Your Life Mix Pie: Why and How

Photo by ninjapoodles

Dear Reader,
It’s time to put your apron on. Yesterday we did some exercise, today we’re going to do some cooking! Last week I posted my life mix pie. Today I’ll explain the process I went through to make it. To start things off, I’ll throw out some ideas of why in the world you might want to make this pie chart. That way, if you aren’t convinced it is a good idea, then you haven’t wasted time reading through the “how to.”

Why:
We live in a culture that takes seriously its self-improvement and productivity. This pie chart will give you a visual aid to help you see what you really spend your time on. This could help in a few ways. It could clue you in to big time wasters. It could open your eyes to the areas you really enjoy. It might even reveal some strength areas and weak areas. It should give you a starting to point to start making changes. It could help you as you’re making serious life changes. And it could reveal that certain important areas are non-existent. So, if any of this sounds like something you would like, then read on.

How-Collect the Data:
To make my life mix pie chart, I began with a blank sheet of paper and pencil. I find those most useful for catching messy ideas that may not have any form yet. I chose a time frame to work with in order to start gathering data. I recommend going with the most consistent block of time in your life, which for most of us will be one week.
Once I had a time frame to work in, I began to sort to write my daily activities down. The I chose some labels that I could group certain activities under. A few labels I used were work, family, eating, spouse, blog, church, commute. I tried not to be too general or too specific with the labels. My general rule was that if it did not equal to at least 1% of my total time, I would try to group it with a larger related category. I then calculated the total number of hours for each activity/category.

How-Enter the Data:
Now that I had all my data, I took put it into an excel spreadsheet. I placed all the categories in column A and the corresponding hours in column B. You can sort them however you would like, but I would recommend not doing them in order of largest to smallest because when you go to display the categories, the labels for the small pieces will be jumbled together. I then highlighted the two columns and opened the chart wizard (if you don’t see the icon on your toolbar, go to “insert” and “chart”). The wizard walked me through the rest. As long as you highlighted the correct info, there should be no problems finishing the chart.

How-Make a Picture:
I wanted to make a picture of it to place on my blog. I didn’t not spend much time to see if I could do that from excel, so if you know of a way, be sure to share that in the comments. What I did was, with the chart displayed, hit “print-screen.” I then opened the paint program and pasted. I cropped it down to just the chart and saved it as a jpg.

Please let me know if you give this a try and found this helpful (or not).

“I don’t even butter my bread. I consider that cooking.” -Katherine Cebrian