What’s important to you?
Run a quick scan across your entire life
It’s October 1 today. We’re in the final quarter of the year. The rest will fly by and we’ll be in 2026. Many of us will make new years resolutions then and some of us will see those through. In 2026. But what about now? We still have 3 months = 13 weeks = 92 days. Make an end-of-year resolution now and end on a high. Learn a language, read 5 books, firm up your abs, save some money. Don’t let arbitrary dates determine your life. Take control, use your agency, and decide for yourself what you want to achieve, still, in 2025. Set a 15-min timebox, simply to decide that, right now.
How do you know how you’re doing?
I check in with myself at least a couple of times a day. I have a very specific phrase that I say to myself, usually in my head but sometimes out loud, to take my overall temperature. This gives me an intuitive assessment which I value.
When I want to go a little deeper to get a more reliable, useful answer, I run through the important areas of my life. For me, that’s:
Relationships
Work/career/finance
Health (physical & mental)
Personal growth
Fun
Everything important in my life fits into one of these buckets.
And so I cycle through them, journaling about each one. At the end of the exercise, I can feel confident that I’ve had a usefully thorough look at my life.
That’s quite something.
Do you have such a list? How would you divide up your life into a small handful of mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive partitions? What changes would you make to my five?
A different, maybe better for you, way to think about this is in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
Security (home, health, safety)
Relationships (family, friends, romance)
Achievement (career, goals, finance)
Self-Expression (creativity, fun, hobbies)
Growth/Meaning (learning, spirituality)
You might also like to assign a colour for each of the categories you do choose. If you do that in a digital calendar, you may be able to see, at a glance, exactly how much time you’re spending on each of these important areas of your life, and dial up or down as you choose. This is a good way to live your life according to your intentions, and know, with some easily collected data, that you are.
Marc
Links you may like
7 days of Timeboxing (the free email micro-course)
Timeboxing, the book (US)
Timeboxing, the book (UK)
Timeboxing, el libro (Español)
Connect with me on LinkedIn