The "Life Pie" chart allows you to define the relative importance of the four quadrants or your life (personal, professional, physical and spiritual). Once you have clarified what you want in each quadrant of your life and have set a path of action (mission and purpose) you are ready to feast upon life's plum pie.
Most people rarely keep track of the amount of time and money they expend, much less accounting for their effort and creativity. The purpose of the life pie is to develop a simple accounting procedure for all four elements of budget, i.e., time, effort, money, and creativity, in order to help you make more efficient and life enhancing decisions.
The chart expresses the four elements in the ratio of their relative values, i.e., time (1), effort (2), financial reserves (3) (i.e., money), creative (emotional) emotions (4). Under the system these four elements are aggregated within one concept, the integrity budget unit (IBU). You have 2,400 IBUs to expend each day. (This sum is arbitrarily reached by multiplying 24 hours in a day by 100.) Consequently you have 960 units of time, 720 units of effort, 480 units of financial reserves, and 240 units of creative vitality (240 + 480 + 720 + 960 = 2,400).
As you proceed to establish missions and enter into negotiations, it may be useful to pay attention to the expenditures you plan in IBUs. The system allows you to record these anticipated expenditures simply by moving the bars on the budget chart associated with the mission section of the program. (See IBUs) After you have concluded a round of negotiation you then record your IBU expenditures. The system will automatically analyze your expenditures and you can quickly assess at any moment whether you are "on budget" or not.
This function has two practical uses. First, the system helps you account for the "real" costs of any negotiation -- not simply in terms of time and money, but also, more importantly, in terms of your most precious resource, your creative vitality. Until now, like many people, you may have been treating effort and creative vitality as "free" goods. By paying attention to how you allocate these resources the system can help you allocate these resources in more intelligent and life-enhancing ways.
Second, good economics is directly related to effective negotiation. If you are not accounting for expenditures of your most vital resource -- creativity vitality -- there is a significant risk you will fall into "need." When we "burn the candle on both ends" or have no sense of how we are spending our assets, we can soon begin to feel out of control and overwhelmed, become defocused, panic, or fall prey to the host of other ills the accompany a compromised integrity.
The IBU system has been designed to provide coherence and conservancy at this basic level.
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