Perform a Life Audit to Set Yourself up for Success in 2018
If you’re determined to clean up your life in 2018, all you need is a marker, a few sticky notes, a blank wall, and an hour or two of free time.
I did my first life audit two years ago after reading this post on Medium by Ximena Vengoechea. Writer and illustrator Vengoecha explained in detail why it is important to test yourself from time to time. “How are we doing? Where are we going? What is important now that may not have been there before? ” she writes. She used life audit to figure this out.
Essentially, a life audit is all about organizing your life and being honest with yourself:
- First, write down each goal, high hopes, and life needs on different sticky notes (eg, getting a new job, getting an award, living next to the ocean).
- Second, organize the posters by category (e.g. health, family, career, etc.) as topics start to emerge.
- Third, organize by time (for example, how long it will take to complete / check each post).
I made another one at the end of 2017 when I realized that I was not progressing in life – in work, in writing, in relationships – almost as much as I would like. And nothing helped me focus more on what I want to achieve than the Vengoechea system.
Vengoechea suggests trying to fill out 100 notes in one hour. It was more rewarding for me to spend the entire evening after work reflecting on my goals and ambitions (a little wine helped me get more creative when the evening passed), and in the end I ended up with about 120 notes, which is more than I thought. I can think of it. They ranged from concrete ones like “create a website” and “write a book review” to abstract ones like “be generous” and “be less serious”.
Obviously this is not a revolutionary system – I think it’s a matter of deliberation. You specifically set aside time to think about yourself, your future, and how you will get to it.
Make it digital
What’s really beneficial about this system is that it is analog. You think about your goals and write them down on paper sheets, which you can then hang in your bedroom or office (or wherever) and see every day. You won’t (hopefully) be distracted or influenced by Twitter or Instagram as you record what’s important to you. But after hanging my collection of goals on the back door of my bedroom, I found that adding a digital element was really helpful.
I left the posters for about two weeks and then moved the goals to the Trello board, which I still have and can be accessed from anywhere. I did not split my posters by timeline as Vengoechea suggests (it was more important for me to just prepare them than organize them right away), but I divided them in Trello into the following columns:
- Things to do: this week
- What to do: short term
- What to do: in the long run
- What to do: for life
- Completed
Then I added colored tags to the goals in Trello, which is a great feature that makes categorization easier (you can also use notes in a different color if you want them offline):
- Green Label – Money / Finance
- Yellow Label – Work
- The red label is training / education.
- Purple Label – Letter
- Blue Label – Life / Health
Then I grouped all tags of the same color in each column. Obviously this won’t work for everyone – you can add whatever columns and tags you need most. But I have found that this system allows me to focus on the short term while leaving my long-term goals on the periphery.
Vengoecha describes in more detail the next steps she took, in particular how to achieve her goals and what kind of people influenced her.
What to keep in mind
As I wrote my goals, I also took notes in my diary, which are useful to reflect on now, a few months later. For example, here are some of the questions I asked myself:
- What kind of life do I want? In 5, 10, 40 years?
- What areas of my life could be improved?
- What is my motivation?
- What do I believe in?
- What do I consider important?
- What does meaningful mean to me?
- What do I like most about work?
- What do I want to leave?
- What I like?
- When do I feel most energized?
- When do I feel most successful?
- What kind of people do I admire and why?
- Do I enjoy spending time with the people I am currently spending time with?
(For more inspiration, check out these two posts .)
Keeping a journal at the same time also helped me expand on what I really wanted to achieve, why I had certain goals and how I would achieve them. And that gave me more poster ideas.
I focused on “where I want to be in three years,” which seemed manageable, but still a significant amount of time to make changes. (For example, I wrote that I wanted to be an editor, have my own apartment, travel and set aside a decent amount of money, and explained in detail why each of them is important to me.)
It also made me realize something that I have not written down, at least for the time being – that is calming down. I didn’t have many “traditional” goals like buying a house or getting a luxurious wedding. Does that mean they don’t matter to me, or they just don’t matter right now? Is this the right system to accommodate such milestones? More to think about.
Ultimately, the life audit provided a useful starting point for further reflection and real change. I’ve already moved several goals to my Completed column in Trello, including getting a new job and creating this website that has been on my mental to-do list for literally years. Maybe this will help you in 2018.