Jeff Bezos' types of decisions), which called for careful deliberation & planning. So, using my RAGE model as my guide again, along with inspiration from a few folks (authors, friends, mentors, coaches & critics), I was able to address those questions by taking the following BIG decisions:

1. I quit my job, my own sabbatical with no return policy - thus creating space for me to rest, recuperate & reflect. This wasn't an easy decision to make, as I was walking away from some rather good monetary incentives due to cash out in early 2021, and as a result of Covid-19, the prudent thing to do would've been to stick it out until the world recovered. Yet, I left anyway, putting into perspective What am I willing to walk away from?
• This was only possible because 5 years ago, when I started my RAGE model, one of the aspirations for my persona as an individual was "To be debt-free on the road to financial independence". Since I was debt free, and maybe 30% on the road to financial independence, I had enough saved up to afford a break for at least a year.
• Life is short, we've lost loved ones unexpectedly in 2020. I have tweaked my life model somewhat to weigh more strongly toward living a life of meaning, purpose & enjoying the present more.
2. I decided to leave TV behind - switch domains - do something else preferably in cloud services. I will use my sabbatical time to ramp-up and then land a new job. This too wasn't quite that easy:
• I'd reached a peak in my career with a highly respected company in the industry, although I knew I had gaps to close to move to the next level. It took a long time to mentally let go, but I found my flame again that helped me remember my past as inspiration to change my future.
• I even considered going to medical school - but that didn't make much sense financially in terms of my family responsibilities and commitments.
• Being the practical guy, I ended up cutting my sabbatical short because I landed a job much sooner than I anticipated - and as a result - ended up making not only a new job decision, but also a relocation to a new city decision too!
3. Not serious about starting my own NGO - I spent a good few days unpacking this topic. I even went through a "finding purpose" retrospective and mind-mapped the options. Lo and behold, there appeared a golden thread throughout my life on working with blind and partially-sighted people. So I planned to use my sabbatical to explore that option...but that was short-lived. So decision: NO, not financially feasible for me. Instead I'll join accessibility-related community meetups at work, continue to donate money to causes and look to committing some of my time as a volunteer (which has been difficult, since it doesn't appear anywhere in my Persona priorities).
4. Not serious about being an entrepreneur because I don't have the time nor the resources to focus on it properly. I will rather focus my energy into innovating at work. I will still build and maintain my ideas repository because I'm an ideas guy - but if the timekeeping from the last five years has shown me anything - it's not that important to me - a wantrepreneur! I will still look at angel investing opportunities though. Thus "Being an Entrepreneur / Run my own product start-up" has been deprecated as a persona. It's actually such a relief to just let that go and leave it all behind! Shedding unrealistic aspirations reduces stress and anxiety, reinforcing a sense of perspective. A cup can only hold that much water before overflowing, the same with life!
5. Decided to remain in South Africa but instead try a new city, Cape Town. I was lucky to meet a career aspiration and a lifestyle aspiration (to live in a coastal city & enjoy nature) at the same time, but I'm still a little far off from having my own beachfront holiday homes so a 20 minute drive to the seaside is a good start though!!

Now, as I begin my 2021 journey, having addressed those serious questions, some of which were the cause of much stress and anxiety at the workplace, home & personal well-being fronts - 2021 will simply be about appreciating new experiences cross-cutting both work and life, aiming for harmony, acceptance, learning and growth (spiritual, personal & professional).  My personas remain largely the same priorities, their aspirations and specific goals will be adjusted for the next set milestones. I have hit reset so the process of reinvention will take time, I'm not going to rush things by being overly aggressive in setting unrealistic goals!

I have indeed made Type 1 (one-way-door) decisions, making it very difficult to go back now. I have rekindled my flame and now it's up to me (as it has always been) to make my life more interesting and meaningful!

2021 is about re-invention. 

I believe it can be done!!

As usual, I share my RAGE metrics with you - see below for my 2020 time-keeping performance...

Hint: Click on the images to view them properly.

If you'd like to chat about my RAGE model, tools and other frameworks I use to help manage my personal & professional life, please feel free to reach out! I believe as human beings we are all striving to make sense of our life/work/world, regardless of our culture, belief systems, etc. I believe I have found a method that could be useful...and I'm happy to jump on a video call with you for free life/work coaching! It has helped a few people already, so maybe that says something??

My RAGE Planning Template

In my previous post, I shared my RAGE model for personal planning. RAGE standing for Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations. I described my journey as I went through my own introspection, splitting myself up into the many Personas I found myself involved in, and shared how I systematically made sense about my priorities and areas to focus on. As always, I tend to go over-the-top, I covered a lot of detail, which to me was quite valuable, but for others maybe not so :-))

The feedback received was quite encouraging to say the least, people suggested I dumb it down a bit, provide a template to focus on a more manageable (handful) of topics, the ranking matrix caught some interest as well. So in this post, I'm sharing a cut-down, generic template for anyone to use to make sense of just ten Personas. You can access the template here, available freely for download.

Template in a Nutshell

Template is an Excel document with the following sheets:

1. RAGE List - this is basically the main board. You select the type of persona (choose between Personal & Professional), Give a name for your Persona (e.g. I, as a...) & fill out your Reality, Aspirations, Goals & Expectations. The board will automatically calculate the rankings, and dish out a planning priority.
2. Persona Rankings - This is the crux of the exercise - for you to compare one persona against the others. Requires deep introspection - who are you really?? What is it that really excites you?? Which aspect of your life should you focus on more?? This is the persona ranking matrix.
3. Look-Ups - The hidden data behind the calculations. You wouldn't usually touch this, but if you wanted to weight things differently, you can attach your own numbers to the weightings.
4. Example Personas - I provide an example of generic persona types that you can use to get your own thinking going.

Master RAGE Board

Persona Ranking Matrix

Example Personas

If you end up downloading the template, and have experimented with it, OR you need some one-on-one help, please get in touch!

Introspection is worth it, you will be amazed at what you uncover...I hope you try this tool out!!!

2022 Personametry Tracking - Work/Life Balance & Harmony Update

Courtesy

It is time for my yearly ritual of analysing my time spent the previous year. This ritual is one of analysis and reflection, setting up the stage for planning & making new intentions for the upcoming year, 2023! 

I've been doing this exercise consistently over the last eight years! Am I crazy? Maybe?! I've become quite the data junkie, and I'm loving it! 

I know that tracking every activity and accounting for every minute of one's life might seem like overkill to most people. I on the other hand, actually quite enjoy doing so! :-) Primarily because having insights into how I spend my time has really helped me be more conscious and intentional about my aspirations, goals and expectations covering all dimensions of my life, seeking balance and harmony in my personal and professional streams. My methods allow me to focus and maintain discipline with my time...

This is my value system that describes my streams:

Muslim | Individual | Professional (Work) | Husband | Family-Man | Social/Friend

When someone asks me the following: Mo, how's life? Mo, how are you doing work-wise? Mo, how's things? Are you happy? Are you meeting your aspirations? Mo, what consumes most of your time these days? I can have a sincere and authentic conversation about it.

Yes, as some of my friends have argued that you "just know" instinctively where your time is being spent, on what and you just know the areas you need to improve on. Sure, I get that and agree. I find it much more useful to validate my instincts, verify anecdotes with quantifiable data & metrics to help me answer such questions: Where am I spending my time? Am I spending time in the right areas according to my priorities? Am I heading in the right direction? How am I growing? Where am I in my stages of growth across all my personas? How do I measure success? Am I growing holistically as a person?

In 2015, I researched productivity and personal development methods extensively, culminating to me creating my own frameworks:

1. RAGE (Reality Aspirations Goals Expectations). Knowing yourself, i.e. what you stand for, your value system, by identifying Personas. For each Persona, define Aspirations/Goals that becomes your long term personal roadmap. What emerges from this is a scorecard that you can track your progress, see example from 2020.
2. PERSONAMETRY is another concept I created that essentially captures key metrics about yourself, TIME being our most valuable resource. If time is our most valuable resource, do we not owe it to ourselves to account for it? For each Persona you identify with, Personametry is your personal telemetry. It can be extended to a variety of use cases, including overall happiness/stress sentiment analysis. If you're keen to learn more, check out this product specification document I created years ago, but alas, haven't developed the app for it as yet (alas, no time, wasn't a priority!)

Personametry complements RAGE by providing data insights, that I use to analyse if I'm trending in the right direction or not. Keeping a personal RAGE scorecard helps me keep track of how I'm progressing against my personal roadmap. In the last eight years alone, these frameworks have helped me reach my highest potential in climbing up the career ladder (making CTO, executive role), becoming debt free and remaining debt-free for 7 years and-running, improve my marriage enhancing the foundations (insha Allah), and rekindled relationship with family members, including long lost friendships, develop a more consciously confident identity as a Muslim in the workplace, make big bold decisions of starting over in my career (like walking away from CTO and big financial incentives rewards, take a pay-cut and step down in role) or start my own consulting, also make time to focus on paying it forward by offering my time to coach/mentor for free, etc. RAGE/Personametry has also helped me in being critically selective of where/what/whom I spend time with, I've learnt to say "NO" more often guarding my personas and setting boundaries, even with my own family and dearest loved ones.

Emerging from this experience so far are some interesting learning experiences, such as how one's goals and aspirations can change with time, depending on one's stage of life. For instance, where I'm at right now in 2023, is my profession is no longer what drives me (I'm consciously not seeking out the next promotion or level up because I've been there already and experienced the life of an executive), as I'm now seeking new experiences centred on creating more purpose, meaning and fulfilment...Having said this, I remain a pragmatist and so am open to new job opportunities that more closely align with my value system (example: NGOs/NPOs looking for CTO/CIO expertise, Africa-friendly timezone working hours is also being considered). If you know of any opportunities in this area, do get in touch!

Analysing 2022 v 2021 - Data Analysis & Insights

Since 2016 I've tracked 24,983 (±25K) activities as data points, tracking my life streams as: Muslim | Individual | Professional (Work) | Husband | Family-Man | Social/Friend - thus logging 60,572 (±60K) hours with an error tolerance of ±0.5% (99.5% capturing accuracy). In 2022 alone, I logged 8,715 hours, of which: Professional Work consumed 23%,  Personal Life 43% with the physical constraint of Sleeping accounting for 34%. Yep, we sleep for a third of our lives, and I have the data to back that up!

Suffice to say, I've made some good gains in 2022 that I hope to carry through into 2023. Check the slide show for the rest...

P.S. If you'd like to have a coffee/virtual chat about my RAGE/Personametry concepts, or you're curious to learn more, or seeking a mentor/coaching/networking opportunity or you simply want to learn about my workflows, then please get in touch!

Year 2019 in Review, Welcome 2020!

I'm now entering my fifth year of time logging and keeping track of all my "life & work"-streams in an effort to make sense of my time sinks, cross-checking my aspirations & goals with reality, in the hope of tuning, re-calibrating areas to be more in harmony with my purpose / value system, sometimes triggering some decisions that could take my life-and-work in a different direction altogether. So I've become a bit of geek with the #quantifiedself so much so that I log almost everything all the time. This habit developed naturally as I spent five years consulting, needing to keep track of all my hours and tasks for billable hours. So I took this all the way into treating my entire life as one big project with multiple tasks that needed accounting!

In 2015, I spent a lot of time soul-searching to make sense of not only what I want out of my life but my work/career aspirations as well, since a major part of my life involves my occupation in the software industry. So I came up with a model called RAGE (Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations). The way the model works is to split yourself into "Personas" sliced into Personal and Professional streams. Using some tools from Agile, such as user stories, you describe for each of your personas, your aspirations, reflecting on your current reality, then setting goals and expectations. Your personas are prioritised by value, which is basically an instinctive, gut-feel assessment of the value/importance of the stream, in comparison to the others. I'd created template and a matrix tool that allowed for easy prioritisation, and a template to help others on this journey as well. My hypothesis still remains valid that tracking time is one way of understanding where my time is being spent, proposing "I will naturally spend most of time dedicated to the persona streams that are of importance to me" - but the reality can sometimes be quite surprising!

In this post, I continue with my annual ritual of starting the new year by analysing what went down the previous year (2019), and how/what I would need to re-calibrate to get me on track with my life's journey-mapping into 2020:

• Recap my personal value system - persona matrix & priorities
• Snapshot of tracking my RAGE progress by milestone reviews heatmap
• Performance appraisal - Did I achieve my intended outcomes / goals set in Jan 2019?
• Quantifying every hour of 2019 - where did I spend my time, what did I do?
• Does it look like I have my life-work balance under control?
• Am I working too much, sacrificing my personal and family streams?
• Am I enjoying my current job?
• What are the main things impacting my future personal & professional aspirations?

My RAGE Model for Personal Development Planning

Over the last few months, I've been working on a concept I've come to coin as the "R.A.G.E model", which stands for:

• R Reality
• A Aspirations
• G Goals
• E Expectations

I am using this model to map out a plan for my own self, as part of my own personal planning. I am sharing this experience because it maybe useful to others, since the topic of finding a work-life-balance affects us all. The years come-and-go so fast, that we're so busy being busy, just living, surviving, making ends meet, meeting your current commitments, heads-down in work, rush-rush-rush, that we really don't take the time out, to pause, reflect, look deeply within ourselves, to map out what really makes us, us!! There's a lot of material on this subject of work-life balance, and stress - I opted for finding my own path, which I'd like to share...

I came across the concept of defining Aspirations vs Expectations vs Reality from another coach, colleague and friend. I mulled over it for a while, and then later coined up RAGE, to go further than just highlighting Aspirations vs Expectations vs Reality, but also include Goals to help make sense of the Aspirations & Expectations, keeping it real.

In this post I share an exercise of how I was able to identify the different streams of my life, prioritise them using rough quantitative formulae borrowed from agile product management like weightings to balance priorities, culminating in a future plan for tracking my goals going forward. This exercise required a lot of self-reflection, introspection, deep searching...it's about making sense of all the noise, including understanding my circles of control / influence, being self-critical and at sometimes a little harsh (with priorities) on myself, example: Is being a husband more or less important than being a Father, Is being an Individual (self) more important than being a Sibling?? and so on.

The end result is a tangible personal plan that I can use to track my progress from 2016 onwards. It is far from complete though, the next phase is actually implementing my plan, and monitoring my progress throughout the year. I intend doing so using a personal-kanban-style Trello board, culminating in time-tracking to measure the distribution of my time across my different personas (topic for another post).

I believe this tool is useful to both life and work. At the end of the post I share some of my ideas where I think this tool can add value to different work/life scenarios.

Please have a read, let me know what you think!! And if you're interested in a template to get you going, let me know.

How does RAGE work?

It's about understanding your situational context - YOU as a person, currently, are being pulled in many directions, how do you juggle all the things interesting to you as a person, plus give enough time to your work, family, friends, etc. What is this thing called "work-life balance"?? How do you know if you allocating enough time to the things that are important?? What if you're wasting (or spending too much time) on something that is essentially of little value or consequence to you?? What matters most to you as an individual?? 

Often this comes down slicing your life into two major categories: (a) Personal & (b)Professional. For each category, there could be further sub-categories, or topics. I call these Personas, and for each persona, I define Top-Level Subject as a sub-category.

In my case, my current reality, consists of 22 high level personas split between my personal life, and my professional life. I am being sliced in 22 different ways, only in 2016, and I've not included any higher level aspirations, like big dreams like travelling the world, owning a porsche, meet Bill Gates, get invited to the World Economic Forum, work in Silicon Valley or Run a StartUp in New York City :-)

I will explain the personas breakdown in the next section. This section talks about what RAGE actually is. It essentially means, take a particular situation or topic from your persona, and analyse the following areas:

• Reality - What is the current status of the situation? What is currently preventing you from reaching the aspiration / goal / expectation?
• Aspiration - What is your ultimate wish to accomplish? How does it look like? What does it mean to you and why?
• Goals - How / What would you need to do to get to the Aspiration? How would you break it down? What milestones do you set yourself that will eventually reach your aspiration? Techniques like using specific measurable goals, something with a tangible outcome helps here, or it can be a story - the future vision.
• Expectations - Based on the goals you've set, what expectations do you have (can it be quantified like a level of confidence, or percentage completion by a certain date, etc). Is the expectation too high?

In addition to the RAGE criteria, an Action Plan for each topic helps in cementing a plan that you can use to track progress against meeting your goals. It is also useful to keep track of how your expectations will change over time, taking snapshots of progress and re-evaluating yourself through your own personal retrospectives.

Personas & User Stories

Personas are about describing how you split yourself up - i.e. we as people have many stripes: 

You as a .... Individual Self, Husband, Father, Brother, Friend, Colleague, Teacher, Business Owner, Family-Man, Son, Daughter, Grandfather, Uncle, Social Worker, Community Member, etc, etc.  

So we have many commitments, relationships with people and business entities (including rights to meet), that demand our time, energy and focus - how do we organise ourselves so that we focus on the things most important and useful to us? How much investment should we put into relationships over self-joys? What is each Persona really about? What does it mean to be a Father, an Employee or a Friend?

Before I delved into my RAGE criteria, I had to understand myself: Who am I? What makes me Me? How do I slice myself currently?? And for each persona, what am I really trying to achieve as an Aspiration for that Persona??

I'm going to be brave and share my own persona list with you. Who knows, there might be something common in your own life, and you might share similar persona aspirations as I :-) ?? This is just capturing my current reality, and not looking into the future with dreamy eyes of who I could become (that ship has sailed long ago or has it?).

The table below shows the Personas for me, read as "Me as a..." split between my Persona & Professional Life, for each Top Level Subject area. For each topic, I borrowed a page from Agile user stories, taking the form of [As a....] [I would like to...] [so that ....] [...get something of value]

My Personas

Type	Area  (Me as a…)	Top Level Subject
Personal	Brother	Being a Brother As a brother to four siblings, I need to grow our relationships & support structures (including continued financial support), so that our family unit appears strong and united, always.
Personal	Colleague	Work Social As a colleague in a work environment, I must nurture and grow authentic & sincere relations (not shallow, superficial hello, how you - but genuine relations), so that I am recognised as someone who values people and interactions, working together on projects, and when not working on the same team, I am a friend that offers a listening ear, advisor & mentor to colleagues as needed. Social interactions & sincere relationships in the workplace matter a big deal.
Personal	Community Member	Community Forum As a member of the community forum, I must spare my time, resources and energy in committing to the good causes, so that ultimately we have a peaceful and safe neighbourhood for our families.
Personal	Family-Man	Home Affairs As a family, living in any country, I need to sort out all Home Office requirements, so that we may live free in the country of our choosing.
Personal	Family-Man	Family Time As a father and head of the family, I would like to invest my time, energy, love and passion into my family (wife, kids) so that we can nurture relationships, grow together and create a strong family unit, paving the way for a healthy, stress-free life going forward.
Personal	Family-Man	Lifestyle Choice As a person living on this earth on borrowed time, I would like to make lifestyle choices, so that my family can live in the best situation & circumstances possible, that promote a safe, meaningful and promising future, where life is beautiful on all fronts.As a family, we would like to evaluate our lifestyle choices, our preferences and situational circumstances, and make changes (if required) to help us attain our ultimate lifestyle that satisfies our happiness criteria.
Personal	Father	Fatherhood As a father, I must spend time with each child, building up a unique, loving and caring relationship, so that my children have good memories to take with them, such that they become successful (happy, content, confident, mentally, physical & emotionally strong) human beings.
Personal	Friend	Social Network - Being a Friend As a friend, I need to maintain, nurture and grow authentic and sincere social connections, so that people see me as a trusted person they can turn to, so that I have a support structure in place for me & my family (and of course reciprocate to my friends).
Personal	Home Owner	Home Improvements As a home owner, I need to continuously maintain the state-of-repair, redecorate & keep the property up-to-date, so that we not only enjoy the living space, but also be ready to sell (and make a profit), if and when we decide to leave.
Personal	Husband	Marital Relations As a husband, I need to fulfil the rights of my wife, taking the relationship to new levels so that my marriage is successful, rock-solid, and future-lasting.
Personal	Individual	Health & Fitness As a person I would like to reach levels of fitness & good living, so that I may lead a healthy & enjoyable life, with minimal medical issues
Personal	Individual	Hobbies As an individual with interests outside of work / family, I would like to pursue my hobbies (Cycling, Writing, Art, Inventing) so that I have an outlet for my creative interests, and that I get joy out of doing so.
Personal	Investor	Wealth & Finances As a person I would like to reach financial independence (by pursuing multiple investment streams) before retirement age, so that I don't stress when I'm retired (or in death) so that my family are taken care off financially. Must be within the realms of halal investments tracking as close as possible to Shariah.
Personal	Individual	Giving Charity & Helping Needy As a person with extra means, I would like to help more in Charity (Sadaqah, Compulsory Zakaat, Lillah) so that I fulfil the rights of others (within my family, friends, workers, community, local and world), and in keeping with the guidelines of Islam
Personal	Individual	Motor Vehicle As an individual with specific requirements for transport, I would like to invest in a new car soon, so that it is more reliable than my current one, and satisfies all present as well future usage needs (4x4 off-road, bikes, family-adventures, etc.)
Personal	Muslim	Spirituality As a Muslim / human being, I want to reach a level of spirituality that allows me to be content and at peace with the world, so that I may live life, according to the way of life of Islam, as a Muslim, and a Sufi, tolerating & living in peace with all beings (not matter what belief system others may so choose). I would like to elevate my spirituality so that I am at peace with myself, others around me, the world - so that I don't go chasing illusions, accepting the reality of the fragility of life (there is more to life than career, business, etc.)
Personal	Son	Being a Child As a son, I must cherish the remaining years with my mom, spoiling her, comforting her, taking care of all her needs, so that I fulfil the rights of my mother, set an example of caring so that my kids can learn from, and to show my appreciation to mom for her love, patience and support all these years. To maintain the Islamic & Indian traditions of taking care of ones parents.
Personal	Son/Bro-in-Law	Being a Son/Bro-in-Law As a son-in-law and a bro-in-law, I must grow these relationships stronger, so that family are content with our life situation, and so that there is harmony overall. To being someone they can trust, count-on, and rely in times of need & support.
Personal	Uncle	Being an Uncle As an uncle to 12+ nephews and nieces, I must be a good role model, offering advice, help, financial aid, coaching and mentoring so that these kids have a decent chance of succeeding in life.
Professional	Blogger / Writer	Blogging & Writing Papers As blogger, I need to take my writing to the next level, so that I gain personal satisfaction out of it, of not being afraid to create my own art, especially when "it just might not work".
Professional	Business Owner	Consulting Business As the owner of AS3, I need to establish the brand, grow a client-base, and run this company as a real-one, so that I get valuable life/work experience from this venture.
Professional	Consultant	Consulting - Client to MCA As a consultant to MCA I must consistently deliver value, exceed client's expectations, so that my engagements are maintained, reputation remains in-tact, and overall ensure my client is happy with my performance, such that there is a pipeline of work always available.
Professional	Consultant	Client Engagement Options As a consultant, I need to diversify my clients engagements, so that I can manage risk and survive, as well as broaden my network within South Africa or overseas.
Professional	Consultant	Service Provider Partners As a consultant, I would like to take my relationships with other SPs to the next level, exploring opportunities for partnerships, joint ventures, etc. so that I improve my chances of success.
Professional	Consultant	Knowledge Base As a consultant, I need to keep abreast and up-to-date, with topics I specialise in, so that I gain the knowledge & ability to apply new tools & techniques to improve the outcomes of my engagements, and so that I personally grow my toolbox as a professional.
Professional	Job Hunter	Employment at Specific Company of Interest As a job hunter, I must find a role & company that I like, value and will enhance my career experience, so that I climb up the ladder on my professional journey onwards & upwards - ultimately to fulfil my ultimate career aspiration (awesome company, awesome brilliant minds).
Professional	Potential Innovator / Entrepreneur	Product Development StartUp As an aspiring entrepreneur, I must push forward on my ideas, take chances & risks on a startup, so that I can ultimately say I've tried this (possibly failed) and learnt a lot in the process.
Professional	Potential [Company] Employee	Permanent Employment, exit Consulting As a potential Employee, I would like to attain a senior management position in an area I can add value, so that I build my career & increase my network profile (in line with my aspiration of finding awesomeness).
Professional	Programmer	Programming - Software Development As someone who used to enjoy coding (and was quite good at it), I need to keep my technical skills fresh, so that a) I don't become a dinosaur and b) to enjoy the feeling of creativity again, c) so I maintain my closeness to technology streams.
Professional	Software Professional	Seeking out People for Learning & Growth As a software professional, I would like to learn & grow, seek out individuals, companies and interactions, to reach heights of excellence, so that I can not only enjoy the profession, but take me to new opportunities & experiences. I want to surround myself with people that motivate me, journey together to grow to the next level.

Phew! So that's over 20+ ways I must split my time up... Now for the next part, surely not all personas hold the same level of importance in relationship to another? There must be some way I can make sense of all of this by prioritizing the personas I'm most interested in...

Interestingly enough, my brother recently called me to help with the local school's governing body, they could do with my help. I said unfortunately, this topic doesn't occur on my focus areas for this year, I am filled up with other commitments, and may possibly consider that request for next year (i.e. Me as an active member of a school governing body). Now what is more interesting though, is I could add an activity under my Persona / Brother subject, and be able to support my brother indirectly helping in improving & strengthening our relationship, thus taking me closer to reaching my aspiration of increasing family bonds with my siblings!

So it certainly helps to have laid out your personal map...

How I ranked my Personas ...

At first I wrote down all by RAGE criteria for each Persona/Subject, and then prioritized my list based on the importance of the Aspiration alone. Then after much thought, I decided to get more closer to something I can actually implement, I need to treat personas differently. I had to come up with some way of weighting & ranking one persona against another. In doing so, I could then arrange my plan according to rank & importance of the persona itself.

So with this in mind, I created at 22x22 matrix of all the unique Persona / Subject Pairs, and went across from left-to-right, passing a value judgement when comparing one persona against another. For example, starting with Personal-Individual, going across and compare: Is being an Individual more important that being a Husband? and so on...

If a persona was more important in relation to another persona, it would get a value of 1, otherwise it would get a value of 0. I built in intelligence to track that if a value was 1, then the opposite relational-comparison, down the matrix, should return a value of 0.

I chose, for the first iteration to go the mutually-exclusive route - to keep things simple, and make the numbers balance. Of course, I could have went there OR route, meaning "If a persona is the same OR equal in importance" - this actually does make sense in reality, but I chose to park that formula because I'd just spend a good couple hours implementing the mutually exclusive rule, and I just didn't feel like reworking the formula again.

Anyway, the mutually-exclusive rule is useful because it drives home the point of distinguishing one persona against another, in true black-and-white, no grey in between. I either make a call or not - a simple forcing function that allows me to drive my behaviour changes going forward.

So this is how my relational matrix ended up:

Ranking Personas

Having entered the 1s & 0s, I then summed each row, and came up with a total. Then used a heatmap to identify the personas by rank (the higher the ranking, the darker the colour to red, the more important the persona).

Interestingly enough, the Persona that came out on top is my spirituality, followed closely by me being a Husband!! Prior to the exercise, I had prioritized my spirituality as something in the background, so this exercise brought to surface how important this topic is, since Islam is a way-of-life, and after much thinking and relational comparison, it appears on the top of the list (bringing to surface that my spiritual dimension is very important, which I've been neglecting for some time now).

I as a Husband on the other hand, did have prominence before the matrix, however, I would not really have put it as number one, because I was thinking more about my personal individual aspirations in terms of career & business, ahead of the family stuff (often taking family relations for granted and not investing adequate time and energy in those relationships to elevate them to the next level)!!

So this exercise has certainly given me something to think about! If only there was more than 24 hours in day ;-)

Difficulty Levels of Aspirations

In addition to getting a view on my relational-personas ranking, I wanted a way of ranking aspirations by importance. So I chose five levels of aspirations, and assigned a weighting (for points-scoring) to each one:

Level of Aspiration	Aspiration Weighting
1 No Brainer - Absolutely Doable	100
2 Within the realms of Doable	80
3 Doable but with some Effort	60
4 Difficult but not Impossible	40
5 A Nice Dream - Stretch BHAG?	10

Like my formula in the ranking matrix, when I ran these numbers in the overall ranking plan, I got to thinking maybe I should reverse the weighting. If I really wanted to make some hard changes, I should instead focus on the most difficult things, and aspirations that fall within the realm of doable should be ranked low, since I have a level of confidence in achieving the aspiration.  This really is a matter of choice, some people prefer to focus on "low hanging fruit" since it is really motivating to knock-things off your TODO list building up momentum and confidence to tackle the harder, more challenging stuff...There is the risk of choosing the difficult aspirations that one gets bogged down and demotivated, leaving little time or lost time on the more doable aspirations...

Aspirational Importance or Happiness Index

In addition to having a view of the relative difficulty of achieving the Aspirations / Goals, I added another filter for defining the importance of the aspirations. Again, not all aspirations are equal, some are more important than others, so it made sense to rank the importance of aspirations, giving each one an arbitrary weighting:

Importance Levels	Importance Weighting
1 Not at all Important	10
2 Slightly Important	20
3 Moderately Important	30
4 Very Important	40
5 Extremely Important	50

I was in two minds about adding another criteria for a Happiness Index - the idea was to quantify the level of happiness. Trying to answer the question, In reaching my goals & aspirations for a given persona / subject pair, what will be the resulting happiness index, i.e. how happy would it make me as a result??

Measuring happiness index has become somewhat of a fascination of mine, which I'm still experimenting with. I had this idea about Personametry (how nice if there was a device that could that?) so I am still trying to define my happiness matrix. For starters, I have been tracking two topics using a Trello board: One board for tracking my Happiness at Work and another board for tracking my Mood/Happiness at Home. The jury is still out on this...

So I decided that Level of Importance implies a level of resulting happiness. If I set something as Extremely Important, it implies a similar, if not equal, level of happiness. Hence I don't need another number.

Ranking Formula

Using the above quantitative techniques, it becomes possible to rank and sort the RAGE list by order of priority, using a simple points scoring system:

Persona Ranking x Importance Level (Happiness Index) x Aspirational Type

This is similar to user story sizing in Agile/Scrum - the higher the points, the higher the ranking / importance, and therefore should get your focus & attention.

Bringing it all together - the Personal Plan

I am using Excel to manage my RAGE list. With the Personas & Top-Level Subjects identified, for each subject, write down the Aspiration (e.g. I would like to complete a road race this year). Having identified the Aspiration, now work towards breaking down the Aspiration into one or more Goals (e.g. To enter 5 seed races by June, To ride 50km every weekend). Once the goals are identified, think about the Expectations - how confident am I, what's the probability of achieving this goal?  And as a final step, turn some of those goals into concrete actions.

Below is a snippet of my own plan - it has been ranked by highest story points, and I've also indicated the probability of delivery (in terms of my expectations of realising the goal / aspiration). This is just a first pass based on the simple, doable aspirations (I am actually going to change it to focus on the BHAGs Big Hairy Ass Goals)...

Snapshot of my RAGE Plan

Visualising the Persona Map

Whilst I've created a way to numerically rank and prioritize each specific Persona/Subject pair, and I can now focus on say, the top ten aspirations / goals, a table with numbers (as above), might appear to be a little misleading. I wanted a way of seeing the spread, and weighting of the rolled up Personas, one level up - this view is created from totalling up the points ranking (planning priority), giving a cumulative total for the main Persona/Subject pairs - basically a single view of how my life may end up being spliced:

How I'm being sliced up - TreeMap

Next Steps (Post initial sense-making)

Now that I've mapped out my life's demands for 2016, and have a reasonable idea of what my commitments and focus areas are, in relation to both life-and-work, I can now start planning to deliver on these goals. Using Excel is cumbersome, so I'm going to look at using Trello or Smartsheet to track and measure progress...I am also going to look at creating a schedule or a reminder system to help me monitor and track my progress to reaching my goals and ultimately my aspirations...it's a start!! I've also set up a personal Kanban Trello board to track any new topics for aspirations...I am also thinking of using HarvestApp timekeeping to start measuring amount of time I spend in each Persona/Subject pair.

I have shared my map with my wife - it's important to include the people in your life, their input is valuable as it provides different perspectives. It is also useful because this sharing opens you up to others, and makes them appreciate the challenges you're facing along the many facets of your life...

Of course this list can't be static, it needs constant grooming, refining and simplifying. I am currently grooming my list, rolling up similar personas, since the level of detail of the first draft is a bit too granular. Constant feedback, and updates from further introspections will happen, as well as, new ideas for aspirations must be tracked as well (you guessed it, I have another Trello board to track my new aspirations ;-)

Other Areas of Use

Apart from using this technique / tool for your personalised inventory checking, I believe this exercise will benefit others in areas such as:

• As a student out of high school, settling on your future life choices can be daunting. So many choices, so many people with advice. You can use this tool to make sense of your options, and prioritize accordingly.
• As a student just graduating from college, you too have to make choices around your next career aspiration. How do you choose the company that best meets your aspirations? What factors play a role in prioritizing? Use this tool to help you decide.
• As an entrepreneur or small business owner, you're faced with many ideas and options to take your business to the next level, so how do you make sense of the next area to focus, which direction is going to add the most value??
• As a person with ideas, or managing your product roadmap, how is one idea or feature more important than the other? In the same way as I've used personas, you can use the same deep thinking questions to help you sift through competing ideas - and prioritize by rank and value.
• As a line manager, you have to manage people, set their goals and objectives. Wouldn't you like to use a more meaningful approach to setting objectives and expectations?? Using this technique will not only bring clarity to your team, but is bound to improve the relationships going forward (your team will look forward to defining meaningful objectives instead of seeing the appraisal process as a pain).
• As a worker, you have many responsibilities, projects and tasks to take care of - how do you prioritize your work, time management and also do stuff that not only ticks the done boxes for tasks, but also help you grow in the company as well??
• As a parent, how do you manage all the ideas, aspirations and goals you're setting for your children? Are you doing too much? Are you focusing on the right areas?? 
• As a project office, how do you prioritize and manage the tens of projects under your portfolio? How do you value one project over another? 

That's a few areas just top-of-mind, I'm sure there's more...

Feedback / Coaching

If you found this topic interested, please share your comments on this blog.

If you're interested in learning more, or would like a template of the tool to use in your own life mapping and planning, let me know. I am glad to help out, to the point of running a coaching session taking you through this journey!!!

2021 Life/Work streams review with 6 years data points

It's that time of the year when I review my personal time keeping metrics showing how I've spent my time over the previous year. I've been doing this exercise diligently since 2015, when I created a framework for myself called "RAGE" Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations. Using ideas from software engineering and product management, I decided to map out my personal (life) and professional (work) streams across the many dimensions I was involved in (Muslim | Individual | Professional | Husband | Father | Friend | etc.). I focused on Time as the key metric to track, since time is one of the most important resource that should never be squandered. 

The idea is simple: if something is important to me, then I should be spending time in that area - but if I end up spending little or zero time on that thing, then that thing must have not been as important to me as I thought it was. 

Tracking time allows me to answer questions like: 

• Am I spending time in the areas that are important to me? 
• Which areas am I over indexing on that negatively impacts my other steams, robbing me of value?
• Am I giving each stream the necessary amount of attention?
• What decisions do I need to make when the data and anecdotes (feelings / instincts) don't match up?

Click here to check out my writings from previous years and here for an introduction to my RAGE framework for personal development tracking.

To read my 2020 review and reference my personal value system, click here.

2021 Re-starting Life & Work (again)

Driven by my personal planning through my RAGE model, 2021 was the year I hit reset. I uprooted my family and relocated from Johannesburg to Cape Town in December 2020. Earlier in 2020, I'd resigned from my C-level position of a very stable and secure job - at first - to take a year long sabbatical to work out my next move. This sabbatical was short-lived due to the uncertainty of Covid-19, I felt it too risky not to secure another job in 2021. I knew one thing for sure: I was no longer interested in building video entertainment technology applications "make people watch TV" and wanted to branch out into something else either in Cloud or e-Commerce. Thankfully I landed the first job I decided to interview for in cloud computing with AWS, Cape Town. A big departure for me because I was going back to core engineering building software, something which I've not done to that level of technical detail since 2010! I was also going to start as a senior manager and not a GM/CTO. So essentially I'd walked away from a high influence, high referent and hierarchical power, entrenched credibility and track record - to starting professionally all over again, from a "big fish, small pond" to being a "tiny fish, large ocean" fella, with zero credibility. I value learning new knowledge, building new relationships and gaining new experiences as more important than positional titles. My wife and kids also left their lives behind which we'd nurtured for a decade since relocating to Johannesburg (from UK), relocating and disrupting their lives to Cape Town with me - they too, hitting reset leaving much loved friendships, community and family-support behind. 

So 2021 would bring a massive disruption to my personal, professional and family streams. Time will tell if this grand reset is working or not. So my personal time tracking data is now more important than before.

This post shares my time tracking data for 2021 compared to the previous 6-years for comparison. Resetting one's life personally and professionally is not an easy thing to do. I've learnt much about this experience that I hope to share in future posts. In terms of the key KPIs of time tracking, 2021 went as well as can be expected considering the unusual context & challenges of Covid-19. In this post I share only the data and limited insights. There's some soul-searching I've yet to do on making drastic changes to my personas, which at the time of this writing doesn't seem to be major...

With year one done, so far, so good...no major regrets although the data has shown I need to recalibrate some streams if I want to get back to previous levels of balance.

2018 Year In Review & 2019 Thoughts

It's that time of the year again where I look into the data for timekeeping over the past year to make sense where I spent my time, and cross-check with reality, in terms of my aspirations and goals that are split between different areas of my life by Personal & Professional areas. The idea is to gain insights from this data and re-calibrate areas of focus for the upcoming year.

Unfortunately, I haven't made much in the way of drastic progress in 2018 compared to 2017, the profile is largely the same - that my professional (work) life has consumed more time (a constant theme), my personal life in terms of family commitments are reasonably on track, and the biggest area of neglect is on my own personal, individual streams (hobbies, ideas, health and fitness). However, since I started the RAGE model experiment, I have made some good wins on other areas, so the model works, but there's still more to be done in this area - specifically around outcome-based goals.

Recap my RAGE Model (Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations) Tracking

I wanted to map out the different areas of my life that defines me, split by two major areas: Personal & Professional. 

For each area, I defined some personas or streams. For example - in the Personal area, I'm a Husband, Father, Family-Man, Individual, etc. For the Professional area, I'm a professional (my main job), a colleague, etc.

For each Persona, I map out my current Reality, ideal Aspirations, and then from those two, set some Goals & align some Expectations to achieve.

Another aspect to this experiment was tracking my overall happiness and well-being. If I spent time in the areas of priority, the theory is it should count towards me being happier.

I prioritise the Personas using a simple matrix that defines how I value and rank them. I then use detailed time tracking to track the time spent doing activities for each area. The theory is that I should be focusing time and energy on the areas that reflect the ranking and priorities I set. This is the core data for analysis. For more details on how I actually do this, I am still using the manual ways as described in the original posting. Since the original version of the Personas, I'm now on version 6 which currently looks like this:

Current Persona Matrix Rankings

What this ranking does is basically show my decision-making rules: Life (Husband, Father, Family) is more important than Work (Job), which is more important than my Individual Personal streams (Hobbies, Pet Projects, Me Time, etc.). A simple-enough value system that I use to navigate through challenges.

It all looks good on the paper model, but in reality, the data highlights some food for thought that I really need to take action in 2019.

What are the big challenges for me?

What triggered my creating the RAGE model and start the detailed time tracking activities was essentially about accounting for my time, addressing the hard realities:

• Being a professional, i.e. having a stable income stream is currently a hard reality constraint. I need an income to support my family - so this is something I should not compromise on - but I still need to control it - I should not be overworking, at the expense of my personal life interests. So the data on work hours is important. When I read about pursuing dreams, passions, etc. about breaking out, taking risks, quitting your job etc. the reality around finances, lifestyle and family stability kicks-in - it's not an easy thing to do...this is a hard reality. I have to think of ways to ensure I do my best work, provide the best service to my employer, but not let work over consume me at the expense of my other streams (which as the data shows is not actually happening). Unless I can find a way to create a passive income stream outside of my main job, this constraint is going to be around for a while. The outcome for this year must be to bring my work-hours to a decent level freeing up time to focus on my personal interests.
• It's quite difficult to switch off from the office these days - even whilst at home, social media chats through Slack & WhatsApp are disruptions, that can't be tracked in hours - so whilst in "family mode", I must respond to chats - this time is unaccounted for. If I were to include all these moments as "work", then work-time increases...which is why this topic of "work-life integration" is becoming more mainstream.
• The functions of resting and sleeping for a human being is something that must be respected, and can't be compromised. I maintain an average of 8 hours of sleep per night, so this is a hard constraint. Eight hours has been validated as the ideal, I can go on for a few days with less sleep, but it's not sustainable. This means that the rest of my time must be allocated around this, with Work/Professional consuming a large chunk of this.
• Giving focus to my own personal interests as an individual, outside of being a Husband / Father / Family-Man, etc. seems like I'm sacrificing my own interests, i.e. putting myself last - and this is where the spiritual dimension of being a Muslim comes in to help - it's sometimes a struggle to deal with these frustrations.

2018 Data Insights - Tracking the Time / Hours spent

There was roughly 8,766 hours in 2018 (365.25 24-hour days), which I tracked and logged a total of 8,820 hours, which is not bad, the errors could be attributed to human error in logging (54 extra hours).

Where did the time go?

2018 Persona Hours, focus on Working Hours & Overall Happiness at work

There were 250 work days in 2018, excluding 12 public holidays. I took 34 days off as leave days, which left 216 work-days. Assuming an 8 hour workday, the capacity for work hours would be 1728 hours.

My actual work hours logged were 2155.4 hours, an excess of 427.4 hours as "overtime" which I don't really get paid for. This equates to an extra 53.4 days worked, an additional 2.5 months of extra work - which took away time from other areas, like for instance, time I could have used for my personal projects.

The table below summarises the major streams - highlighting in red, the months where work-hours exceeded the normal bounds. Overall split between life and work remains consistent with the previous two years, with my own personal individual streams taking much of the knock:

So it's clear that work-hours is an area to be controlled to free up time for allocating to personal, individual streams.

General Happiness & Well-Being at Work

I continue to track my overall happiness levels at work on a daily basis. I have also started tracking the bad days in terms of sleepless nights. In 2018 I had my fair share of stress at work that resulted in some nights where I hardly slept a wink, tossing and turning, worrying about issues at the office as well as my future in the company. This is a new stress that introduced itself last year, that I need to better manage. I tracked 12 sleepless nights, this is about 4% of the time. However, in general, the picture still looks good - I'm enjoying the work on the whole:

The last quarter of 2018 did see an increase in bad days - we had some challenges with the platform in terms of stability, new boss, changes in teams, and overall tensions and conflicts to manage & people resigning. This what triggered my blog post on workplace 3.0 last year. Additionally, my health took a bad turn as well in November. The number of "indifferent / neutral" days seems to be increasing - an area to keep track of. But in the grand scheme of things, there is more upside than downside at work, so this is still looking good! However, I do need to plan in personal time (leave days) more in the year to maintain a healthy balance.

Life in general is good, but my Personal streams are taking a knock

In general, overall - the time keeping does not contradict the priorities and rankings for my personas. I am also in a good space - health, wealth and mental space is in equilibrium (maybe this is because I've just done three weeks of of chilling out, relaxed summer vacation - back to office come Monday...). As I introduced the post earlier, on paper, I should be happy that my hours are reflecting the priorities I set & committed to...however, I can't help but feel a little down that overall my individual self interests are taking a knock...

In terms of the streams I see as my personal individual persona (i.e. the things I'm interested as person, outside of me being a Husband / Father / etc.), here's a view of the percentage focus per month (still highlighting the months where work exceeded the norm):

The positives highlighted in green:

• Reading books - did well enough to track against my goal of 24 books, ended up completing 21 books last year. Not bad.
• Spirituality - tracking very nicely, spent 10 days in seclusion in June, time well spent.
• Me Time - this is time I spend by myself, thinking, exploring or even binge-watching shows ;-)

The areas of concern are:

• Health & Fitness - dismal year. I had some health issues creep up on me last year. Not good.
• Cycling - very little done. According to my Strava logs: 29 days, 47 hours, 585km.
• Blogging - regressed big time - need to do at least one post a month
• Entrepreneur - my ideas still collecting dust. Pathetic, makes me really wonder about this!

Major Outcomes for 2019: Intent

Broadly speaking, here's some outcomes I'd like to focus on this year, the detail in terms of specific targets is still tracked manually in the spreadsheet template:

• Professional
• Get work-hours down to a manageable level, target no more than 170 hours per month
• Continue to build a strong leadership team thus removing me as a bottleneck, focus on strategic outcomes, less operational
• Spread in more leave time, reduce sleepless nights to zero
• Personal - Individual - Entrepreneur 
• Spec out my Rage/Personametry product idea and get an MVP done, even if it's manual
• Attend at least 6 Start-Up meet-ups this year
• Personal - Individual - Health
• Improve current fitness state - there should be no 0% activities in a month
• Personal - Life & Family
• Introduce consistency & routine into happiness building activities - at least once a month we should develop a routine around the things we enjoy doing as a family