Several years ago when I was researching methods of planning my time to survive doing two degrees simultaneously, I came across the idea of bullet journaling. I'm not going to explain how it works because it's a long and well developed system and not the main topic of this post, but feel free to check out the following links: One man's bullet journal and Boho Berry: Bullet Journal 101. I quickly realized this concept is not for me - I believe this is a great system for those who are more dedicated to organization, and are willing to spend time each day reflecting on their days. I keep a plain daily pocket-sized moleskine calendar - each year the same, so it became my new year's ritual to get one - and writing down tasks or thoughts doesn't take me more than a minute each time.
But I found something that for the last couple of years was a good indicator of where I am in life, and where I want to be: the level 10 life. I also learnt about this through Kara from BohoBerry, so here is a link to her post about it.
What is it, in simple words?
It's your self-evaluation in 10 areas of your life that you select, on a scale of 1 to 10. I used to tweak them a little to my needs but this time I used the original ten. I remember I usually split health&fitness into two categories and got rid of physical environment.
Here is a chart I made for myself. If you wanna use it - feel free. Here you can download the empty circle: circle.png but you can with equal success draw it on a piece of scrap paper or a napkin. It's not that important.
Some observations
- Your evaluations will fluctuate every couple of months or years. Sometimes, if you're not on top of it, you'll sacrifice a couple of areas for one or two others to grow. This is why we are here doing this silly exercise. My circle used to be way fuller a couple of times I did this in the past!
- The key to being generally content is to keep an eye on the balance in all areas of your life and set small goals to improve the ones that drop. I wouldn't advise to set more than one-two goals per each category, as I'm not a fan of neither being under pressure nor self-improvement taking over your life.
- If a particular area is of no interest to you, remove it. The idea is to take a look on your life as holistically as possible, so if you don't care about contribution but want to observe traveling outside of fun and recreation, go for it. Plus, it doesn't need to be 10 categories. 8 are completely fine if that's fine for you.
- You are encouraged to keep the chart and use a different color to mark your progress (or regress).
I'm going to reflect on my results in another post, so you have some time to do the exercise!